Arts

West Brattleboro, Vt. — “The Right Balance,” an exhibit of paintings by Guilford artist Susan McDormand, is showing through December in the foyer and other gallery spaces at All Souls Church UU (ASC). The public is invited to meet the artist and gain insights into her work at an artist’s reception on Saturday, November 10, from 2 to 4 pm.

McDormand began painting at the River Gallery School in Brattleboro more than 20 years ago. “Ric Campman and Lydia Thomson inspired and encouraged me. Today I continue to paint in oils, on beautiful papers, often implementing pencil and pastel. As the piece develops, I begin to have a mirror . . . it seems to be about intuition, color, and a language being written. For me, painting is so much about blending movements of color together.” The work reflects her goal of creating harmony in life as well as in artistic expression.

From DaVinci’s screaming soldiers to Hals Laughing Cavaliers, the history of art is full of powerful examples of the portrait portrayed expressively. This workshop will focus on rendering the complexities of the human portrait in an active manner by studying the aspects of facial anatomy which convey expression. Each day a different emotion will be studied and rendered in a variety of drawing styles.

West Brattleboro — Each fall for the past several seasons, the gallery spaces at All Souls Church (ASC), aka West Village Meeting House, have been filled with blessings of Peace in the form of Stuart Copans’ papercuts. The current show is titled “Peace is a Process.”

This 9th annual exhibit features Copans’ creatively diverse cuttings of “Shalom,” the Hebrew word for Peace, and “Salaam,” its Arabic equivalent. In addition to these papercuts, viewers will be treated to Copans’ recent “concrete poems,” in which the poetry is intimately entangled with the object on which it is written, as well as the first few of his tea bag prints and limericks inspired by Edward Lear’s nonsense verse and drawings. Also showing are Dotty Seiter’s “Prayers in the Wind,” a collection of peace-prayer mobiles spinning gently in the central foyer windows.