The Vergennes gallery Northern Daughters this week puts up a summer show that features the work of Anne Cady, Julia Jensen and Jessica Smith, three artists who use familiar landscapes as an entrance point to creating art, but otherwise have very little else in common. “Blades Will Sprout,” the title of the show, will be on view at the gallery’s 221 Main St. location from June 14 through July 29. There will be an opening reception on June 22 from 5-8 p.m.
Anne Cady’s distinctive oil paintings are inspired by the Vermont countryside that surrounds her (“Someday to Return,” pictured, right). Her paintings are playful and bold, full of vibrant color and spirit. This body of work features all new paintings, including works filled with the brilliant green of the first growth of Vermont’s early spring, and the lush brilliance of fields after the first cut. The New Haven artist also mixes in pieces wild with color — red mountains and rolling hills stretching back into open sky’s typical of her local valley landscape.
Though quite a departure stylistically, Julia Jensen’s work is also a rich collision of the external and internal world of the artist. Her work brings blurred, lush, almost dreamlike visions of landscape to the viewer (her unnamed piece is pictured below). “When I am working I try to leave the surface as open as I can for as long as I can, turning the panel this way and that, trying to keep subject out of it and work just with color and shape,” she says. “Inevitably, somehow, a place begins to emerge.”  A graduate of Tulane University with a B.A. in Art History, Jensen has been painting for 20 years.
Sense of place is certainly a cornerstone of Jessica Smith’s work. Many of the paintings she is exhibiting in the current show feature landscapes viewed near or directly from her farm in a mountain valley in Southern Vermont. The profile of familiar mountains and hills dominate the her work compositionally, while her sparse paint application and muted color palette show the viewer the Vermont landscape through a lens unique to Smith. Her work, she says, is a way of processing comings and goings, and this group particularly is inspired by the seasons of change in the mountains.
Northern Daughters is a contemporary art gallery that regularly features the work of 12 artists, in addition to special exhibits like “Blades Will Sprout.” The gallery owners said they “strive to be a space that merges the aesthetic of blue chip galleries with the familiarity and authenticity of a Vermont general store.”
For further information contact Northern Daughters at [email protected] or (802) 877-2173.