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Watertown artist Tina Gauthier is making her second appearance at The Good News Cafe Gallery. Over the past seven years, she has offered more than a dozen presentations of her works in both solo and group exhibitions in New York, New Jersey, Austria and New Zealand. In February she completed her second fellowship and residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Sweet Briar, Va., and she has been chosen for a residency this May in Costa Rica sponsored by the Julia and David White Foundation.
Recipient of a master of fine arts degree from Rutgers University in 1997, Ms. Gauthier has created works in a variety of mediums over the past decade, including oils on canvas and fabric, gouache on paper, and mixed-media works. Since 1994, she has been a free-lance painter for public and private spaces, completing indoor and outdoor murals, other wall paintings and faux finishes. She has also worked on digital projects to preserve and catalogue photographic art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, as well as serving as an art instructor for the Mattatuck Museum and the Washington (Conn.) Art Association.
A major inspiration for many of the recent paintings in the current exhibition was Ms. Gauthier's journey in China from November 2001 through February 2002. She explains:
"The project in China began with the idea of creating and completing one 14-inch by 17-inch gouache on paper each day. Throughout this process, the paintings progressed from images that expressed my feelings about my surrounding environment to images of the environment itself.
"The circular composition became a way for me to focus on a particular section of the landscape, as if peeking through a keyhole. I think of the circular composition as a way of looking deeper into something through the process of painting it, as well as a way of understanding the completed image on the paper as its own contained world.
"This whole experience has left me with my heart open, and with the desire to focus and discipline my mind to stay in the present moment. I will continue to create works on paper throughout the year by attending artist residencies and putting myself in unfamiliar environments. I intend to explore the emotions within memory and loss, and how the objects in my environment trigger these emotions."
Ms. Gauthier describes her approach to her artistic work as "fluid and open-ended, allowing my subconscious to be free to shift images to create new meanings. My paintings combine the illusions of my imagination with the reality of my surrounding landscape," exploring "the boundaries between figuration, abstraction and the zones that interplay between them.
"The paintings are allegorical landscapes," she observes, "and therefore they can be painted anywhere. I see them as environments contained inside the human brain. They portray the illusions of the mind, and only exist in the reality of the painting."
A native of Watertown, Conn., Ms. Gauthier is a 1988 graduate of Watertown High School and received a bachelor's of fine arts degree in 1992 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She also traveled extensively in Alaska and the Yukon during 2001, creating two large paintings from that tour.
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