C.S.A. Artist Archive
Below, take a look at past participating artists in the Library Arts Center’s “Community Supported Art (CSA)” Series. The program started in winter of 2020 during the pandemic, and we are pleased that it continues to engage our community of artists and patrons.
MEET THE 2022 CSA Artists SERIES ONE:
THE LAND WE LOVE
This series featured landscapes—from traditional to more contemporary—all with representational landscape features including painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography.
Debra Claffey
New Boston, NH | mixed media, monotype, printmaking, collage + encaustic
Debra Claffey is a visual artist who uses encaustic, oil, and mixed media in her work. She holds a BFA in Painting from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University and an Associate's Degree in Horticultural Technology from the University of New Hampshire. In both 2011 and 2020, she received an Artist Entrepreneurial Grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Claffey’s work has won several awards, including the Second Place Award at the Monotype Guild of New England’s Fifth National Monotype Exhibition in May 2018 and the Juror’s Award at the Anything But Flat Exhibition at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. Claffey is a Past-President of New England Wax, and Past President of the NH Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Debra celebrates the complexity of the natural world and our place in it with paintings—in oil, encaustic, and mixed media—of plants and their foliage. Some are monotypes collaged to panels with paint or beeswax; others are painted directly to paper or panel. Pattern and repetition announce appreciation and anxieties, patches of daylight, and memories of movement. The drawn or carved line is the record of her own perceptive interactions with life on earth.
Debra honors plants: their great age and history on the planet, their intelligence and successful adaptions, their beauty of form, shape, and infinite color. She marvels in our new knowledge of their ways of communication, of making themselves attractive to us and other species, and the trading of “goods and services” that goes on between plants, fungi, bacteria, insects, birds, and even us mammals. Debra's experience in horticulture and organic land care has led me to focus in on the plant world and the assaults on the soil, biodiversity of plant species, and the protection of native flora, which is represented in her artwork.
Paula Dorr
Grantham, NH | pastel, acrylic, + mixed media
Paula Dorr is a pastel painter and a photographer, having retired after 37 years as a cultural art and photography teacher at the Hanover Middle School. She is constantly observing shapes, textures in colors, light, value, and beautiful, repetitive lines in my environment. Her vacations take her to unfamiliar places to photograph. These photographs and travels influence her work. Paula has earned numerous awards for both her paintings and photographs throughout New England. She has studied with local artists, including Rebecca Gottesman and Aline Ordman, as well as renowned artists Peter Granucci, Robert Carsten, and Frank Federico. Paula is a member of the Pastel Society of NH, the Vermont Pastel Society, the Library Arts Center in Newport, the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, the Marblehead Art Association in Massachusetts and the Eastman Camera Club in Grantham, NH.
Gwen Fuller
Grantham, NH | watercolor
From early childhood in western Massachusetts the urge to create was insistent for artist Gwen Fuller. At first exploring on her own, then studying art concepts and fundamentals with many teachers expanding her horizons and honing skills. Gwen has experimented with many mediums and currently work in oil and watercolor.
Gwen's paintings live with their owners in many places around the country and abroad. Gwen has shown in Key West, Jacksonville, Orange Park, Florida, Newport and Wickford, Rhode Island, northern California, Norfolk, Virginia, and the Upper Valley of New Hampshire.
Gwen lets her work speak for itself and considers it is a result of years of dedication, hard work and great pleasure.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The urge to create from the end of a brush has always been with me. Over the years I have studied art concepts and fundamentals with many teachers expanding my horizons and honing skills, and continue to do so. My desire now is to capture and share the beauty and diversity in life through visual expression inviting the viewer into the experience of the moment. Creating art is a combination of highs and lows, exhilaration and doubt, very hard work and intense focus as well as pure joy. My paintings have found wonderful homes all over the country and abroad.
Paul Howe
Goshen, NH | photography
Paul Howe has been photographing most of his life. He first started taking pictures when he received a Polaroid Swinger camera one Christmas when he was eight years old. In Paul’s sophomore year at Kearsarge Regional High School, he took a course in black and white photography and had his first pictures published in a local newspaper that same year. With the help from his father, Townsend Howe, a black and white darkroom was set up at home in New London. That summer, he bought his first 35 mm camera and photography has been a part of his life ever since.
