Watercolors and Collage
Our June 2021 gallery installation is presented by Evie Sutkowski.
Artist, Evie Sutkowski, lives in Monroe Township. Her interest in art developed strongly during her high school and college period. Evie minored in art before she graduated from Syracuse University. Her passion for art continued during the time she traveled throughout the country as a consultant in the late 80s and 90s. During that period, she attended watercolor, collage, and pastel artist workshops in Massachusetts, Iowa, New York, and New Jersey. Later, she studied under several New Jersey artists as well, including Barbara Cox, Jane Lux, Joanne Amantea, Robert Hyers, Maurice Mahler, Solomon Kadoche, and mentors: Russ Johnson in watercolor and Karen Starett in collage. Evie is a member of the Garden State Watercolor Society (GSWS), the Suburban Artists Guild (SAG), The Plainsboro Artists Group, and Princeton Sketchers. She works primarily in watercolor but during the pandemic focused on collage. In September of 1999, she exhibited a sculpture/collage of a fishing boat with a family of origins theme at Penn State’s Paul Robeson Gallery Exhibit entitled, A Gathering of Women, a Healing Place. The work was featured in an article covering the event. Evie has participated in more recent exhibits including GSWS 50th Anniversary Juried Art Show, New Jersey Audubon Society Juried Art Exhibit (Plainsboro Preserve), Monroe Township Cultural Commission’s Annual Juried Art Show, Juried Annual Art Group Exhibit (Plainsboro Library), Pinot to Picasso Art Show (Princeton Arts Council), Middlesex County and State Juried Senior Art Shows, SAG Annual Art Exhibits, Annual Shad Festival (Lambertville, and several exhibits at the Gourgaud Gallery (Cranbury). Evie’s artwork is in various private collections in New Jersey, Florida, Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. She is the recipient of several first and second-place art awards.
“Watercolors and Collage” by local artist Evie Sutkowski will open Thursday, June 3, in the gallery and run through June 30. In this exhibit, she features paintings of the Dogtown rocks, with an oblique reference to artist Marsden Hartley’s similar subject matter. One of the largest boulders is known as “Whale’s Jaw” because it looked strikingly like a whale’s head until 1989 when the jaw broke off after campers lit a fire under the bottom of the rock. In “Whale’s Jaw” and other paintings in this series, Evie captures the mysterious mood at Dogtown, the overall eeriness of the atmosphere, and the ruggedness of the Dogtown granite boulders.
For the seasonal watercolors, Evie’s emphasis is on value. In the winter snow scenes, the whitest white contrasts with the darkest dark, exposing the timelessness of the winter scape blanketed in snow. As a counterpart, in the spring and summer florals, Evie splashes stroke and color across the watercolor paper, achieving a loose and free movement. The fall scenes highlight vivid color and introduce the concept of rhythm.
Evie’s love of the tactile is made apparent in her collages, through her layering of textured papers, newspaper and magazine prints, tearing and cutting their shapes into form, and gluing with matte medium. In her abstract collage panels, she focuses on the basic design elements of shape, line, texture, pattern, value, and color. It was a real challenge in these panels to arrange the design elements into cohesive and harmonious arrangements. Evie finds it both healthy and healing to work with her hands on a collage.
This exhibit will be open to the public from Thursday, June 3 thru Wednesday, June 30. Please stop in.