Above and Beyond

Featuring:

featuring: Bill Jersey and Maxine Shore
This show runs from October 4, 2018 until November 4, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 6, 5-7 pm

Fine artists Maxine Shore and Bill Jersey will exhibit oil paintings expressing their personal visions of landscape that go above and beyond the natural world.

Maxine Shore is an award-winning artist who has exhibited her work throughout the USA and is included in many private, public and corporate collections. She is a contemporary colorist who uses color and light in an effort to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Inspiration for her paintings often comes from travel to places near and far that spark her imagination. Working exclusively in oils, she relies on watercolor or pencil sketches as well as her camera to record images that she works on in her studio. Such was the case with the painting, Cinque Terre, which depicted a town in Italy she visited recently. A photograph of the painting was featured in the New York Times.

Shore is more interested in interpreting how a place makes her feel than simply reproducing how it looks. "In my art nature provides a springboard for the color and light I envision in my imagination. Reflections of light on water, the way a breeze animates a scene, the filtering of light through leaves - these natural phenomena illustrate what I enjoy exploring in my paintings. Painting has given me tremendous pleasure and I am delighted that my work conveys that spirit of joy to others."

Bill Jersey's route to success as a painter was very different than for most artists. As a child, art became his escape from the constraints of a fundamentalist upbringing. A short stint in the US Navy gave Bill a chance to attend a Christian college as an art major. But in a strange twist of fate the religious film company that hired him was contracted to make its first commercial feature. It became the iconic horror film, "The Blob" on which Jersey was the Art Director.

But documentaries, not features, became Jersey's career. For 60 years he produced award winning films for networks and PBS, but art was always his passion. When Bill and his wife moved to Lambertville in 2008, art became his primary focus. In painting - as with film - Jersey seeks to go beyond mere observation, working to express with color and form the unique qualities of an historic barn or clouds or the spirit of a night sky, all from the view of a fresh eye.