In 1980, Paul started shooting pictures to make a living. From 1981 to 1986 Paul was a ski photographer for Waterville Valley. In 1987 Paul started working for the Argus Champion newspaper and worked as a freelance photographer at the paper until 2006. Paul still covers area news events as a freelance photographer photographing Intertown Record and the Eagle Times. Paul also has had his photos published in many publications. Along the way, Paul Howe has photographed many weddings, events and portraits of local people and families.
Paul has done publicity photos for the New London Barn Players, the Newport Opera, and U.S. Senator Sununu and Forbes campaigns. Paul has received awards for his photography including Community Journalism from the New Hampshire Press Association, Kearsarge Athletic Service Award in 2005 from Kearsarge Regional High School, and the 2013 Newport Area Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Citizen of the Year Award.
ARTIST STATEMENT
A photographer for close to 40 years I have always tried to capture those fleeting moments in time. Whether photographing the fading light of a winter afternoon, stopping the action at the peak moment in a sports image, or the morning dew on a blade of grass. My Goal as a photographer is to convey the feeling I had when taking the photo to the person looking at the finished print.
Heidi Lorenz
Goshen, NH | Watercolor
Heidi Lorenz, born in Muenchweiler, Germany spent childhood predominantly in the United Kingdom. Magnificent coastline & pastoral countryside enthused sensibilities toward horses, the sea & country. Heidi’s love of art formed early and illustrations in Anna Sewell’s "Black Beauty" shaped initial artistic impressions & love of horses. Summers were often spent in the United States and then academic periods in the United Kingdom. Early on Heidi would walk several miles in order to visit the "Red House Museum" to witness authentic works of art. As a teenager Heidi traveled further Later came the original oils by artist Lucy Kemp-Welch at the "Russell-Cotes Museum" & eventually Heidi would encounter the vast art & cultural scenes of London, Paris, NY & many other cities! Currently, Heidi enjoys farm life in Goshen, NH, USA and shares her farm with her son and his family, a couple horses, several dogs, cats, goats and chickens.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My art is a representation of my life. It doesn’t matter where I find myself, on the farm, in the countryside, by a city block or scanning a coastline. I’m an enthusiastic painter wanting to capture whatever stirs me; sometimes the simplest objects become radiant subjects simply by the quality of light settled upon them. I paint my pets, critters in the woods, old rickety barns, a bee sucking nectar from a blossom, or a character of interest that happens upon my path. My approach is fairly direct & although I love to draw I rarely overdo any preliminary sketches! I’d call my initial approach a rather relaxed gestural drawing. I work in both oil & watercolor so my technique varies although generally, after a light sketch, I start placing loose blocks of color leaving the light canvas or paper as my lights. In oils I will often lift color off the canvas in order to create lights & midtones. Brush on & wipe off, back & forth, pushing & shaping the paint, refining as I go, each stroke making clearer my intention of shape & form. Artwork to me is a great puzzle of placing together all this color, texture, tone & value. I love it!
Elisabeth Malloy
Cornish Flat, NH | Oil
Elisabeth “Lissa” Malloy is a born explorer and naturalist of her home state, New Hampshire. Born and raised in the lower valley, she explored (and still does) the woods, brooks, and the White Mountains growing up. Naturally, this spirit is reflected in her art. Lissa enjoys the atmosphere and interconnections of all existence, and often includes hidden whimsical stories in her work. She finds inspiration from the outdoors, from the moment we round a corner on the trail to the pausing in a glint of light.
Primarily self-taught until college, Lissa has earned two Bachelor’s in both Graphic Design and Drawing with plans to one day work on a master's degree. She loves exploring mediums, styles, and genres, with a special fondness of working in paint and colored pencil. She has also apprenticed as a tattooist and is currently adding a graphic novel about surviving and healing from domestic abuse to her body of work.
MEET THE 2022 CSA Artists SERIES TWO: CONTEMPORARY TILES
This series featured an array of pieces, all created with a contemporary sensibility, from representational to fully abstract including painting, collage, photography and printmaking.
*Note that the art pieces shown are representative of the artists' work, yet different than the original pieces created for this project.
