Exhibit and Reception for Featured Artist Laurel Wilson

The featured artist at the Yarmouth Art Guild’s gallery, Artists’ Paintbox  for June 15-28 is well-known Cape watercolorist, Laurel Wilson. Her show, “Exploring Through Watercolor” will display some of her recent paintings as well as tiles and cards with subjects drawn from the local area. The detailed, realistic compositions and fresh color expresses her feeling for the environment and the traditional way of life on Cape Cod, where she has lived for the past forty years.  There will be a reception from 5-7 PM for the show on Saturday, June 20 from 5-7 PM at the gallery which is located at 11 North Main Street in South Yarmouth, just north of the intersection of Rte 28 and Main. All are welcome to meet the artist and enjoy light refreshments.

Laurel is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College where she majored in Art History and took many studio art classes to augment her studies. She did a two-year MA in Art History at Oberlin College, writing her thesis on George Inness (a 19th century landscapist) and his connection to Emanuel Swedenborg. Moving to the Cape in 1974, she took watercolor classes with Claude Croney (AWS), Kely Knowles, Kristie Velesig, Sandra O’Connor and recently with Vera Champlin. Her favorite watercolor painters are Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and John Singer Sargent. She also enjoys the work of many contemporary watercolorists.

Her work experiences have included curatorial work at the Allen Art Museum at Oberlin College, curatorial work and art conservation at the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Art in Washington, D.C., art conservation at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston, and an art history teaching position for the Art Department at Alfred University. She has done art therapy with psychiatric patients at St. James Mercy Hospital in Hornell, NY, has volunteered for many years as a field guide for the Cape Cod Natural History Museum, and for the three years has been a volunteer with the Bray Farm archaeological dig in Yarmouth Port finding and studying artifacts from a native American site as well as the early colonial farmstead.

She is a juried artist member of the Cape Cod Art Association, the Chatham Creative Arts Center, the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, The Cape Cod Museum of Art, the Arts Foundation and the Yarmouth Art Guild. She is an associate member of the New England Watercolor Society and the American Watercolor Society. For the past fifteen years she has participated in cooperative galleries in Orleans: Gallery 31, Argonauta, Eastwind Gallery, and Saltworks Fine Art. She has been selected to show at the national juried Chatham Festival of Arts for over thirty years and will show there August 14-16, 2015. She has also been selected by the Chatham Creative Arts Center to show in their Annual Invitational for recognized Cape Cod Artists in Sept 4-Oct 2, 2015 and has been featured in Cape Cod Life Magazine’s Arts Annual. She has won many awards and her work is found in private collections  worldwide.