As its loose and messy appearance suggests, watercolor is a very difficult medium to master. As familiar as it is, the human figure is also very difficult to draw and hard to fake because everyone knows what it looks like. Images of water are also extremely difficult to create because they try to represent a still moment of what is a constantly moving and shifting phenomenon. Nevertheless, Kate Peper rises to the challenge and makes large expert watercolor paintings of figures in and around the water.
Her “Immersion” features swirling, splashing, reflecting, refracting pool water being experienced actively or passively by anatomically correct and expressive figures. Their faces register the bliss of floatation or submersion in the healing element of water. The distortions resulting from disrupted water make beautiful abstract images of disintegration. This is a masterful show beautifully hung in the back room of the Frank Bette Center.
In the front room is a group show called “Landscapes of the Mind.” Yet most of the landscapes seem to be of actual places one could visit and say, “Oh yeah, this is where the artist was when they painted that view.” Eddy Lehrer’s photograph of a “Sunset at Marina Park” captured a sky that was not a predictable orange. Similar colors of a gray sky shot through with shocks of light are captured in Paul Feinberg’s oil painting of “Burning Through.” Nature has a boundless imagination and color palette.
Andrea Bishop and Frederica Colla show quiet sylvan settings where Thoreau may have sat pondering nature while mosquitoes bred in the still shallows. Reid Haataja emerges as a designer, not an illustrator, especially with his photo “Globules” which looks a lot like it feels when random thoughts arise and float around in the landscapes of our mind. 
Kris Warrenburg illustrates a compositional lesson for us in two soft watercolors. In “Acoaxet Marsh,” the blue waterway starts front and center of the composition, inviting and leading us to deeper space where it empties. It is the visual equivalent of “Welcome In” with which salespersons often greet incoming customers. In contrast, her “Merrill Lake Sanctuary” puts a prohibitive soggy, boggy marsh in the fore through which the viewer is disinclined to slog to reach freer water.
These shows and works can be seen through August 2, 2024, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, from 11 a.m – 5 p.m. in the gallery at the Frank Bette Center, 1601 Paru St. Visit the website for more details.
