Art as a Way of Life

Clare Adams

Alice Cheney

The ‘Art as a Way of Life’ Clare Adams & Alice Cheney show honors the two artist’s late mentor, Mr. Kaji Aso, and shares new artwork now made four decades later, focusing on nature and using fused glass by Adams, and encaustic (hot wax medium) by Cheney. “Mr. Aso saw ‘nature’ as an essential source for balance, contentment, and a different way of seeing.” Adams and Cheney write in their dedication for the show. 

Clare Adams, based in Cambridgeport, Vermont, presents her newest work using fused glass to   recreate her well developed imagery which represents the artist’s local landscape of rivers, mountains, trees, and villages throughout the seasons. Adams has developed this imagery through extensive use of block printing, monotype printing, and painting on glass with enamels. In the artist’s work titled “The Creek” Adams interprets the landscape into a select number of shapes, each composed of small pieces of colored glass, then fused in a kiln to find the bold greens with bright and deep blues of the summer landscape. In this way, Adams reflects the changing light and seasons directly in the medium of glass, which, as an object, inherently changes the light around it.

Alice Cheney, based in Warren, Vermont, uses hot wax encaustic medium layered and carved with saturated pigments to paint the sounds and sights of the nature surrounding her. The permanence of the encaustic wax expounds on Cheney’s background in wood carving, and in painting on paper with ink and watercolor. The artist’s work titled “Snowy Owl out of Season”, is a painting of blurred and layered deeply colored greens, yellows, blues and purples, creating a sharp edge of leaves from within which emerges muted yellow, orange, red and white flowers with long petals represented by a range of shapes from undefined to carefully drawn. In this piece, Cheney takes the central panel, often painted outside while listening to the birds, then frames it with an encaustic border, in this case painted with numerous Snowy Owls. The medium of wax, in its translucency, fluidity, and many ways of manipulation from melting, to polishing, to carving, is celebrated by Cheney in its direct connection to nature, preservation, and renewal.

‘Art as a Way of Life’ is a tribute to Mr. Kaji Aso (1936 - 2006), who came to the USA from Japan in 1967, first to New York City, then to Vermont, and settling in Boston in 1973. “If you think of painting, then you are painting” is a saying by Aso which is well remembered by Alice Cheney and Clare Adams. Adams and Cheney initially met while touring in Japan with Mr Aso in 1985 where they discovered their similar aesthetic interests and their connection to Vermont and its rural landscape.

Artworks oming soon

Canal Street Art Gallery

23 Canal Street, Bellows Falls, Vermont