Bart Elsbach

Through Way

August 18 - October 8, 2007

Sheffield, Massachusetts artist Bart Elsbach presents a new body of landscape paintings in Through Way. His paintings portray the land in the delicate light of dusk and dawn or partially obscured by changing weather. By focusing on the horizontal line of the place where fields meet trees and trees meet the sky, his paintings evoke the contemplative mood created by light, air, and land in a classic landscape style. Elsbach states, "Movement and transition are inseparable from living and transcends our lives. The landscape held in a painting seems caught but it unfreezes as what we bring to it changes." Since 1987 when he returned to his home town of Sheffield, Massachusetts after graduate school, he has been rambling and trespassing through local fields with canvas and paints in hand. He kindly crops all traces of human intervention and idealistically portrays the landscape without the interruption of power lines, tire tracks and encroaching housing developments. Active with Berkshire Grown and Sheffield Land Trust, Elsbach, is well known to those who work to preserve the open landscape and natural habitats. Through October 8.