Artist Spotlight

BY JANE DEERING

A treasured summer pastime is exploring the creative riches found in art museums and galleries, and Concord offers much in the way of such explorations. In addition to the superb Concord Museum, the town boasts the Concord Center for the Visual Arts (Concord Art), founded in 1922 by artist and activist Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts, the Umbrella Arts Center, a collective of local artists’ studios, and the Lucy Lacoste Gallery which presents ceramics by national and international artists. In West Concord you’ll find Three Stones Gallery, Sun Stone Gallery, and the Bradford Mill Artscape. The area’s newest space — The Garage @ Jane Deering Gallery — is a contemporary gallery on the owner’s property at 94 Elm Street, a short walk from the town center.

ADIN MURRAY

Adin Murray

Adin Murray is an American Realist painter. He was born and raised in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, and received a BA in Art/Biology from Tulane University and an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His work and travels have taken him to the California coast and Western Australia where the enormity of the sky became the subject of six immense paintings for his graduate thesis. His interest in atmospheric change is captured in a series of ongoing paintings Adin refers to as The Horizon paintings. In his words — “The horizon, that ‘thin place’ where the sky and water meet; it can be beautiful or foreboding, tumultuous or calm, light or dark, and always it speaks to the universal truth of constant change.” His work has been featured in Faultline, the literary and art publication of the University of California, Irvine, and has also appeared in Southern Living and North Shore Magazine, as well as the Boston Globe. A selection of his remarkable small-scale graphite drawings will be in a two-person show at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA this July, and his most recent luminous paintings will be the subject of a solo exhibition titled There’s a Certain Slant of Light in August at the Jane Deering Gallery, Gloucester, MA. His work is held in both private and corporate collections nationally and internationally. Adin currently lives and works on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. adinmurrayart.com

Boundless. Oil on canvas.

©Aden Murray

ESTHER PULLMAN

Esther Pullman

Esther Pullman has a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Yale University. On becoming a photographer, she says “I was trained as a graphic designer at Yale in the 1960s and was fortunate to have Walker Evans as my photography professor during my graduate study. His influence on me grew over time as I had a chance to know him and become increasingly familiar with his explorations of the vernacular and the commonplace. Later — thirty years later! — an interest in horticulture and garden design led me back to photography. I found, hiding within photography’s apparent facade of fact, an emotionally charged and expressive medium.” Esther is noted for her panoramic triptychs of greenhouses from around the world. She is a member of the Concord Center for the Visual Arts (Concord Art). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in the collection of the Cape Ann Museum, the Danforth Museum, and numerous corporate and private collections worldwide. Esther lives in Cambridge and Annisquam, MA. estherpullman.com

Reynolda Greenhouse. Winston Salem, NC. Archival pigment print.

©Esther Pullman

Jane Deering is the owner/director of the Jane Deering Gallery in Gloucester, MA and The Garage @ JDG in Concord. She has been a resident of Concord since 1985 and now divides her time between Massachusetts, California, and London, UK. She has a BA from Regis College and a post-graduate degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. janedeeringgallery.com