Hesselgrave show opens Sunday at Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library

Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library
146 Thimble Islands Rd., Stony Creek, (203) 562-4927
Close to Home: New Work by Lisa Hess Hesselgrave
May 9—Jun. 2, 2010
Opening reception: Sun., May 16, 4—6 p.m.

Press release

Close to Home: New Work by Lisa Hess Hesselgrave will be on exhibit from May 9 through June 2, 2010 at the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library in Stony Creek. There will be an artist's reception on Sun., May 16 from 4—6 p.m.

A regular on the New Haven art scene, this show is the first time Hesselgrave has exhibited on her home turf of Stony Creek, CT.

Inspired by the view from a favorite window, the pieces in this series of dusky landscapes evoke the road to home or the road away from home.

Using oils and pastels, the artist has recorded a keenly-observed landscape from a favorite window. Hesselgrave's familiarity with the immoveable shapes of her view has allowed her to focus on the continually changing qualities of color and light. An exercise in restraint, the darkest of the nighttime images employ barely perceptible shifts in color, yet manage to reveal suggestions of houses, trees and road.

Hesselgrave's long regarded skill of representing the human figure is transferred here. Most of these images are unpeopled, yet the human presence is suggested by the comforting familiarity of a roofline or the amber glow of a window. Precise in color, nuanced in form, these finely crafted works haunt the viewer with images at once solid and ephemeral.

Lisa Hess Hesselgrave has been exhibiting her work throughout the greater northeast since graduating from the Yale School of Art in 1985. Hesselgrave's work is represented by the Kehler Liddell Gallery in New Haven. She has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts in 2002 and 1992 and at the Seaside Institute, in 1996. Hesselgrave is on the faculty of Gateway Community College in New Haven.