on display September–October 2025
reception: Friday, September 26, 5–8pm
(during the Greenfield Arts Walk)
In this new body of work, Anna Bayles Arthur continues to employ a playful, intuitive process to develop her unique vocabulary of forms. Careful layers of transparent pigments provide a ground from which these forms seem to emerge and disintegrate. And it is through this spatial ambiguity that she hints at a fluidity of another kind of boundary, that which exists between dream and reality, conscious and subconscious. The explicit organicism within these compositions draws the viewer into a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar: biology, landscape, things mechanical, parts of composite bodies. Relationships unfold within the confines of the rectangle, constructed narratives that echo the drama of the natural world. It is just beneath the surface of these narratives that the viewer might find that familiar tug, an intimation of some ancient memory that moves within us: primordial water worlds, the emergence of basic life forms, surfaces of stone and mineral, dark voids. And perhaps by tapping some of these latent memories, one might touch upon a more collective human experience, a glimpse into our fleeting and mysterious part in this vast ecosystem.
About the artist:
Anna Bayles Arthur has been laying down images on paper since she was a small child – and for the last three decades, ceaselessly engaged in the discipline of making prints, drawings, and paintings. Having landed in western MA following the completion of an MFA at U-Mass, Amherst, she has continued to produce exhibitions of her work throughout New England. For Ms. Arthur, art making has always been more of a calling than a career, and it has been through some combination of privilege, hard work, and luck that she has been able to maintain this vocation. Despite (or perhaps because of) her aversion to social media platforms and practical avenues of self promotion, her creative practice has continued to evolve – the foundation of which has always been a rootedness to place and a deep connection to the natural world. She has been living and working in the same studio in Northampton, MA since 2006. http://www.annabaylesarthur.org/
