Melanie Barash Levitt, owner of Jackson Art, is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Graphic Design. Melanie has been a graphic designer for the last 20 years and worked on the creative team for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. In 1994, she traveled to Japan to teach art at the St. Joseph Int’l School. Her travels throughout Asia has had a great influence on her work and her life. Upon moving to Jackson and starting a family, Melanie wwweloped Jackson Art Exploration as a way to expose young children to art. Since then, she has taught a variety of classes for kids and adults at her studio. Melanie’s interest in printmaking began when she took a class in watercolor monotype at Maine College of Art. She instantly fell in love with the process and has been doing it ever since. Her Asian influence and love of nature are portrayed in her work. She also paints with oils on canvas, plein air style, setting up her easel outside and taking in the beautiful landscape of Mt Washington Valley. Melanie currently resides in Jackson, NH with her husband Daren, and two daughters, Logan and Eden.
Joelle Rober Goff is a resident of Mt Washington Valley, NH. A self-taught artist and an enthusiastic member of the valleys thriving artist community. Joelle’s paintings are collected throughout the US and abroad. Her work has also been licensed commercially for use on tile murals, wall clocks, and canvas prints. Joelle teaches acrylic flower painting workshops at The Jackson Art Gallery and Studio.
Rebecca Klementovich lived in NYC for 20 yrs before moving to the White Mountains of NH. In 1992, she earned a Bachelor in Fine Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology with additional studies at Cooper Union and the Arts
Student League in NYC. Her background as a fashion textile designer influenced her serious color courage! She is a mom, reiki master, and yoga instructor. She has shown her work throughout NY, ME & NH. My abstract landscapes have the bold exploration of color that depicts the New England landscape similar to the Fauvism painters. My unique gift of seeing colors and energy that float around the mountains comes from my reiki training. Many people don’t see these colors. I hope to show the subtle colors that move around the landscape here in the mountains.
All my work explores the unseen 99% of matter. Some of the landscapes are found through astral projection, some work is painting the scientific, and some work ventures into poetry.
Janet Gill. For the past ten years, pastel has been my medium of choice. I believe it is the rich, immediate color, as well as the energy that can be achieved by the pastel strokes, that has made pastel my
favorite. When choosing subject matter and composition, color is probably foremost in my mind. It is what draws me to a subject. My color choices are based on what is in front of me but as the painting wwwelops my choices are more intuitive and perhaps exaggerated as I try to express
the feeling of what I am painting and as I respond to the painting itself. Every painting is an adventure – sometimes effortless and fun, sometimes a mighty struggle.
Lori Stearns. Each of my pieces starts from a basic desire to create. I have always had that drive. Call it the Muse, or an irresistible urge, I am from within and inspired from without. I love the worn look of a well-used stair rail, or a tree root on a favorite hiking trail: an old cabinet door that has been opened and lovingly polished for many generations. These surfaces are magical to me and inspire my jewelry and mosaics. Even when I use new ceramic and glass tile, I am ever conscious of the mosaics, thousands of years old, still enjoyed by admirers in European countries and Africa.
Mary Howe. About twelve years ago at sixty-eight, I began to paint regularly with Nan White’s Friday painters using watercolors. Five years ago Carl Owen introduced me to oil painting. I loved it! Even though I mostly paint landscapes I find abstract painting more challenging and exciting. In an abstract painting, I attempt to express a non-objective image with colors and motion or sensation and design without illustrating something specific.
June McLeavy. Some of my earliest memories involve making art. From the time that I attended Saturday classes as a child at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I knew that art would dictate my path. I made the conscious decision to share my passion and received an undergraduate degree in Art Education from the University of Vermont. An additional graduate degree in special education laid the foundation for a lifelong career in public education. For several years in addition to teaching, I worked as a freelance craftsperson, and I became a juried member of the League of NH Craftsmen. Teaching art remains my passion, and I am grateful every day to be inspired by young artists. Their artwork informs my own, and I hope that they would say the same. Over the past several years, I have begun to build a body of my own work. Most recently, I have taken classes at the Maine College of Art, Provincetown Arts Association and Museum, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Art New England in Bennington, Vermont.
The use of mixed media sharpens my creative edge. I am especially drawn to ephemera with a strong sense of history and a story to tell. Old letters and book pages, original calligraphy, eco prints from vegetation, and pieces of my monotypes all bring their own past to create a new present on the board or canvas. Themes of domesticity and nature are often evident in my work. Old family photographs, as well as sketches of natural forms and patterns, are often the inspiration for the images and symbols I draw or paint into my work to help unify the diverse elements. It is my hope that each viewer will nd in my work a story that resonates with his or her own.
