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Rick Carey
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Watercolor paintings come with their own set of expectations: images that are small, delicate, and carefully wrought with the smallest brushes in artist's toolchest. It's not a medium, usually, for the monumental.

Noted Illinois artist Sallie Wolf, however, has her own ideas about that. She has spent many summers at her family's vacation home on Squam, and through recent summers has made sketches of the mountains, the trees, the boathouse and other features visible from that house. These have been translated into the sprawling, multi-sheet watercolors now on display in "Big Brush Watercolors" at the Holderness School's Edwards Art Gallery.

"Enlarging a sketch forces me to seek out big brushes (two- to four-inch flat brushes, including house painting brushes) to try to reproduce the simplicity of the brush strokes, but the surface is worked much more fully than in a sketch," says Wolf.

Expanding small sketches into big watercolors with four-inch brushes requires that the original detailed images become more abstract, which is fine with Wolf. That also allows portions of an image to establish its own boundaries. She says, "I work across the multi-sheet panoramas all at one time, but I strive to have each sheet capable of standing on its own."

The results of a process begun in New England and completed in the Midwest, a process that involves the combination of two different palletes of light, speak to feelings that the artist describes as "distance, dislocation, longing, loss, memory."

Educated at Brown University and the School of the Art Institute, Wolf has exhibited her work in Italy and throughout the Midwest. "Big Brush Watercolors" is her first New England exhibition.

Her paintings will be on exhibit at Edwards through January 24. There will be an artist's reception on Friday, December 12, from six to eight PM. All are welcome to attend.

The Edwards Gallery is open from 10:00-6:00 Monday-Friday, from 10:00-5:00 on Saturday, and on Sunday by appointment. For more information call Franz Nicolay at 536-1713 ext. 359.