Whether coming or going, Vermonters will be among the 23 million passengers nationwide who are flying for the holidays. Those who pass through Burlington International Airport will be able to take in exceptional works by local artists this month, courtesy of the Burlington City Arts leasing program.... Read more

Painter Barbara Wagner gives the old aphorism “nothing ventured, nothing gained” a more positive spin in the title of her solo exhibition at Stowe’s Green Mountain Fine Art Gallery: “Something Ventured — Something Gained.” The “something gained” is 15 exuberant mixed-media abstractions from several different series.... Read more

A new forest has sprouted in Jeffersonville, and it offers more color than the usual foliage season. Simply titled “Trees,” the juried members’ exhibition at Bryan Memorial Gallery is alive with deciduous foliage and conifers. Nearly 200 pieces by 65 artists appear in the show.... Read more

Creatures fly, squawk, slither and swim in Burlington’s Flynndog gallery this month — that is, in illustrations by Montpelier artist Delia Robinson. The drawings are from a new collection of poetry, a bestiary, by University of Vermont Italian professor Antonello Borra. In the Middle Ages, the Bestiarum vocabulum became a popular form of illuminated manuscript. A traditional bestiary was a catalog of animals, some fanciful and some real, each entry with a religious subtext.... Read more

Nonagenarian Catherine “Catchi” Childs isn’t an elderly folk artist à la Grandma Moses. She’s an accomplished figurative painter with a sophisticated aesthetic, complex palette and confident, expressive brushwork. River Arts in Morrisville is currently hosting a retrospective of 36 portraits, still lifes and a few landscapes by the artist. Formerly from Long Island, she now lives in Morrisville, but during her long career Catchi’s paintings have been exhibited from England to Japan, and points in between. ... Read more

No visual-art subject has a richer history than the human form, and we seem endlessly fascinated by our outward appearance. Even a hundred years after Wassily Kandinsky championed nonobjective abstraction, figuration is all that resonates with many viewers. “The Body Human: Off the Wall and On” isn’t filled with realism, but works using the body as a point of departure do populate the show. The 22 paintings by John Hoag and sundry figurative sculptures by five other artists at T.W.... Read more

Like paintings by Paul Klee and William Baziotes, the biomorphic abstractions of Burlington artist Beth Pearson are rooted in the natural world while fluently speaking the language of formalism. Her spaces tend to be defined by horizons and strong figure/ground relationships. Her colors, while generally simplified, are often legible as skies, a beach or even a field of green grass. Textures — sometimes built up, sometimes scratched on a panel’s surface — are another dominant force in her paintings.... Read more

Burlington’s South End Art Hop is celebrating its 19th year in 2011, but the outdoor-sculpture component didn’t appear until 2003. Its stated purpose is to “showcase larger sculptures, installations, murals and other public works of art.” There aren’t any new outdoor murals affiliated with the 2011 Hop, but plenty of large sculptures have sprouted along the Pine Street corridor. An interesting development in the category this year: Several of the pieces include multiple components.... Read more

It wasn’t until the 1970s that women’s artwork began to receive the meaningful attention of curators and critics. There’s more equity in the 21st-century art world, but redressing cultural imbalances has taken more than a generation. That’s why a contemporary show such as “Women’s Work: The Visual Art of Vermont’s Women,” currently on view at Montpelier’s T.W. Wood Gallery, is still vital. Other than its existence, however, there is nothing distinctly feminist about the exhibition.... Read more

Watercolor is often referred to as an unforgiving medium. In the hands of a novice it readily dissolves into a blurry disaster, but even the most proficient watercolorists need to, as John Singer Sargent once said, “make the best of an emergency” in every piece. One issue is that you can’t effectively edit watercolors by painting over mistakes as you can with oils and acrylics. A good watercolorist needs to be not just technically astute, but fearless and confident as well.... Read more