To everything turn, turn, turn
There is a season turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under Heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rain, a time of sow
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it's not too late

(The Byrds [excerpt])

It is December and we have moved inside for the winter. The birds have picked the garden clean of seeds, leaves have been raked, and firewood stacked against the promise of cold nights. We move inside to welcome quietude and time for reflection, planning for new growth and regeneration.

Amanda Acker moves through her daily environment with affection towards her surroundings. In her words, “I see a scene and I think, oh I see you. I feel some sort of attraction, understanding, or curiosity. Sometimes I make a sound... Oooooo, ahhhhh, hello. It is really that simple. I choose to make paintings because it is the way I acknowledge, process, learn, and move around the place where I live”.

Technically, Acker is trying to make the thing look like the thing. Not so much in a photographic sense, but in the way it is seen and evoked. “Oooooo ahhhhh”. How do you make the chair, but in paint? How do you paint the water falling from the hose? How does the tree interact with the neighboring tree? That is when the artists really start to notice things, and more things, and how she falls in love with the world.

Amanda Acker is a self-taught artist whose work has been widely exhibited (in sold out shows) in Michigan and in CT. She lives and works in Michigan.

Pastoral and bucolic still life settings emerge from Melanie Parke’s life. The tenderness of each painting evokes the artist’s fondness for domestic setting and mementos of friendship. Melanie Parke reconstructs familiar interiors and filters them through the ideology of memory. Her subjects often center on flowers, birds, decorative objects, gardens, and intimate interior settings with an intent in creating safe places for pleasure. Sentiment crafts a domestic locus and seeks visual lushness by alternating tonal moods and vivid ornamentation.

Painting is a pleasure-seeking process for Parke and abstraction a vehicle with which to think and begin. The artist sets up the space intuitively in broad and textured gestures, then pieces together arrangements to compose a homespun narrative. Specific interiors and landscapes are implied. Shifting the emphasis to pattern, texture and tone, Parke works to destabilize notions of exacting representation. This is an effort to build on a sensation of memory which conjures both comfort and longing.

The artist’s work is exhibited widely and is in collections throughout the United States. She has been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome three times, and an artist in residence at Borgo Finocchieto Invitational Residency, Tuscany, Italy, Heliker - LaHotan Foundation, Cranberry Isles, ME, Acadia National Park, ME, Yosemite National Park, CA, and Dorland Mountain Colony, CA. Parke earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL and studied at Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, IN. Parke lives and works in a contemporary studio in rural Michigan surrounded by orchards, meadows, and birds.

Sally Maca explores the daily changes in atmosphere and light and their transformational effect on familiar streetscapes and landscapes. The artist is dedicated to capturing the moment when the mundane becomes transcendent, a transition often created by the heaviness of a passing storm, the glow of a streetlamp, or an otherworldly sunset.

Maca’s subjects mostly hyperlocal landscapes, inspiration gleaned from daily walks or a glance out her front door. The artist explores the soft geometry in the angles of tree branches, or the horizon line and the hard-edged, manmade lines of roads and utility wires; these disparate elements are woven into lyrical compositions. Maca is not focused on a specific representation of a neighborhood or landscape, but in isolating the elements of a location to bring a universality to the painting, enough so that a viewer realizes that they too have experienced that same feeling, somewhere else, at another time.

The small scale of the paintings is central to the work; not only does the size invite close inspection but it evokes an intimacy with the painting.