BigTown Gallery has opened its 2011 exhibition season with a tandem showing of recent work by the accomplished landscape painters, Kate Emlen and Frances Wells. Emlen is a longtime Vermont and Maine Coast resident. For an equal span of years, Wells has lived and worked alongside the Hudson River. Now in their mid-careers, the distinct path each has taken to an unwavering focus on landscape results in work that transparently registers the artist's direct response to what is seen, but speaks, too, of our relationship with the natural world we inhabit, succinctly expressing how life lived in a particular region accumulates by its year-in, year-out, cycles of life, work, and season; it becomes part of us, and we carry it forward.