Matt Brown. I graduated from college hoping to work with my hands. In 1987 I established my own business doing work with wood: post and beam barns, new house construction, renovations, additions. Cabinetry work led to the construction of a shop which is where I now make my woodblock prints. My printmaking career owes much to those years. Learning to work with wood, to line things up and judge by eye, to draw up plans and implement them into 3 dimensions: this was in many ways my printmaking apprenticeship. My materials are now pigments, wooden
blocks and paper and my pursuit is with line, shape, and color, but it still feels like the same process of visualizing something, analyzing it into parts and then putting hand to tool and getting down to work making things. My technique is inspired by the example of the ukiyo-e and shin hanga prints of Japan. I love the process of making these prints: the way pictorial simplicity is encouraged, the way an image is separated into parts and put back together, the way the translucent colors blend and juxtapose, the way the wood interacts with the paper.
My imagery is mostly from around New England: Vermont, New Hampshire, and the coast of Maine. My printmaking work is motivated by a desire to wwwelop better visual understanding. I am fascinated by how art can change the way we see our world.
Cole Scott. I’m originally from Southern California but have lived and worked throughout the U.S. I love the natural world and landscape photography is one of my favorite genres. I’m also drawn to abstract and conceptual images, because of the singular freedom they can provide. I gravitate toward expressionism in photography, striving to capture the subjective aspects of a scene. I feel most successful when those viewing my images wwwelop their own, personal understanding of what the image encapsulates. I love discovering and photographing the simple, unadorned segments of everyday life. Photographing people also has its own rewards. Having been a Clinical Social Worker, I appreciate the value of discovering and bringing out that often hidden, a little extra piece that establishes a person’s unique character.
Christine Metivier. I’ve always loved the art of photography, but it wasn’t until I moved from the bustling city of Washington DC to the peaceful White Mountains of New Hampshire in 2002 that I decided to get serious about my hobby. Surrounded by stunning nature, I was finally compelled to purchase a high-quality camera and take several hundred shots of the flowers in my perennial gardens. I had taken flower photos before, but this time I was amazed at what I had been able to capture. The detail. The color. The rawness of being so up close to nature. I was instantly hooked and thus began a beautiful marriage between my passion for flowers and my love of photography. When I finally merged the two, I saw the in nite beauty of nature that so often goes unnoticed. It is a joy for me to be able to share my photographs with others who also appreciate the simple, yet striking, vibrant beauty that flowers so generously offer us all.
Born in Québec City, Canada, Christine Métivier (formerly Dennery) now lives in Maine with her family. Her photographs decorate the newly renovated guest rooms at the Omni Mount Washington Hotel & Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
Susan Forsman. Poetry, music, and my respect for the absurd and surreal inspire my painting. When I begin a painting, I don’t have a definite idea of what it will be, just a general notion. I let one stroke lead to another and eventually I see what I want and where I am going. As a young person, I studied with Lewis Hodgkins and majored in art in college. For years I painted traditional landscapes. Today my paintings are also landscapes but ones that arise from my interior musings on life’s mysteries and wonders.
Jennie Blair was born and raised here in New Hampshire in the Mt. Washington Valley. After receiving a BFA in Studio Arts in 2000, she continued to work in studios with other potters over a period of 15 years. During that time she lived in Montana completing a one-year apprenticeship, managed a production pottery studio, while also wwweloping her own pottery business. After moving back east to her hometown, she continues making functional stoneware pottery in her studio here in the valley where she resides.
Janis Pryor has been formally studying art since the age of 13 in New York City. She went to the High School of Music & Art and then to Bennington College where she majored in art, focusing on color field painting and architecture. Over the years, her artistic journey has taken her to exploring the world of small format abstract pastels and their evolution into large format paintings. Her influences include Rothko, Turner, Jules Olitski, Claude Monet, and Helen Frankenthaler.
Nathan Macomber first blew glass at Mass College of Art in 1995.
His education in glass continues and includes classes at the
Corning Museum of Glass, The Penland School of Arts and Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and a self designed B.A. in glass from Prescott College which he received in 1999. Nathan spent the first seven years of his career working in Prescott, Arizona, where he helped build and manage a glass blowing studio. In the Spring of 2002, he bought his family’s old farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. There, he has set up his own private studio where he can be found almost everyday blowing glass, metal working, teaching, or maintaining the hundred year old farm which has been in his family since 1949.
Gay Freeborn was born in Palo Alto CA and now a long time resident of Maine, I paint with oils on canvas or linen. Coming from an artistic family background and exceptional high school art program there was no lack of encouragement to create. I studied sculpture and design at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and have continued my education through classes and painting groups and occasionally teach students individually. Returning to painting after many years of wwweloping an interior and landscape design business, I focus my work on capturing the likeness and emotions of animals, especially the relationship between man and his canine best friend. I paint other animals as well, inspired by my deep feelings for the Maine countryside, the horses on our farm and my 7 wwwoted Labrador Retrievers. I convey the motion, shape and love for the animal with loosely applied sweeping brushstrokes or pallet knife. Using glazing mediums, wax, chalk dust and thick over painting to sculpt subjects on the canvas, I bring them to life in an unconventional form.
