Special programs and events planned July 9th to August 27th!

Peterborough, NH – - – Painters James Aponovich and Elizabeth Johansson have gathered a group of their friends and artistic colleagues for the exhibition “An Artists’ Circle,” showing in the Sharon Arts Exhibition Gallery from July 9th through August 28th, 2010. The exhibition includes artists who have achieved great renown in their careers. The opening reception is Friday, July 9th, 5 pm to 7 pm and is free and open to the public.

James Aponovich is a New Hampshire artist whose work has been exhibited nationally since the late 1970s. Aponovich specializes in idealized still life with landscaped backgrounds often inspired by Italy; his work is noted for its geometry, proportion, composition and light-filled atmosphere. An accomplished figure painter and portraitist, Aponovich turned to still life painting in the early 1980s after intensive study of Chinese landscape painting. “In my work, if I am painting a peach, it’s not just the soft, furry flesh outside, but the hard pit inside. That’s the kind of meditation on objects that I seek in my approach,” he says of his work.

With a major retrospective at the Currier Museum of Art in 2005, Aponovich’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Currier; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago Art Institute, and the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, among others. He served as the New Hampshire State Artist Laureate from 2006 to 2010.

Elizabeth Johansson currently works primarily in oil painting and graphite drawing. She has done solo shows in New York City, Boston and San Francisco, as well as the Currier Museum of Art. Notable public institutions with her work in their permanent collections include the Currier, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum, and the Boston Public Library Art. For 20 years Johansson was a drawing teacher at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. In addition to painting and teaching, Johannson is a noted garden designer. She and James Aponovich are married, with a daughter, Ana, who is also an artist.

Joined by Celebrated Friends and Colleagues

For this exhibition, Aponovich and Johansson are joined by twelve friends and colleagues, including printmaker Peter Milton, furniture master David Lamb and potter Gerry Williams.

Peter Milton has been described as one of the most honored and respected printmakers in the world today. His work is in most major museums around the world, and he continues to produce intricately detailed and masterful prints in his fifth decade of printmaking. Since 1962, when he was diagnosed as color-blind, he has produced primarily graphite drawings and black-and-white etchings. Said critic James A. W. Heffernan, “In an age of ubiquitous color—on film, television, billboards, magazines, and newspaper—it is very hard to capture the eyes of the public with an art of black and white alone.”

Milton has been granted more than eighty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and in London, Osaka, Bogota, and Paris; he has won prizes in Columbia, Korea, Ukraine, and Poland; his work has found its way into the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Museum, and the Tate Gallery.

Furniture master David Lamb has his own shop in Canterbury, New Hampshire, where he was raised, and where today he designs and builds furniture on commission, often for celebrities. He has won numerous design awards and his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Art and Antiques and the Currier Museum of Art. His work has been published in major trade journals and he has contributed to several books on Shaker furniture. Lamb is a founding member of the New Hampshire Furniture Masters Association. David Lamb has recently been named New Hampshire State Artist Laureate for a two-year term.

“Potter is what I do, who I am, where I come from,” says Gerry Williams, a nationally and internationally recognized master craftsman, teacher, lecturer and author. Williams was founder of The Studio Potter, a nonprofit organization, and editor of The Studio Potter magazine. In 1998 Williams was appointed as New Hampshire’s first Artist Laureate.

Williams was born in India, the son of American missionaries. Influenced by Gandhi, Williams states, “There is a lot of the spirit of India in my work, though not necessarily in the form of pottery. The political effigies that I do certainly come from my India experience because I look after them not as sculpture, but as folk art. The ambiance, the dignity of crafts, the importance of manual labor, the spiritual necessity of the humanistic core of crafts all come from my background in India.”

He began his career in ceramics by taking classes at the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen in the early 1950s, and has his studio and home in rural Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Other participants in the exhibition include painter Sean Beavers; sculptor and furniture maker Jon Brooks, naturalist and illustrator; David Carroll, who received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2006; painter Jamie LaFleur; watercolorist Bob Larsen; sculptor Gary Haven Smith and glass artist Susan Pratt Smith; and painters Sydney Bella Sparrow and Elaine Swenson.

Additional information on special programs and events related to “An Artists’ Circle” is available by calling Sharon Arts Center at 603-924-7676.

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About Sharon Arts

The mission of Sharon Arts Center, a non-profit organization, is to support and serve artists and craftspeople, to engage the community in the artistic process, and to foster the relationship between artists and the community through education, exhibitions, the promotion and sale of art and craft, as well as through special programs and events.

The Downtown Galleries in Depot Square (Fine Craft Gallery & Store, Juried Artist Gallery and Exhibition Gallery) are open Sunday, 12-5 pm; Monday –Wednesday, 10am-6pm; Thursday – Friday, 10am-7pm; Saturday 10am-6pm (The Exhibition Gallery is open year round). The Sharon Arts School of Art & Craft in Sharon, NH, offers a wide variety of art classes and programs. The School offices are open Monday – Friday, 8:30am – 4:30pm.

Sharon Arts Center is sponsored in part by the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Charitable Foundation, and art lovers like you!

MAY 21, 2010 PRESS RELEASE–

An Artists’ Circle Exhibition: July 9 – August 27