A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery
126 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060

Phone: 413.586.5553
Fax: 413.387.6027

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 12-5
Friday:  12-8
Closed Monday

Current

February 5-29
Artist Reception: Arts Night Out: 
Friday, February 10 5-8 pm

Katy Schneider's exhibition of portrait paintings spans the past two decades and includes  family, individual and self portraits.  Schneider, originally from NYC moved to the Valley in 1990 to teach painting and drawing at Smith College where she still teaches. For the first few years in the Valley,in an attempt to pursue her focus on painting people,  she exchanged families posing time for the finished portrait.  She met many local families through the  painting process.  All portraits at this time were done from life. Over a period of several months, she would come to the various subjects' homes for weekly for sittings. The reward: a free family portrait.

Eventually she began painting her own emerging family.  Pregnant self portraits, children and animals became compelling subjects. This particular body of work earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 in addition to a host of other prestigious  national and state awards.  Schneider's portraits led to collaborations with Newbury Award winning author, Patricia MacLachlan of Williamsburg, MA and her daughter Emily Charest MacLachlan,  The trio have done three award winning childrens books, the most recent "I Didn't Do It",  filled with Schneider's masterful dog portraits, published by Harper Collins Publishing.

 In addition to working directly from life, Schneider uses video and computer technology.  Videotaping her subjects and working from a variety of stilled images sent through the computer, Schneider can work from a greater variety of poses and compositions. 

In the past 20 years Schneider has completed hundreds of portraits. Most are intimate in size ranging from 4 x 6 inches  to 18 x 24 inches. For this exhibition, Schneider gathered a selection to  celebrate her subjects and the individualized painting approaches taken to capture particular moments with particular sitters.

"These paintings represent the way I came to know and appreciate our local community", Schneider says.  "The portraits function as explorations of psychological dynamics within a family.  They function as  vehicles for abstraction; balancing volume with flat shapes, balancing simplicity with complexity, balancing light and dark. In all, I try to depict the eternal quality inherent in the fleeting nature of my subject matter."