Country Barn To Be Setting For

Glen River One-Day Art Show

Friends of the Sandy Hook artist Glen River will host an exhibition of Mr River’s abstract and “Portraits of Place” paintings at Medridge Farm on Saturday, June 5, from 1 to 6 pm, with a rain date of Sunday, June 6.

There is no charge, and the show is open to the public.

The “Portraits of Place” series began years ago with paintings of Manhattan. When the artist was 14 he had an artist uncle who lived in the city and upon returning from visits, the young artist would create impressions of his experiences. The habit of making these images into paintings became a pattern for many subsequent projects.

Throughout Mr River’s travels his sketchbook and camera informed his sense of place. While exploring connections between land and myth, his “Kachina” series strengthened his views on the association between man and the places he feels connected to.

The Native American tribes of the American southwest have traditional as well as personal connections to the land. Mr River feels most people have special places they build mythical connections to. In his “Portraits of Place” he attempts to arrive at a sense, or feeling of place, rather than just a picture.

A Manhattan Portraits series continued with a major series, which he worked on from 1979 until 1989. Many were lost, however, in a 1992 fire. In 2002, Mr River returned to the series, and his process was focused on a personal journal of the moment.

His source material was gathered from the glimpses of his excursions, when visits to friends and family took him into the different “villages” of the city.

A series of Yale Campus Portraits had their start circa 1968 to 1970, when Mr River was a student at Yale School of Art. His sketches were just a loose reference at the time, and he had other projects occupying his attention. After returning to the project in 1984, these too were lost in the 1992 fire. He returned once again in 2004 to these images, and has since published an art book made up of many of the new images, called Campus Portraits of Yale.

His latest art book, Sandy Hook and Newtown, is a collection of images of his hometown. Similar projects have covered New Paltz, N.Y., Old Greenwich, Rosendale, Weston, Westport, Woodstock, and Costa Rica.

Medridge Farm, the home of Julia Wasserman, is at 113 Walnut Tree Hill Road in Sandy Hook.