Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery

Hours: Saturdays from 10:00am to 12:00pm and by Appointment

EXHIBIT:

“Landscapes Through Texture”

by Carol Mackiewicz-Neely

ON DISPLAY SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2024 - SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2025

OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13TH - 6:30PM TO 8:00PM

Curated By EC-CHAP

ARTIST STATEMENT

Most of my work comes from a sensual place of texture and intimate action between tool and canvas. The imagery that emerges is often abstract with hints of the figurative or literal. This collection of texture paintings depicts imagined landscapes existing in a misty haze or from high above in a bird’s eye view snapshot. My work combines acrylic paint, sawdust, beach sand, salt, and sugar, pushed across the canvas with brush, palette knife, or cloth. I use water and rubbing alcohol to push and move the paint around into forms or pathways that feel right to me.

Sometimes the paint is poured directly onto the canvas, already mixed with one of the natural materials; sometimes the natural materials, like the sawdust, is on the canvas and paint, water, and rubbing alcohol applied to it and mixed and manipulated. Inspiration for the landscapes comes from seacoasts, rivers and rivulets, fields, and marshlands. The textured and mixed paint could be applied to the canvas and left alone, but I find great satisfaction in pushing it around until it feels like it fits the form of a landscape I can see in my mind. Landscapes through Texture is a felt sense of being in a location that may seem familiar but also simultaneously new and different.

She wanted to use her art and passion and drive for creating to help others and herself, express feelings and expand the definition of creative artist.  Carol is skilled as an artist to recreate still lifes and scenes around her, but takes great satisfaction and fulfillment in pursuing the expressive nature of her feelings and her sensual self.  Her art embodies layers of paint, textures, and vivid colors.  Sometimes the paintings are large and expansive, other times the experience is intimately small and contained.  She combines natural materials into the paint to enhance the experience of playing with and applying the paint, and creates fields of colors and surfaces that are textured and capture and spread light across it unexpectedly.

Carol Mackiewicz-Neely

The Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery represents a platform for local and regional visual artists to display their original works for public viewing at no cost to the artist. This unique collaborative model allows for artist participation in show design, installation, and supervision.

The Community Gallery derived its name from its historical roots. The physical space that houses was once the ground floor of the Dye & Bleach House for the Gardiner Hall Jr Company from 1916 to 1954.

It was here where millions of yards of cotton thread were processed and colored before being spooled for domestic and international distribution.  

Each show in the Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery will be on view for the duration of 4 to 8-weeks. Artists are chosen by EC-CHAP and curated to pair with the work of other artists or groups of artists whose work complements one another. We welcome submissions by students or community groups and encourage everyone to visit the gallery. We hope for this Community Gallery will bring awareness to the talent within our regional communities.

If you are interested in learning more about the Dye & Bleach House Gallery, and opportunities to display your work, please contact us. Email: info@ec-chap.org or call: 518-791-9474. The Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery is located at The Mill Works, 156 River Road, Willington, CT.