art exhibitions

The Cornwall Library is delighted to present Traces, Places, and Faces, an intriguing exhibition of photography and watercolor painting by Sari Goodfriend and Eddie Watkins. They are life partners, and exhibit their shared passion for people, nature, and art in this joint show.

From an early age, New Yorker Sari Goodfriend happily spent her childhood summers in Cornwall with her sister Jenny and her art dealer parents, Carol and Jim. For a few years after college she lived in East Cornwall, photographing for local newspapers from New Milford to Salisbury. Todd Piker (of Cornwall Bridge Pottery) provided her a first opportunity to exhibit (and sell!) her personal photos in a show he curated at the Silo Gallery in New Milford.

Moving back to New York, Sari has since worked as a commercial photographer, shooting assignments for corporations, magazines, non-profits, universities, and private individuals. She now does mostly portraits and events, but her youthful Cornwall summers are apparent in the landscape and nature-inspired images she is exhibiting at the library. Her part of the show also features some abstract photographs inspired by what she terms “bleak winter beauty” and “the wild, chaotic, post-tornado woods”. Many of her photographs are in frames that once held old master prints from her parents’ art dealership, C&J Goodfriend, Drawings and Prints.

Eddie Watkins is from Pittsburgh. After four years in the Navy stationed in Cuba and Newfoundland as a proud member of the Seabees (Construction Battalion), he moved to New York City and became a photographer of fine artwork. His clientele includes museums such as The Frick Collection, The Museum of Arts and Design, private art dealers, well known artists, and collectors. He also photographed the permanent collection of The Art Students League.

Eddie has been the drummer for many rock and blues bands, a sideline that provides subjects for personal photography seen in this show. When on the move, from 1980s city streets to rural landscapes, Eddie always carries either a camera or a set of watercolors. His painting style ranges from loose and interpretive to detailed and exacting, inspired by his naval engineering background. This show includes both his photography and watercolors.

The Cornwall Library is delighted to present Ellen Moon’s Thinking About Gardens, exhibiting her watercolors of private Cornwall gardens, and also featuring two of her elaborately embroidered jackets with botanical themes. All of the work on exhibit is for sale. And because Thinking About Gardens coincides with Books & Blooms (June 20 and 21), the library’s annual two-day garden-related event and benefit, it is a great opportunity for gardeners and art lovers to celebrate summer together in rural Cornwall.

Moon says “For me, painting has become a form of meditation, an hour in the day when I have to concentrate on one thing and one thing only…”

A few years ago she began the project that resulted in the contemplative, deeply felt watercolors in this exhibit, painting the grand gardens of Cornwall, many of them featured on Books & Blooms garden tours. She says “What a pleasure it is to sit in these beautiful spaces and paint
‘en plein air’…I began to expand my thinking about what constitutes a garden…there are many sorts…formal, botanical, cottage, vegetable, herb…even a path through the woods is a kind of garden. My current working definition of a garden is a human intervention in the landscape to enhance human appreciation of the landscape.”

About her embroidered jackets, Moon says “I like to tell stories…In my jackets, I am reporting on some of the daily phenomena that I have witnessed in the world around me—butterflies in the mist, the surprising beauty of a spider’s web, light and shadow in a field, the lively round of life and death in the pond.” This show displays two works in fiber: crocheted, knitted, dye-painted and hand-embroidered art to wear. One is a jacket embroidered with spring flowering trees and shrubs and their pollinators, including the wind; the other is a kimono inspired by Yeats’s “The Song of the Wandering Aengus.”

After graduating from Connecticut College, she received an MA in Drawing and an MFA in Multimedia from the University of Iowa. Since then she has exhibited works in watercolor and fiber in many venues. She has also designed masks and costumes for theatrical groups, and taught mask making workshops. Recently she has become very interested in giant puppets.

Moon lives in Cornwall, where she was a weekly storyteller to the first grade at Cornwall Consolidated School, and art curator for The Cornwall Library. She now serves as central force for the annual Rose Algrant Art Show, an exhibit of works in all media by Cornwall artists.

The show includes watercolors of all sorts of gardens, flower gardens, vegetable gardens, and even some “gardening” of the woods. Just about all of the paintings are of Cornwall gardens. Moon will also show two botanically themed, elaborately embroidered jackets. Registration is requested for the reception.