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An artist cooperative in beautiful Milford PA. Our open space gallery has a diverse collection. Oil, acrylic and watercolor paintings, photography, sculpture, ceramics and jewelry are some of the unique pieces you will see. Our friendly gallery has one of a kind gifts and creative works for you home. Come see us!
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Artistic Brush and Knife
Exhibit Runs September 14th from 6-9 PM
The ARTery Gallery's September exhibit is titled "Brush and Knife: Vibrant Visions in Oil and Acrylic," bringing together two of the gallery’s prolific oil painters: Laura Lippay and Barbara Alice Moir. While both of these artists create large as well as small works, Lippay’s color palette is often, though not always, characterized by pleasing aqua blues and pinks that evoke a feeling of unharnessed joy. In contrast, Moir primarily starts out with a more traditional palette of colors that historically have been associated with representational and realistic themes. However, it’s their choice of painting tools and variety of paint thicknesses that makes this show especially unique. While many oil painters prefer to work either with brushes or with painting knives, Lippay and Moir seem comfortable using both styles of painting, affording them a wide range of textures and expressions on the canvas.
Laura Lippay interprets the world around her with mysticism and fascination. Her work encourages the viewer to glimpse our surroundings with exaggerated color and curiosity. Lippay has been called "all the colors in a Crayola box" and her art referred to as "beautifully macabre," "colorful," “bold,” and "eclectic." As she emphasizes the inner sparkles of light in her velvety souls on canvas, Lippay’s work inspires introspection and contemplation alongside playfulness, romanticism, and sometimes even fortitude. Lippay has received a variety of art instruction via advertising design studies at Northampton Community College, graphic design studies at The Art Institute of Philadelphia, and select courses from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She works primarily with oil, acrylic, and ink but also experiments with a variety of techniques and other mediums including jewelry and resin. In addition to being a working member of the ARTery gallery, Lippay is associated with Go Collaborative, a non-profit that brings artistic life to Stroudsburg, PA; the Gamut Art Gallery in the Pocono Mountains; the Wayne County Arts Alliance where she is a member; and the Up Front Exhibition Space in Port Jervis, NY.
Barbara Alice Moir became an artist the day she first borrowed her mother’s oil paints for a high school project at Eldred Central School in Eldred, NY back in the 1960’s. From then on, Moir continued to paint and study art on her own even though she chose music teaching as her full-time occupation. The books and tapes of artist Helen Van Wyk (1930-1994) of Rockport, MA became her favorite source for information. After retiring from music teaching, Moir finally immersed herself in art by moving to Jackson Heights, Queens where she joined the Jackson Heights Art Club as a photographer and oil artist. Within a year, she was accepted into the Salmagundi Art Club in Manhattan, the American Artists Professional League, Audubon Artists, and Flushing Town Hall, in Flushing, Queens, NY. While participating in their exhibits, she studied painting with John Foote, (Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, NYC) whose work is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Today Moir is pleased to be back in the Tri-states area as a working member of the ARTery Gallery. “Every time I walk in the door, I am tremendously energized by all the creativity and comradery among the artists here,” she says.
The ARTery Gallery, located in the historic Forest Hall, is a cooperatively owned and operated fine art gallery, serving regional artists and art lovers since 1996. The gallery features a wide array of artistic talent ranging from traditional oil, watercolor, and photography to sculpture, jewelry, textiles, pottery, and collage.
You can visit with Laura Lippay and Barbara Alice Moir while enjoying complimentary refreshments at their opening reception on Saturday, September 14th from 6-9 PM. The ARTery welcomes the public to this free cultural event. The month-long Lippay-Moir exhibit will be on display from Thursday, September 12th through Monday, October 7th.
The Language of Beauty
Opening Reception on Saturday, October 12 from 6 – 9 pm
The ARTery Gallery announces the featured exhibits of two of its members, Marie Liu and Liza J. Smith-Simpson in October, titled ‘The Language of Beauty’. Both artists are well versed in paintings of beautiful and meaningful images that focus on the beauty of the world around us, here in the tri-state region.
Marie Liu, longtime member and current Director of the ARTery has been painting images of the Poconos, its unique landscape and history, for over a decade and is well-known for her depictions of the many waterfalls in the region. A number of her pieces have been conceived with the help of inspirational phrases and excerpts from literature, including Rumi, Jesus, Yann Martel and Gifford Pinchot; then translated in paint through local scenes, flora and fauna. She states, “Finding inspiration for paintings of the place I call home is easy. Applying a deeper meaning to the imagery, through literature, seems like a natural progression and allows those paintings to represent a larger idea. My hope is to encourage the viewer to seek the magic and mystery of life within their immediate surroundings, however seemingly mundane. I suppose that is the essence of both art and life.”
One of her major paintings to be presented at this, her fourteenth featured exhibit at the ARTery Gallery, is a view of the Delaware River Valley from Staircase Natural Area in Pike County PA, manipulated to illustrate a passage in a book by Yann Martel – “Daylight has reached its last hour. The earth and the trunks of the trees are burnished red by the setting sun. Sweeping across the land comes a wind, a most gentle of cavalry charges… Riding upon it is the collective news of all nature…”. The full passage is incorporated into the frame surrounding the painting. “It took me years to find the right image that could visually express this beautiful passage. I planted the seed and it finally sprouted – sometimes that’s how the creative process happens.”
For Liza J. Smith-Simpson, visual language has been very natural to her, as she grew up in an artistic household. She sold her first oil painting of a vase with daisies at the age of 9, but her curiosity also led her to an interest in the spatial relationship of abstract collage, which she still creates with her ‘Flight Paths’ and ‘Pieces’ series, using vibrant handmade collage pieces and acrylic skins. She also creates paintings in various mediums of flora, fauna, landscape and seascapes/skyscapes (which have become her very popular signature imagery).
Her years of study and work in several fields have familiarized her with languages of various disciplines. Pursuing a degree at in Psychology, she also studied art with Professor Hyo Chong Yoo, both at Upsala University in West Orange NJ, then receiving her Bachelors of Art in Psychology from Caldwell University. Working at an insurance company for 13 years, calculating insurance premiums, and then for healthcare for 6 more years. She was accepted into Northwest NJ Respiratory Care Consortium in 2005.
She has participated in many art demonstrations and workshops over the years, including in 2019 with poet and collage artist, Joan Hall. In 2015 she was enrolled in classes with CA based artist Robert Burridge. Recent awards include; 2022 a 1st place award for "Autumn Mood", 2020 honorable mention for "Ascending Order", 2019 2nd place for "Buttermilk Falls NJ" and honorable mention for "Flight Paths IX", at the Tewksbury Historical Society Show.
In her travels from California to Paris, she has witnessed a piece of the Divine's natural beauty. She believes this Earth is a cherished land that needs our love and admiration. In sharing the views that she loves, she is reminded of a quote by Henry David Thoreau, “It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” Liza believes that it is the beauty of a scene that sparks her artistic inspiration and drives her to create.
The public is encouraged to attend the wine and cheese reception on Saturday, October 12 from 6 – 9 pm to meet the artists and see the work of the other members of this cooperative gallery in the historic Forest Hall Building.