Carleton’s Paintings & Etchings At Good News Cafe & Gallery

WOODBURY — Connecticut artist Richard Carleton offers visitors a “visual epiphany” of diverse images realized in the paintings and etchings presented in his new exhibition, running through February 7 at Good News Cafe & Gallery, 694 Main Street South in Woodbury.

Mr Carleton explains that the works selected for his show, “Paintings and Etchings,” are not the product of a specific artistic philosophy.

 “My pieces start out with a visual epiphany,” he says. “My etchings and paintings look as if they were done by different people, but they feel the same while I am doing them.

“I approach the etchings as a journeyman, as one who would travel around and record things as a product to sell, a tourist item, a keepsake, something sentimental,” the artist observes. “In the paintings, I have an interest in American transcendentalism and in the decorative aspect of painting.”

Mr Carleton, a Branford resident who maintains an art studio in New Haven, has exhibited his paintings, prints and etchings widely in New York and across New England over the past three decades. Among his more than 20 shows at galleries and museums in Connecticut, he has offered recent solo exhibitions at the R.J. Julia Gallery in Madison and the Willoughby Wallace Gallery in Stony Creek.

Selections from his works have also appeared in recent exhibitions at the juried Art Show Amherst in Amherst, Mass., the “Five Realists” show at UConn/Stamford, and a group show at Cooley Gallery in Old Lyme.

A graduate of the Boston University School of Fine Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design, Mr Carleton pursued post-graduate study with master printer Nancy Brokoft in New York. He has undertaken numerous portrait and landscape commissions as well as etching editioning commissions over the past 20 years, and his works are widely represented in private and corporate art collections.

His professional affiliations include memberships in the Society of American Graphic Artists, the Boston Printmakers, and the California Society of Printmakers.

Also featured at Good News Cafe & Gallery through February 7 is an encore exhibition of the glassware art of Vermont craftsman Michael Egan. Mr Egan’s selections, previously shown at Good News during the 2003 holiday season, offer distinctive artistic design in varied types of glassware including platters, pitchers, bowls and vases.

“Each piece of glass that I create is made of solid glass cane material that I design and produce in my studio,” Mr Egan notes. “I employ this cane material in my vessels as a painter uses brush strokes, with each piece of cane acting as a gesture of color.

“Working with different styles of cane yields a variety of woven or tapestry surfaces, and combining different canes develops secondary colors and detailed patterns within the walls of my pieces. The results are serendipitous and controlled at the same time.”

For more information on these exhibitions call the Good News Cafe at 203-266-4663.