Rural America celebrated in new ARTery Gallery exhibit

In October, the ARTery Gallery in Milford presents the annual exhibit of two of its longtime members, Randall FitzGerald and Marie Liu. Their artwork compliments each other in their focus on the natural world, love of the environment, and our collective attachment to it.

FitzGerald is a biologist and artist who studies life on the planet from both a scientific and aesthetic viewpoint. His love of nature permeates both his professional and artistic life, and most of the fine art he produces reflects the intimacy he enjoys with the natural world.

The ARTery exhibit includes works from rural America that explore people’s connection with the land that nourishes all of us. FitzGerald employs what he calls a “photo pictorial” process that starts with a photograph, which is optimized using Photoshop and then painted using a variety of digital brushes found in Corel Painter. The resulting artwork is then printed on canvas using archival inks and then enhanced with acrylic paint before applying a coat of acrylic gel medium for preservation.

Liu, known for her images of the Poconos, will exhibit her most recent large oil painting of the Great Council Tree of Walpack, N.J., which describes the history surrounding this 450-year-old oak tree through imagery of a 17th century map, William Penn, the Lenape, the Delaware Water Gap, and images taken from and inspired by the Peaceable Kingdom paintings by Quaker artist Edward Hicks.

Alongside this she will be also exhibit her paintings paying homage to Gifford Pinchot, the history of the region, and her landscape and waterfall paintings that she has been producing for over a decade.

For this exhibit, Liu and FitzGerald have designed a fine art print “Waterfalls of the Poconos” which includes nine images of Liu’s waterfall paintings.