TIO Berkshires: Fall Colors Just Part of the Art

24 Sep TIO Berkshires: Fall Colors Just Part of the Art

A funny thing happened on our way to view porn – 16th and 17th century-style eye-poppers.

Never made it to a show at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, 28 paintings of bodacious goddesses and nymphs, heroines and victims, most sporting heaving breasts and generous thighs, all painted by the A-team of late Renaissance/early Baroque, titans like Titian, Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubens, and Francisco de Zurbaran.

Meant to, but we took the country road less traveled instead and wound up in New Marlborough, a pre-Revolutionary gem (aren’t they all up there?), settled in 1738, now one of five addresses that operate under the banner of Southern Berkshire Regional School District and the second largest in the cluster.

Leave your chic Type A persona and Jimmy Choos at home. New Marlborough is a variation on the prevailing New England refrain, a laid back, picture postcard of a toy town surrounded by sprawling leafy vistas and dotted with homes like the Whitney spread, that once belonged to affluent weekend “cottagers.” There is generally a general store nearby and a favorite old inn, nowadays serving finely crafted local food (Inn on the Green, a mail stop in the 1700s).

Also a church white-washed in history – in this case, one that encourages the worship of fine art and sounds.

Run by the New Marlborough Village Association, around the corner and downstairs from church’s bright red front door is the Meeting House Art Gallery, which showcases eclectic round-ups of local talent (11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Once the gallery space closes, classic concerts begin.)

This month one of the featured artists happens to be my dear Aunt Connie (Sussman), whose seven paintings razzle-dazzle off the walls of the exhibition space.

Connie Sussman

Aunt Con tilts towards Impressionism, though this body of work veers in the direction of pure abstraction. Think Turner in his later years. One image in particular, “Sunrise,” is a tribute to the irascible English genius and a show-stopper, yellow paint blown onto the canvas and lit from within. Brilliant. Literally.

The show also stars a barracuda, caught in a net of magic realism by filmmaker Larry Burke (in a  six-minute video entitled “Somethin’s Fishy”); charming miniatures by Shawn Fields that capture the zeitgeist, along with floral and fauna (two- and four-legged) of the region; elegant snapshots of domestic life in the intimate (we are voyeurs in his idyllic world) watercolors by Bruno Quinson.

Pamela Red Hardcastle’s creates lyrical, fanciful sculptures from spruce and hickory bark, often set against a metal, studies in constrast, rough vs. smooth.

Dez Ryan’s beguling 3D collages re-mix and elevate the quotidian.

The digital photography of environmental artist Ritch Holben, plus Tania Walker and Cheryl Ann Luft, ranges from majestic and muscular (Holben) to delicate and dreamy lyrical abstractions of landscapes and waterscapes ( the two ladies).

Abstract sculptures by Robin Tosh (“Menage á Trois) and Peter Thorne (“Stick on a Rock”) complete the mixed media invitational, which closes October 2.

In New Marlbourgh, everything old is new again.

And everything new, worth viewing – along with much vaunted views of the Berkshires, now bragging full fall frontal.