Eleanor Sweeney
I’ve been making photographs for almost 50 years. After working in traditional black and white for a while, I ventured into hand coloring and experimenting with Polaroid. Always wanting to try new methods and techniques, I’ve figured out how to make photographic transfers, putting them on various substrates. In this show, all the photographs are transferred onto birch boxes. To do this, I print the digital photograph on transfer film and then press it onto the box using a solution called Super Sauce to make it adhere. When I remove the film, the color stays on the box.These images are all reflections of natural subjects in a sheet of mylar that I’ve taped to a stiff piece of cardboard. I find something to photograph and then set up the mylar to reflect it, and photograph what I see in the mylar. They were all taken outdoors, and since the mylar is not very tight on the cardboard, it ripples in the wind, making the resulting image wavy and abstract. Each one has a mind of its own, and I manipulate them, playing with the color and changing the sizes and shapes.
I graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Russian, although I was always interested in art courses too. When my youngest child went to kindergarten, I started learning about photography, and have kept it up ever since.My photographs have been in many juried shows, group shows and solo shows in the Adirondacks and beyond, and are in private collections throughout the country. I’m a founding member of the Adirondack Artists Guild in Saranac Lake, which is a thriving gallery with 15 members, and my work is also at Gallery 46 in Lake Placid.
Audrey Kay Dowling
I am and have been a professional artist, gallery owner and teacher for over 40 years. Being the owner and curator of Portage Hill Art Gallery has given me the opportunity to represent my own work and to develop many other shows representing other artists for over 36 years. I attended SUNY New Paltz, where I received my BS in Art Education. I spent two summers exploring self expression through clay at the Alfred University summer clay programs. I have been honored to have my work chosen for many regional and national shows. I have also had my work published internationally, and have been the recipient of over ten art grants. My most recent grant was being funded as an artist participant in the Arts Services Initiative /New York Foundation of the Arts/New York State Council on the Arts Artist Boot Camp Program in Buffalo, NY.
My art goal is to make work that allows others to think about this world in which we have the pleasure of existing and to think about our limited resources. I interpret what I see every day in the woods, lakes, oceans, mountains, creeks and gardens. Form is beautiful, color is exciting, movement is visually stimulating, and texture and patterns open my eyes and my heart to express myself.
Betty Bryden
I have been actively involved in the arts for five decades in various capacities; as painter, gallery owner, arts council director, exhibition consultant, studio tour organizer and graphic designer. My personal artwork has concentrated on ink and watercolor painting on handmade papers, a fascination that began in the 1960's and continues today. For fifteen years I lived in Ogunquit, Maine where I painted, owned a gallery and enjoyed an extraordinary art community. My work was well received and appreciated in that state and New England in general: 1976 76 Maine Artists, Maine State Museum, Augusta, Maine, 1977 Patron's Choice, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, 1979 All-Maine Biennial, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, etc.. In 1983 I moved to Pennsylvania where my creative direction changed to include designing greeting cards and children's rocking chairs.
After the realization that my creativity was moving in the wrong direction I returned to painting and embraced working with handmade papers again, eventually with a concentration on abstracted landscape collage. The rural county where I live in Northeastern Pennsylvania is filled with rolling hills, farm land, grand views of pasture and sky and waterways large and small. It enjoys the diversity of the four seasons and it, along with returns to the Maine coast and the landscape between, supplies me with the inspiration that informs my work.The collages rely heavily on the technique of paste paper alteration on various kinds of paper and occasionally incorporate found materials. I use few papers that are not altered in some way by my hand. I rarely make papers myself (an art form that would side track me from painting) finding immense joy and challenge in the papers I come across. For the past twenty years I have concentrated on exhibiting in our area – through the Artists' Open House Weekend each Columbus Day Weekend throughout Susquehanna County and at the gallery/bookstore I have owned with my husband for eleven years (Butternut Gallery & Second Story Books). The arrival of the natural gas industry in northeastern Pennsylvania, and the resulting changes it will make to the landscape and economy, have made me reconsider the placement of my work.
I am and have been a professional artist, gallery owner and teacher for over 40 years. Being the owner and curator of Portage Hill Art Gallery has given me the opportunity to represent my own work and to develop many other shows representing other artists for over 36 years. I attended SUNY New Paltz, where I received my BS in Art Education. I spent two summers exploring self expression through clay at the Alfred University summer clay programs. I have been honored to have my work chosen for many regional and national shows. I have also had my work published internationally, and have been the recipient of over ten art grants. My most recent grant was being funded as an artist participant in the Arts Services Initiative /New York Foundation of the Arts/New York State Council on the Arts Artist Boot Camp Program in Buffalo, NY.
