Kate Spencer recalls getting an excellent education in the arts when she was in high school in Great Falls, Montana, and painting was a big part of that experience.
After moving to Boston to attend college, though, she got involved in playing traditional music on guitar and banjo, then later ran a music store in Brattleboro, Vermont, for many years — and painting fell by the wayside.
But about 20 years ago, Spencer took up her canvasses and paintbrushes again, and she hasn’t stopped since.
Now some of that work is on display at Amherst Town Hall, and it reflects Spencer’s continuing evolution as an artist, as well as her taste for landscapes from both her adopted home in western New England and the Big Sky Country she grew up in.
“Montana is in my soul,” said Spencer, who lives in Montague and travels at least once a year to her native state to visit family and friends, as well as to make sketches or take photographs of outdoor settings that she later paints.
“I want to take some of that soul and put it into my landscapes,” she said.
For the Amherst Town Hall show, which runs through Aug. 26, Spencer has selected a mix of her oil paintings from about the past 13 years. While the bulk of the work consists of landscapes, she also offers some still lifes and other, more intimate outdoor portraits, such as the houses along a street in an Irish village.
And by showing a range of her canvasses from the past several years, Spencer also showcases the changing nature of her work. She explains that when she took up painting again, her work slowly but steadily evolved from a more detailed, realistic style to one of increasing abstraction.
Some of her paintings fall between those measuring sticks. “Street Scene, Ireland,” which depicts a small village road with a few parked cars in front of a row of houses and a cafe, has an impressionistic feel, as does “Red Cows in Meadow,” a pastoral scene also from Ireland.
“Still Life with Capicola,” meanwhile, a tableau of wine bottle, cold meat, cheese and bread set on a wooden table in front of a stone window embrasure, might have been inspired by Matisse, among others.
Spencer, though, says two of her biggest influences are Vermont abstract painter Eric Aho, with whom she studied for a while when she resumed her painting, and the late California artist Richard Diebenkorn, a leading painter of post-World War II America, particularly in abstract expressionism.
“There are so many realistic landscapes out there, and I’ve been more drawn to the abstract,” she said. “I find that’s a particularly good way of looking at the big spaces in the West.”
Indeed, her western landscapes, many drawn from the general region around Great Falls, capture the sense of a land defined by wide-open sky, sweeping prairie of wheat fields and grass, and distant mountains.
She uses a loose brush and basic geometric patterns to map out a canvas with broad strokes and just a few details: a hay bale in the foreground; a dusty road disappearing into the distance; an undulating brown line for faraway mountains; and a dominating sky with alternating patches of dark and light.
“Bridge at Rock Springs,” Spencer’s largest painting, recalls something of the modernist images of the 1930s and 1940s, with its depiction of a large concrete bridge that crosses a small river emptying into the larger Missouri River north of Great Falls. She uses a mix of darker blues, greens and grays to show roiling waters to the left of the bridge, compared to the more placid water on the right.
“Waterfall at Lick Crick,” by comparison, is a quieter, denser composition in which Spencer combines a certain level of abstraction with rich colors to recall a favorite woodland scene from the Rocky Mountains west of Great Falls.
Spencer says western New England is also a big inspiration for her work. “The paintings find me,” she said, noting that painting in this region also gives her the chance to work en plein air, or on site.
“Queen Anne’s Lace,” for instance, is a close-up of a favorite flower in a meadow right beyond her house in Montague; its contrast of white flowers and darker leaves is a mix of abstraction and impressionism.
Spencer still works with watercolor; she’s currently illustrating and writing a children’s book, “The Cat Who Walked the Camino,” a story of a feline that joins people walking a historical pilgrimage route in France and Spain. Her illustrations are in watercolor, pen and ink.
“That’s a medium I still enjoy,” she said.
Her newest paintings, she added, are trending larger and even more abstract; a number of them were too large to be included in the Amherst exhibit. But she says she hopes to make them part of another show in this region — her previous exhibitions have all been in Vermont, she noted — in the next year or so.
“It’s been so exciting for me to get back to painting,” she added.
In fact, Spencer says her father, who years ago refused to let her study art in college because it was “too impractical,” saw some of her renewed work in the past decade or so and reconsidered his decision.
“He said, ‘Well, maybe I should have let you go to art school,’ ” she recalled. “That was pretty high praise from him.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
There will be an artist’s reception Aug. 4 from 5 to 8 p.m. at Amherst Town Hall for Kate Spencer’s painting exhibition. The reception will be part of the town’s monthly Arts Walk.
Amherst Town Hall is open Mondays through Fridays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Kate Spencer’s website is katespencerart.com.