March 2 - 27, 2022

Opening Reception: Friday, March 4 6-8 pm
(Bromfield follows Covid guidelines from the State and City of Boston:
masks and proof of vaccination are required)

Blake Brasher: “Experiencing Something”

Barbara Cone: “Improvisations”

Blake Brasher: “Experiencing Something”

The paintings in this exhibition are layered compositions done in acrylic and marker with the occasional use of watercolor, pencil, and collaged elements on large canvases or smaller sheets of textured polypropylene paper.

These abstract mind-scapes create propositional spaces that engage the imagination.

Barbara Cone: “Improvisations”

It may be because everything feels pretty broken these days that I continue to improvise with humble, sometimes intentionally damaged, materials, but then again it may be because humble, broken or damaged materials are simply more interesting. For Improvisations I’ve made free-standing pieces from odds and ends of gessoed balsa and basswood. Borrowing imagery from the constructions, I prepared digital drawings on Hahnemuhle paper, placing them under photo-based clear overlays I designed in Photoshop.

The Playtime store in Arlington, Mass just outside Cambridge, is frozen in time. I doubt much has changed since the 1950’s. Customers are expected to step over open boxes and squeeze past stacks of mystery supplies. Among many, many other items, Playtime offers a staggering collection of wooden objects used for crafts plus carving blocks in varying sizes. There are also tall, skinny wooden sticks in every thickness and dimension, some very delicate and others more robust. Gathered in their shipping boxes, these sticks line the aisles in unexpected places, threatening to put your eye out. Like the cardboard boxes I used to make the ceiling-hung constructions for the 2020 show, the sticks attracted me and I began to collect them. I often trekked down to the basement to visit the rest of the wood offerings, collecting different sizes and shapes of balsa wood over a period of months. I needed heavier basswood carving blocks to anchor the constructions I’d planned and found a provider in the Mid-West. In a short time some very heavy boxes began to arrive.

I was interested in painting the components of the free-standing constructions white, then sanding them, using the method I had employed on one of the ceiling hung cardboard box constructions from the 2020 show. Each component, no matter how small, had to be coated on all sides with a thick white gesso normally used as a base for encaustic work, then individually sanded. I had used graphite on the original pieces, but now I employed the mouse sander for my mark-making. After a few weeks, everything in my studio was covered with a fine coating of gesso dust. Wiping the pieces down, I began to build. By now I had an impressive collection of bits and pieces from which to choose, and each construction seemed to know what went where, hence the name of the exhibition, Improvisations. Many individual pieces were needed to complete each construction, and I often cut them to fit.

Not all the work was so hands-on. Accompanying the six constructions are 8 wall-hung digital two-layer framed images. I cropped the images of the constructions, then altered them in Photoshop. One set of images bring some color into the images of the constructions. They are printed on Hahnemuhle paper and form the background for clear overlays. The overlays are also altered images of the constructions, abstracted in black and white. The background images and overlays are meant to interact, suggesting the three-dimensional look of the constructions.