Soft Palette: Comfort in The Storm is a select-group exhibit designed as a much-needed passage to a calming place. The exhibit features a collection of mature artists, each with decades of refining their craft with much to say, bringing all things beautiful and meaningful into the world. Featured: encaustic artist Emma Ashy, painters Darlou Gams, Jeffrey Fitzgerald, Kathleen Kendall, and mixed media artist Catherine Nash.
Soft Palette: Comfort in The Storm opens at Bowersock Gallery, 371 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA, on Friday, August 29th, 2025, reception from 7-9 pm; show runs through September 19th.
The show’s warm and inviting hues and images offer respite, while the meaningful surfaces, abstract to representational, offer the mind a purposeful and peaceful travel. It’s a perfect show for the times, and all the more as summer wraps and we transition into the traditionally ‘busy season’ of change and its string of holidays. Each piece is a slice of tranquility that offers the viewer a peaceful place in which to get lost.
Encaustic artist Emma Ashby is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London whose work has been exhibited internationally. The painter’s lush landscapes are created by painting layers of pigmented molten beeswax and clay, which give the works texture, depth, and a rich luminosity. Emma’s methods give her seascapes, meadows, and wild seaside moods, voice. They’re realistic yet ethereal, caught at the edge of a dreamy, foggy moment and like a shiny gem, they captivate.
Painter Darlou Gams earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts, Summa Cum Laude, from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. The former illustrator’s work is featured in private and corporate collections worldwide. Gams’ focus is capturing light and atmosphere in her contemporary, tonal landscapes, which gives each slice of her soft-focused terrain an otherworldly tenor. Darlou is a master of her craft; her work has always delivered something more than just ‘real' with landscapes those of our dreams.
Painter Jeffrey Fitzgerald (BFA — University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is a master of illusion — his tantalizing abstractions of nature shifting under scrutiny. This is a confident artist, with each move of a brush or palette knife a testament to his confidence. Every piece by Jeff is distinctly ‘a Fitzgerald,’ bold, and exciting; his canvases move, alive with energy.
Painter Kathleen Kendall is the sole figurative artist; her distinct, realistic, ethereal works are an exploration of the metaphysical and spiritual. As a visual image, Kathleen’s work is appealing and arresting with so much more than meets the eye. Kathleen uses juxtaposed images as pathways to deeper thought — often a place without words, just a feeling recognized.
Artist Catherine Nash, whose work is exhibited worldwide, brings decades of exploring painting, encaustic, papermaking, installation, and printmaking to her current 3-D assemblage/mixed media works (BFA in Printmaking and Drawing, University of New Hampshire; studies at Kyoto Seika University of Fine Arts, Japan; and MFA in Mixed Media, University of Arizona). Her work depicts a poetic view of humankind’s relationship to the world around them — a place to reflect on the spiritual and philosophical. Catherine creates magical, poetic portals that transport the viewer into a world of wonder and spirit. The best way to describe her translations of the natural world is sacred. They’re powerful and awe-inspiring places where we meet as one with the natural world.
Also check out other Arts events in Provincetown, Fine Arts events in Provincetown.