Robert K. Carsten
Springfield, VT | acrylic + mixed media
A longtime, popular national and international workshop instructor and exhibitions juror, Robert K. Carsten studied at the Art Students League of New York, Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti, Italy. He’s authored many articles on art and artists for The Artist’s Magazine, Pastel Journal, PleinAir Magazine, and Watercolor Magazine. Robert’s work in various media has won numerous awards and has been featured in AcrylicWorks 4; AcrylicWorks 7; Pure Pastel; Pure Color/The Best of Pastel; Strokes of Genious/The Best of Drawing, and others.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Unlike a ballad, a work of classical music doesn’t use words to tell a story. Instead, it uses the elements and principles of music composition to convey mood, stir the imagination or invoke memory. Likewise, abstraction, which is termed non-representational art, uses the elements and principles of design to similar end. Colors can evoke emotion, line can induce movement and define edge, tones can induce mood, the interplay of shapes can create rhythmic relationships. With this series of abstract paintings I‘m creating for CSA, I’ve chosen to individually compose each work using an inspirational concept (as indicated by each title on back) — positive, intangible attributes like enrapture, joy, excitement, peacefulness, etc. These form the foundations, acting as springboards for my intuitive, visual expressions.
Mary Gerakaris
Canaan, NH | photography
Since childhood Mary Gerakaris has been intrigued by detail, patterns and color. In an effort to capture and create an amalgam of her visions, she studied art, photography and graphic design at colleges in Milwaukee and Chicago. Mary has always came back to photography considering it the most honest way to capture what she sees. Mary's study of composition and color theory strongly informs her photography…she paints with her camera.
Mary's work experiences since moving to NH in the early 1970’s have been as a copywriter, catalog designer, therapeutic riding instructor and teacher, but she has never put down my camera. Photography is a passion for her that she considers a form of individual expression.
Mary is fascinated by the naturally occurring colors, textures and exquisite patterns found in both natural and manmade objects. The forms that she sees in her natural surroundings, aging buildings and architectural details give her unlimited sources of inspiration. In her photographs Mary attempts to share her vision, composing with her camera, and altering color as minimally as possible.
Amber Paris
Putney, VT | mixed media
Amber Paris is a Vermont based artist who creates mixed-media work that investigates ideas around belonging and connection. Amber works in a wide range of mediums and her work incorporates several elements that bridge the divide between fine art and craft resulting in a dynamic multi-disciplinary style. She utilizes rigorous data collection and a style that marries fiber art, painting/drawing, sculptural and bookmaking elements to depict her narrative findings. Amber received her BFA degree with a concentration in Painting from Tyler School of Art (2005) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She lives in Putney Vermont with her husband and three children. You can find Amber online at amberparis.net.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In this series of topographical maps, Amber utilized a GPS tracking app to record her wanders both on and off trail while in residency at Welcome Hill Studios in Chesterfield NH. Using information from the app, trail maps within the Wantastiquet-Monadnock Corridor and the New Hampshire Fish and Game topographic map archives, she then created this series using layered repurposed fabrics on 140lb cold press paper. She stitched her recorded trails onto these 51 separate maps which fit together to illustrate over 30 miles of hiking in the course of her residency week.
Chris Rollins
Plainfield, NH | watercolor, pastel + mixed media
Chris Rollins is an artist and land surveyor. His paintings often involve people or buildings. He paints mostly in watercolor and acrylic, frequently adding pencil and ink.
He grew up in a small Maine town on the Kennebec River. Like his grandfather, father, uncles and brothers, he worked on the Kennebec Log Drive “picking rear”, sluicing pulpwood, and driving a tugboat. He has a degree in Forestry and is a self-employed Land Surveyor. Chris lives in Plainfield with his wife, Susan, and their dog, Kirby.
Chris Scott
Newport, NH | mixed media collage
Chris Scott - artist, teacher and arts and crafts enthusiast. Chris has always made things and drawn since childhood. She was a quiet kid and spent many happy hours creating fantasy worlds from simple arts and crafts materials. Chris studied fine art (painting and art history) in school, which she jokes qualified her to have many non-art related jobs, but she always had a studio (even if it was a corner of an apartment) and always made art. In the late 1980s Chris went back to school to get my master’s degree and paid for classes working as a teaching assistant where she found her calling. Since that time she has spent her career teaching arts and crafts in art centers, schools and in town parks and recreation departments. Chris finds facilitating art and craft experiences for others is superbly satisfying, and notes that often, she finds herself reliving those happy hours of childhood with the participants in her camps and workshops making arts and crafts. Recently, Chris has begun a series of collaged fantasy animals made from fabric, augmented with paint and colored pencil. These animals represent things that scare and intimidate her, transformed into goofy colorful celebrations of the world around her, she calls them My Monsters.
