Exploring Paint at Archway Gallery, Houston. Dates:
May 1 – June 3, 2021
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From Archway Gallery:
“When friends Shirl Riccetti & donna e perkins decided to have a show together, they could never have anticipated such a tumultuous year as 2020. Perkins, an abstract painter working in acrylics, and Riccetti, a more traditional painter working in pen and watercolor, decided to confront the challenges of 2020 by continuing to do what they have been doing for most of their lives, Exploring Paint.
“Shirl Riccetti is an avid traveler. She has documented her trips to Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (just to name a few) in pen and watercolor. Her sketchbooks hold narratives from her journeys, with notes of the smells and sounds, as well as her reactions and feelings of the moment. Riccetti feels that historic buildings hold memories of their past, and that people reflect their own journeys and stories. The memories evoked from her sketches and notes empower Riccetti’s pen to create lines that might be thick, thin, wobbly, uneven, or precise. She develops each painting differently, putting herself back into that time, and the moments that ‘grabbed’ her attention. Each drawing brings a memory into focus…. The giggling Chinese girls taking her photo in Sorrento as she was sketching, watching a family cow saunter down the mountain following a Slovak shepherd, the horrific sight of WWII bullet holes in a wall in Budapest, a family’s garden wall in Italy…. Shirl Riccetti captures moments of peoples’ lives and honors these encounters by documenting them with her pen and brush, with the drama of line and color.