MIDDLEBURY — Edgewater Gallery on the Green announces its April Solo Exhibition Artist: Donna Andreychuk. The gallery will host an opening reception for her exhibit, “Visual Journey,” on Saturday, April 9, from 3-6 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.
Andreychuk is a Canadian artist whose work can best be described as landscape-inspired abstract impressionism. Although many of her pieces are motivated by her love of the Canadian landscape, her scenes depict great similarities between Canada and Vermont. Both can be rugged and harsh, yet soft and soothing.
Painting en plein air as frequently as three times a week, Donna uses her outdoor pieces as inspiration for her larger works. However, she rarely uses more than a fragment of a plein air piece in another painting, and hardly ever sells them. Instead, those small works become inspiration for her studio sessions. She says they are like companions in a shared space, that speak to her, and connect her back to the rocky shorelines, gnarly pines and big skies that she is so earnestly trying to capture in her work.
Each larger, more finished piece that she paints is like “an imaginary accumulation of elements from all the places I have been.” The paintings in “Visual Journey” come straight from her heart. She spent much of her youth alone, outdoors, connecting with the earth. Painting landscapes is an intuitive approach to express herself through her artwork.
Whether seen from a path through the woods, the shoreline of the Thames River, or while quietly paddling a canoe along Lake Huron or Georgian Bay, Andreychuk tries to capture the essence of how she feels with a handful of loamy soil or while gazing at the point where the treetops meet the sky.
The title of the show symbolizes the visual and intimate trip she took the first time she brought her work from Canada to Middlebury. She needed in her mind to connect the two places and spaces, to feel that her work would be at home in a place she had not yet been until then. On her journey across the border and into the Vermont landscape, she says, she felt the connection developing, as if she were able to tiptoe across the treetops and land here, with her paintings, in a place that turned out to not be too different from her home.
After she left that first collection of work at Edgewater Gallery, Andreychuk returned to her home in London, Ontario, with a new landscape of inspiration. Equipped with photographs and mental imagery, she found her way into and through a new body of work that is every bit a piece of her journey, her home and her heart.
For more information on Donna Andreychuk and the “Visual Journey” exhibit, call 802-989-7419, email [email protected] or visit edgewatergallery-vt.com.