ARTIST STATEMENT
A caterpillar doesn’t know it will become a butterfly. Butterflies are often thought to represent hope, renewal, transformation and rebirth. Chris chose butterfly specimens to be a compact reminder to be hopeful, to take excellent care of ourselves, to try new things and to hold outcomes loosely. All the butterflies in this series are made from found paper materials, Chris likes the challenge and the humor of using pre-designed images. These collages are created using magazines, wall paper samples, and other bits and pieces from the vast supply of pretty paper in her studio. The different textures and sheens of the papers are unified by matte medium which is polymer based and acts as glue, but also gives the pieces a rich, wax-like finish. The sky blue backgrounds gave Chris the opportunity to paint and draw, just a little in this series. Each butterfly in this series has a name with a translation into Latin. This is a nod to the butterfly specimens scientists and hobby enthusiasts collect. Making things is Chris’s greatest joy and she hopes you will enjoy your butterfly as much as I have enjoyed making them.
Pam Smith
Enfield, NH | linocut, mixed media + watercolor
Pam Smith is a New Hampshire artist and printmaker. She is an avid gardener and conservationist, and her creative inspiration comes from the natural beauty all around us. Her work ranges from botanical relief prints to whimsical collages and combines traditional printmaking, painting and mixed media.
Pam’s linocut prints are designed, carved, and pressed by hand at Art Haven Studio in Enfield. She is an artist member of AVA Gallery and the Women’s Caucus for Art, NH, and she sells her work via her Etsy shop and at the Women’s Rural Entrepreneurial Network (WREN) in Bethlehem, NH. In 2021, she has exhibited her work at Twiggs Gallery, the New Leaf Gallery in Keene, NH, and the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts.
ARTIST STATEMENT
These works focus on original botanical, flora and fauna relief prints using various printmaking techniques combined with mixed media. Pam’s linocuts feature organic lines and bold design elements, and often introduce layers of semitransparent color as an under layer to her prints. Each piece of artwork features a hand-carved, hand-pulled original linocut print, and every piece is unique.
2020/21 CSA Artists
ROUND ONE
Kait Armstrong
Andover, NH | Printmaking
Kate’s current work includes woodblock carvings that are handprinted as postcards and small works of art, and detailed embroidery done on hand-dyed textiles.
Abigail McCoy
Newport, NH | Acrylic & other mediums
Abigail works in a variety of mediums in order to capture the magic and charm of the antique items she likes to use as still lifes and as details in her whimsical illustrations.
Elizabeth Moore
Grantham, NH | Mixed Media
Elizabeth’s work is typically multi-layered with collaged elements, heavily textured, brightly colored, and non-representational. Ancient and distant cultures have always intrigued Elizabeth. Consequently, she enjoys creating ethnographic works of art in which text and other cultural symbols are embedded in my visual compositions in an effort to make meaning and allow each piece to speak a language all its own.
Jennifer Stark
Newport, NH | Mixed Media Collage
Through mixed media collage Jennifer explores shape, color, texture and materials to satisfy her need to organize and energize space.
Patti Warren
Lebanon, NH | Watercolor
Patti uses watercolor to portray the elegance in everyday items. In addition to being an artist, Patti is also an art teacher both at the Library Arts Center and other venues in the Upper Valley. Patti offers classes, for both children and adults, currently her classes can be found through the Arts Center online via Zoom.
2020/21 CSA Artists
ROUND TWO
Rebecca Bense
Bradford, NH | Watercolor
Rebecca is a native New Hampshire watercolorist with a love of learning and teaching. She teaches many classes through the Library Arts Center, currently through Zoom. With a love of learning, Rebecca studies under Doris Rice and also Carol Douglas and has studied with Margaret Dwyer and Robert J. O’Brien.
Margaret Dwyer
Elkins, NH | Watercolor
Master Watercolorist Margaret Dwyer is also known for teaching extensively through local arts centers in the greater region, her private studio, and the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park where she has been Artist in Residence for the last three consecutive years.
Susan Lirakis
Center Sandwich, NH | Photography
Susan Lirakis believes in looking and plays with seeing. She has been making photographs, and using them as a means of expression, for over sixty years.
Susan Parmenter
Sunapee, NH | Pen & Ink
Artist and environmental activist, Susan is committed to communicating the splendor, vitality and importance of our natural world. Whether in landscape or still-life, nature is ever-present Susan’s work–often paralleled by signs of humankind to highlight our relationship with the wild. For this project Susan will be contributing pen and ink drawings.
Alan Shulman
New London, NH | Oil and Acrylic
Alan finished a career as an architect, then one as a special education educator, and now is in his third career as an artist, returning to his first love, painting, which grabbed him at the age of two…finger-painting at an easel.