Two well-known local artists showing at the Pemaquid Art Gallery, Kathleen Horst and Cindy Spencer, create delightful watercolors but with charmingly different sensibilities.

Horst is popular for her miniature, elongated composite views of our local Maine villages and towns. Iconic buildings are taken out of context and combined with each other to create the essence of the locale. She also paints larger individual scenes of coastal villages and landscapes, expressing enjoyment of the beauty around her with strong, lively colors. In addition, her renderings of birds and butterflies capture the crisp patterns and intricacies of their forms and designs.

Spencer, who also works in acrylic among other mediums, has a loose, lyrical approach to her watercolors, and her landscapes and still lifes are evocative, atmospheric and romantic. She is “fascinated with color, edges and transitions,” prizes “a loose, fresh painting that looks effortless,” and enjoys the unexpected interactions that result from overlapping edges, drips and washes so characteristic of watercolor. She often includes small figures in her compositions, introducing a human element into the colorful, light-filled atmosphere. Her flower paintings and still lifes are also airy and impressionistic, continuing her playful, almost musical experimentation with paint.

Kathleen Horst grew up in Florida, and was a high school level Family and Consumer Science teacher and a potter in Georgia for many years. Retirement to Maine allowed her to finally focus on her own painting. She has her own gallery/studio and is a member of the Bristol Road Galleries, a collaborative of four neighboring galleries. In her studio pottery business in Georgia she also created portraits of people’s homes as glazed tiles, making an easy transition to the house portrait aspect of her present business.

Cindy Spencer had lived in the Mt. Washington Valley area before moving to Wiscasset by 2017. She is a lifelong painter, working first in oils, but has been painting in watercolor for over 30 years since being inspired by artist Nan White from North Conway, NH. She has shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Mt. Washington Valley and in Bridgeton, ME.

Both artists’ work can be found at http://www.pemaquidartgallery.com and www.kathleenhorstart.com and www.cindyspencerart.com.

The Pemaquid Art Gallery is open through mid-October, from 10 am to 5 p.m.  The 2023 Pemaquid Gallery artists also include: Bobbie Applegate, Debra Arter, Stephen Busch, John Butke, Dianne Dolan, Gwendolyn Evans, Peggy Farrell, Sarah Fisher, Claire Hancock, Kay Sawyer Hannah, Hannah Ineson, Will Kefauver, Jan Kilburn, Barbara Klein, Patti Leavitt, Sally Loughridge, Judy Nixon, Charles Nowell, Alexandra Perry-Weiss, Paul Sherman, Marnie Sinclair, Gary Smith, Liliana Thelander, Val Thomas, Kim Traina, Barbara Vanderbilt, Bob Vaughan, Candace Vlcek, Carol Wiley and Sherrie York.