Local artist Melinda Sheehan is one of a trio of painters showing their work at the Saint John Arts Centre on December 3rd through January 20th. "There is always some movement," she said. "I think that it's just the life force, the energy you feel and the joythat it brings. When I do have time to paint, I like to escape to the water, and its serenity."

A trio of local artists and art teachers will unveil their first group exhibition at the Saint John Arts Centre, Dec. 3. As much as the three are friends and peers, they each bring a deeply personal interpretation of the show's theme and title, "Layers."

For Elizabeth Underwood, some layers are physical, other metaphorical. She incorporates text into her paintings as a compliment to the designs and images she depicts, some of which are drawn from memory and dreams.
"It started when I was doing a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing," she said. Eventually, Underwood began applying this writing directly to her canvases, "and it just became one of the layers of the painting."
She said the layers in her work include weaving together patterns, colours, images, and, of course, meaning, "so it becomes a kind of tapestry."
Underwood pointed to puns on the word text, such as textile or texture, to illustrate how words and meaning become woven together.
More recently, Underwood's incorporation of writing in her work has led her to experiment with other kinds of text, including Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform writing, which was used by the ancient Mesopotamians.

Peggy Woolsey is also interested in incorporating the ancient into her work, albeit in an entirely different medium. Two pilgrimages, one to Stonehenge, the other to Florence, changed her art, sparking an interest in architecture and three-dimensional forms, and the stories they tell.
"I fancy I can see, feel and hear messages from icons of the past through the many layers of dusty, grimy history," she wrote in her artist's statement.
Woolsey said her way of looking at the world, including her own backyard, was changed by these places. "I had to go to Florence to see Saint John," she said.
In her work, Woolsey has taken traditional forms and put her own spin on them, including a large dome, taller than she is, constructed out of a wedding dress. Although she concedes the dress is "latent with meaning," she said she was more interested in its construction, its architecture. "I saw the dress first, the dress to me was the beginning," she said.
But Woolsey is quick to acknowledge substructures of meaning, and thinks architecture is an elegant way of gaining understanding into a culture. "Some of these structures mirror civic or social structure," Woolsey said.
This idea is reflected in one of the two-dimensional works she is showing: a painting of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, dwarfed by surrounding skyscrapers. "You could look at that and say the secular is overtaking the sacred," she said.

Far from the dense cityscapes of the Big Apple, Melinda Sheehan's paintings feature a scene more familiar to New Brunswickers: the Saint John River and the ocean. Sheehan said she always paints waterscapes with people or animals in the scene.
"There is always some movement," she said. "I think that it's just the life force, the energy you feel and the joy that it brings. When I do have time to paint, I like to escape to the water, and its serenity."
For Sheehan, painting is a way to connect with time, but her glance falls at least as much on the future as the past.
"The layers of generations are the layers in my work," she said, explaining that her canvases in the exhibition depict the stages of life.
The final painting shows her husband some years from now, walking by himself on a deserted beach. "It is peaceful but it is lonely as well," Sheehan said.

Layers opens at the Saint John Arts Centre, 20 Hazen Ave., Dec. 3. Reception: 5-7 pm. Free admission. For more information, contact 633-4870.