For most people, having a picture you drew when you were seven put on display for gaggles of people to see would be a mortifying experience. But for ARTSWorcester members, it’s just another day at the office.

Journeys … Steps along the Way is the new exhibit at ARTSWorcester’s Aurora Gallery on Main Street.

“The concept for the exhibit is ‘then and now’,” says Jan Seymour, Executive Director for ARTSWorcester. “We asked artists to submit an early piece of work from their life and a piece that is more recent.”

The Aurora Gallery host’s this summer’s ARTSWorcester member exhibit.

“Some artists took it literally, and brought in pieces from when they were children,” says Seymour. “It was quite wonderful.”

The oldest artwork on display is from Mary Dunn, whose tempera on canvas piece “Mirth” was created in 1948. Dunn’s more recent work, “Grandmother’s Food Processor,” was finished in 2008.

“It feels great to be able to show old and new pieces simultaneously,” says Edward Watson whose work is featured in the exhibit. “People are able to see how the artists have grown; in my case from darker colors to brighter ones.”

Watson lives in Worcester but is originally from Buckinghamshire, UK. He found inspiration for his displayed piece entitled “Death of a Writer” interestingly enough, from the film Amadeus.

“A dramatic point in the film is when Salieri, the envious court composer, wears an eerie mask, posing as a mysterious patron who requests a requiem mass,” he says. “With worries about bills and ill health, Mozart keeps trying to finish his compositions. I wanted mainly to show the interior and exterior struggles involved in the artistic process.”

Many of the artists expressed positive reactions to the theme of the exhibit.

“It’s a cool exhibition idea,” says 14-year-old Worcester native Keenan Cassidy, who has also submitted two pieces for the exhibit. “I find an artist’s progression over time interesting.”

Cassidy submitted a drawing from when he was 7 years old, and also one of his newer pieces entitled “Life.”

“I like combining new and old,” he says, “re-purposing old materials or traditional applications with new media.  Sometimes it can be reminiscent of street art or other modern movements.”

Seymour says that, while she can only speak for for ARTSWorcester members, she sees “an evolution in the art scene here. We are seeing younger artists who incorporate a different use of traditional media, as well as members using digital formatted work.”

Francis Warner of Holden is also displaying at the Aurora.

“My art can run the gamut of mediums and themes, but all my work is original and unique,” says Warner. “I do not copy other artists’ styles or techniques. I enjoy creating fantasy and representational images; each piece different from the next but each of my own style.”

As you tour the gallery, keep in mind all but a handful of the work is for sale, with prices ranging from $60 to $10,000. Each piece offers something unique, while the entire exhibit displays the range of talent that resides in the area.

“This show is all over the place,” says Seymour, “and that’s what we like about it.”

Journeys ... Stops Along the Way runs through July 31 at Aurora Gallery, 660 Main St., Worcester. Free. artsworcester.org.

By Laurence Levey

In Empty Landscapes, Silent Halls, the inaugural exhibition at the brand-new Gallery of Art at the Hadley (GArtH), Brian Burris offers paintings that evoke emotion and suggest meaning, yet which challenge the viewer’s ability to articulate that meaning.

GArtH is a collaboration resulting from discussions between the Hadley building’s new developers and ARTSWorcester, located just across the street. Jan Seymour, ARTSWorcester’s Executive Director, calls it another step toward establishing the Main Street/Chandler Street nexus as “Worcester’s Art District.”

The gallery is well-lit, the paintings large. The colors and shapes on the canvases vary, but all the paintings are abstract; less abstractions from some thing or idea, than abstractions toward something as yet unknown, uncertain. Burris, a firefighter, describes working from “almost like a trance state,” the images and titles unpremeditated. He refutes the notion that his paintings are a way of working through the tragedies he’s witnessed. “I don’t romance the traumas on the fire department,” he says, adding that “everyone has had traumas in their lives.”

Brian Burris glows in front of his latest exhibit.

In “Portrait of the Devil Unrepentant,” a glutinous, angry red all but screams defiance at the viewer. Other works leave the emotional message more open to interpretation. The paintings capture moments of primal energy, with creation and destruction counterpoised, equally possible. Burris agrees that the paintings possess a Rorschach-like quality, inviting or even compelling the search for objective meaning through a subjective effort.

“Espiritus” presents a spray of white static interspersed between lavender and blue color fields. “No More Dominion” appears to depict a receding fireball. “Dying of the Light” displays the deep astral green of outer space and white stardust ...

Or not.

Burris regards such efforts at interpretation as themselves creations, works of art. He cannily says his own artist statements, like his paintings, are changeable creations, as influenced by what he’s currently reading as by the events of his life. No doubt he would bemusedly view an article about his work in the same light.

Burris says he has fun creating “psychological landscapes,” transmitting creative impulses into artistic objects. He has been working with acrylics for twenty years and feels comfortable with the medium.

Comfort will not be your primary response, however, as you grapple with these explorations of feeling-states, these pulsing representations of movement and change. What you will come away with are impressions of a world rich in meaning, even if some of that meaning you’ll have to account for on your own.

Empty Landscapes, Silent Halls. Tuesday-Saturday, 1-4 p.m., thru December 1 at the Gallery of Art at the Hadley (GArtH), 657 Main St., Worcester. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and burrisworks.com.

not just for the bookish

By Dana Davis

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then there are volumes of talent and content on display at the new Cantor Gallery exhibit, WORD/IMAGE/TEXT.

The display, located in the College of the Holy Cross’ O’Kane Hall, features the beautiful and thought-provoking imagery of three veteran artists, including Worcester Polytechnic Institute Professor Joseph Farbrook, University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of Photography Zoey Stites, and Paris-based sculptor Anik Vinay. The month-long free show, which also boasts vintage prints by Shusaku Arakawa, was lent by a private collector.

The gallery showing explores the intersection of word, image and meaning within each artist’s chosen medium and was inspired by the recent International Word & Image Conference, organized by Frederic Ogee and Maurice A. Geracht, professor of English at Holy Cross.

“The conference is focused on the relationship between the creators of text and the creators of visual art and how these fields can intersect and inform one another,” Farbrooks says. “Modern media users receive a continuous barrage of text and imagery everyday and are constantly being asked to decipher the juxtapositions of the two. The Internet has become a universe of text and images assembled on a screen, as is much of television. It is important to understand what is being presented.”

It is fun and instructive to juxtapose Farbrooks’ video-based, moving art with the still life sculpture created by accompanying show artist, Anik Vinay, the principle artist for the last 10 years at the Atelier des Grames, Giogondas, France, which has been producing handmade books since 1968. Vinay’s works incorporate a variety of techniques and methods such as engraving and typography and make use of an array of materials including handmade paper, ceramics, wood, glass, plastic and metal.

Artist Zoey Stites readily admits she “has an obsession with words,” and that her work, “in individual images and series, deals with the ideas of words as a form of expression.” She claims she is “more focused on the actual words themselves, the use of words, culturally and by he media, and the impact they can have and the power of personal, cultural and ascribed meanings.”

Word to the wise: Visit this show and text your friends about it, too. It will only be here through July 22.

WORD/IMAGE/TEXT through July 22 at the Cantor Art Gallery, O’Kane Hall, 1st Floor, College of the Holy Cross, 1 College Street, Worcester. Free. 508-793-3356 or holycross.edu/cantorartgallery. o