* Late Bloomer: Opening Art Reception for Groton's Lois Underwood

***Late Bloomer: Watercolors by Lois Underwood***

Opening Reception
Friday, November 16, 5:00-7:30 pm
Open Studio Groton
30B Hollis Street
Groton Center

Twenty years ago, Lois Underwood began to paint. She tentatively
sketched her first flowers from blossoms she picked in the garden of
her home in Groton (Underwood, an iconic Grotonian, is a life member
of the Groton Garden Club). And sometimes during winter she’d resort
to using photographs of flowers from postcards and magazines for motif
and inspiration.

As Underwood became more adept at drawing and the unforgiving medium
of watercolor, her paintings acquired confidence, and her compositions
became more thoughtful and daring. Small florals set against black
backgrounds startle with their sophistication.

Over the years, taking classes first at the DeCordova Museum in
Concord and then at the Fitchburg Art Museum and with local artists,
Underwood took new ideas back to her small studio to practice,
practice, practice.

Underwood started to keep a sketchbook, a habit long practiced by her
husband Bayard Underwood, whose sketchbooks span his adult lifetime.
(Bayard, artist and architect, died in 2010 at the age of 93.) In her
sketchbooks Underwood recorded visual observations: the particular
curve of a person’s nose; the shape that her cat, The General, made
with his back turned, or the way he crossed his paws in that prim
manner cats have; the patterns of leaves on a branch. Anything that
triggers a visual curiosity was—and is—added to Underwood’s
sketchbook.

Two decades later, Underwood’s interest in the world around her has
only sharpened. On her weekly trips to Nashua for groceries, Underwood
sometimes stops to see the seasonal changes in the little pond off
Locust Avenue in Tyngsboro. A sensitive observer, Underwood doesn’t
miss the impact of careless intervention by our fellow humans on
fragile ecological systems such as this pond or the effect of weather
and neglect on an Oklahoma farmhouse, which she saw on a trip to her
birthplace some years ago. Though often working from photographs,
Underwood manages to convey a sense of the personally observed in
these works, and powers them with a poignant sense of loss and
acceptance, longing, and matter-of-fact resilience.

More recent among Underwood’s works are directly observed views from
an upstairs window of her home looking west. A sense of play and
experimentation are evident as Underwood employs cutout images from
magazines in this unusual view of upper Main Street in Groton. These
and other paintings of buildings demonstrate Underwood’s interest in
structures in the landscape.

If you missed Christine Lindemer's lovely piece about Lois, you can
read it on the Groton Line here:
http://www.thegrotonline.com/2012/11/13/lois-underwood-opens-solo-show-at-open-studio

Join us for an opening reception Friday, November 16, 5:00 to 7:30 at
Open Studio Groton, 30B Hollis Street in Groton Center. Open Studio is
located between the Groton Toy Shoppe and Groton Hair. Parking is
available along the street and behind the building. Open Studio is
wheelchair accessible via the rear access ramp.