The Old Deerfield Painting Group will host it’s 34th annual exhibition, “Through and Through,” in the Deerfield Community Center from Aug. 24-31.
According to the group’s facilitator David Sund of Greenfield, the group’s sessions are split into two semesters, September to mid-December and March to Memorial Day. Between these times, the group of 12 meets at the community center every Tuesday morning to paint together and occasionally critique each other’s artwork.
To newcomers nervous to share their art during these group critiques, Sund tells them, “This is a friendly group, there are no sharks in the water; we’re here to encourage each other not compete with each other.”
Sund works as a gardener between April and November and paints in the off season. While he enjoys creating art, he admitted his studio can feel “very isolating.” For Sund, the group expands this solitary activity into a communal one. Creating and critiquing together encourages him to keep picking up the brush and pushing his paintings forward.
“There’s such a difference in vision and taste and style and skill level,” Sund says of the group. Even when the 12 painters set their easels around the same subject, he said 12 distinct works surface. Some artists dip their brushes in oil paint, others use watercolor, acrylic, pastel or ink. Most members paint traditional realistic works, including landscapes and birds, and others prefer the abstract.
“It inspires you to try harder and try to explore an avenue that you might not have tried before,” Sund said. The gardener himself often pulls inspiration from the petals he sees at work, painting gardens of watercolor flowers. “It’s the language I speak,” he explained.
Despite the mix of mediums and subjects, Sund spotted a similar idea painted into the pieces during a group critique session in September.
“I was seeing images that had a whole lot of real depth to them [like] you were in a place looking off into a distance but there was a sense of looking through something else,” Sund described. Eying this motif, he jotted it down in a notebook. When the group voted at the end of the first semester on the theme for their annual exhibit, they agreed on the idea and titled it, “Through and Through.”
Sund said his peers’ pieces include trees, arbors, pathways and windows that welcome the viewer into the art. “You have to visually work your way through one layer of image to the next,” he explained.
“Through and Through” will be open to the public and free to view, Aug. 24-31, from 12 to 5 p.m., with an opening reception to on Aug. 24 from 2 to 4:30 p.m. Most paintings will be available for purchase.
