Landscapes And Sculpture By Two

Connecticut Artists At Fenn Gallery

WOODBURY — Fenn Gallery’s next exhibit, “Around the Corner,” features the urban landscapes of Constance LaPalombara and the raku sculpture of Eva St John. The show runs June 23 to July 31, and an opening/artist reception on Saturday, June 25, from 4 to 6 pm, is open to the public.

New Haven resident Constance LaPalombara is a master painter of the urban landscape. With an eye keenly attuned to the emotive qualities of light and shadow, a subtle palette and strong sense of composition, she achieves a soft geometry and glow in her work.

People are conspicuously absent from Ms LaPalombara’s canvases. Her scenes of buildings and streets register as a frozen moment, and suggest the melancholy qualities of modern urban life, and the distances that separate people. Although not subjects in her paintings, the work invariably makes reference to human presence whether through a carefully accentuated street light, stop sign, parked car or traffic cone.

The artist received her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and has exhibited extensively in Connecticut, New York, Maine and in Italy.

Morris resident Eva St John artfully marries an ancient discipline with her very personal modern aesthetic to create her raku pottery and sculpture. Capitalizing on the metallic effects and dark crackle lines made possible with raku, a technique originating in the ancient tea ceremonies of 16th Century Japan, Ms St John’s vessels have a refined rusticity and earthy beauty.

Her luminous, multihued glazes seem to flicker and dance upon the graceful surfaces, all the while bound together by a lacy network of random yet beautiful crackling which is one of the hallmarks of the raku method.

Fenn Gallery is at 345 Main Street (Route 6); telephone  203-263-3449.