Hosmer Gallery

Caroline Jennings (1949-2024)

My Appalachia

This exhibit comprises work that grew out of Caroline Jennings’ upbringing and early adulthood in small town Appalachia. The work explores the way in which hope grows out of hardship and isolation, and tries to express how a relatively isolated culture creates both bonds and separation. The exhibition will include oil paintings and works of handmade paper that incorporate poems/text by the artist and photographs made and developed by the artist’s grandfather in the early 20th century. Jennings’ work is figurative and narrative, but not realistic, and explores the “peripheries” of our lives—what happens beyond the limits of our everyday being  and is critical to who we are, and to our stories.

Artist Caroline Jennings passed away on November 4, 2024.

David Russell

I have been a painter and hand papermaker for over 30 years. Upon moving to Amherst, MA five years ago (just in time for the pandemic lock-down), I found myself painting watercolors daily. Two years later, I felt I had exhausted myself two-dimensionally and didn’t know where to turn. Then, I heard my mother whisper in my ear, “ David, it’s time to work in three dimensions now. Sculpt!”

I now consider myself an abstract sculptor, and conceptually, most aligned with the early modern works of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Constantin Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” series is my most treasured inspiration. I aim to simplify shapes, and concentrate them into their purest form retaining mass and color.

The aspiration for physical and spiritual representation in wood characterizes my current work. My process starts with finding wood that has decayed to the point of being unrecognizable as wood or log in its’ natural state. My tables are abstract paintings with legs.