Concord and surrounding towns like Acton, Maynard, Lexington, Lincoln, and Stow have a rich artistic culture. In Concord alone, we have The Umbrella Arts Center and Concord Art as well as the Artscape artist community operating out of the Bradford Mills Building in West Concord. We also have two excellent commercial galleries, Three Stones Gallery in West Concord, and the Lucy Lacoste Gallery in Concord Center. As well, Village Art Room in West Concord provides a wonderful gathering place offering projects and classes for art making and creative community outreach in our town. Concord has several artistic facets and tributaries permeating and enriching our entire community.
Jonathan Macadam
Three Stones Gallery has been representing painter Jonathan Macadam for five years and I have been privileged to witness Jon’s evolution as a painter. Jon was born in England and came to the United States at 10 years old. He attended Concord-Carlisle High School and then lived in Beverly, MA for fifteen years. It was on Boston’s North Shore that Jon really fell in love with the marshes, rivers, inlets, and ocean that are so typical of the New England coastline. He travels often throughout New England creating his oil paintings and then returning to the North Shore, his ’home turf’. Following college, Jon lived in Orvieto, Italy studying the art of the Italian Renaissance where he learned the skill of layering glazes with oils creating what I like to call, ‘the Macadam Glow’. Jon’s paintings have a unique inner glow radiating from his skies and water brought alive by his appreciable skills as a painter. The emotional and even spiritual impact of his paintings is serene, palpable, and powerful.
Martha Wallace
Martha Wallace (known as Marty) came to ceramics later in her life after receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School and working in the tech industry in the ‘80s. Marty then raised her children with her husband in Concord and volunteered on several boards both in Boston and Pennsylvania. Ten years ago, Marty took her first ceramics class at (then named) Emerson Umbrella and she’s never looked back. One of the first things I noticed about Marty’s ceramics is that they are definitely not cookie cutter shapes, patterns, or glazes. As Marty says, “I’m not interested in doing the same thing over and over,” and she finds it interesting to experiment with many different ideas. She’s a ‘ceramic explorer’ yet as I was arranging her work in Three Stones, I realized there is definitely an over-riding Marty style. Her work strikes a very fine balance between functionality and daily use with a keen, beautiful aesthetic. I am always eager to see what Marty will be pulling from her kiln at her next firing.
All photos ©Three Stones Gallery