Leverett Crafts & Arts
A community center for making & sharing art in Leverett Massachusetts.
Studio Artists
Joy Friedman
Pottery
I set up my studio at LCA in 1985, dedicating myself to making high quality functional stoneware and teaching ceramics. I sell my pottery in stores, craft fairs, and at my open studio sales.
I put careful consideration into each pot. They are pots for living with and using; for the table, cooking, serving, and celebrating.
I get a lot of inspiration from the natural world. I often decorate my pottery to represent abstract landscapes. Using multi-layered glazes that I formulate myself, I create pottery with colors of the desert, ocean, forest, sunset and seasons.
I feel lucky and blessed to be able to do the work I love. It is very fulfilling and satisfying for me.
A full line of dinnerware, mugs, lace bowls, dip and chip platters, pitchers, vases, toothbrush holders, berry bowls and much more are available.
Susan B. Mulholland
Oil Painting
Susan earned a BA in Studio Art from Connecticut College in New London, CT with an emphasis in printmaking and ceramics. After 44 years as printmaker she has changed her focus to become an oil painter. She loves painting pet portraits, farm animals and landscapes.
Susan has lived on the shores of Leverett Pond since 1976 and many of her current paintings are love letters to the place she has made her home.
Sandra Haynes
Diaries & Bookbinding
I am a Diarist (say it like you say painter, author, sculptor, dancer, musician.)
Diaries are an art form, a mixed media form of writing, drawing, painting, and even sculpture. Like all the other arts, the subject matter derives from the internal and external interests of the artist but diaries have an element no other art form has - privacy. Diaries are an art form that thrives in the darkness, out of the public eye, hidden in drawers, closets, fire safes, and encrypted files.
This makes diaries uniquely egalitarian. Without the requirement or motivation to share what is in the diary, there is no need to live up to external artistic standards. Curiosity and exploration can be freely indulged in by anyone.
I've been keeping my diary just short of 40 years now. It's my life's work; the one consistent thing in what has turned out to be a chaotic, voraciously curious life.
Louise Minks
Painting
“Color! Vibration! Rhythm! Celebration! These are essential to my work. It is a completely joyful experience for me." I paint mostly on site in New England and in the Southwest when I teach at Ghost Ranch where Georgia O’Keefe lived and painted.
My only formal art education was in the 6th grade when my mother hired an art teacher to teach some of the neighborhood kids around our ping pong table in the basement – no art classes in our grade school. I loved it, and I still remember everything that teacher said! I didn’t take art in high school or college, but as an adult, I worked with several professional painters and excellent painting buddies. I learned a great deal from all of them. Through the years, I have tackled portraits, historical interpretive paintings, bookbinding and printmaking. I have been an outdoor “plein air” landscape painter for over forty years, passionate about painting “fast and loose” – a wild woman just loving fresh air, dramatic light, the excitement of attacking the canvas with brush and paint. I was never a “detail” painter, always much more slap dash. Color and drama still grab me first, and I try to grab them!
I love what I paint and paint what I love! I’m very grateful to be able to do this as my life’s work. It is a great blessing in my life.
Lori Lynn Hoffer
Oil Paintings
Lori Lynn is a graphic designer, photographer and oil painter residing in North Leverett, MA. Her focus on floral/botanical images and landscape reflects her deep love of nature – of the colors, dramatic shapes and patterns of light and shadow that surround one in the garden, woods and fields. The Pioneer Valley is a perfect home base for these themes of exploring the natural world for both beauty and healing. She hopes that her work can bring viewers the joy and centering that is always available in nature.
In her recent work Lori Lynn applies thick layers of highly saturated colors. These paintings typically begin on a black canvas and end quite vibrantly in a style reminiscent of stained glass, with black outlines defining shape and flow in a manner both stylized and organic. Recently she showed a collection of new work called Tuscany Revisited, based on photos from her graduate school studies in Florence. She works from her own photographs and is currently painting a series of small works focusing on local wildflowers and garden flowers.
Chris Pellerin
Felting
Fiber artist Chris Pellerin of Montague, MA recently started a new business creating lifelike animal portraits not by drawing or painting them, but by needle felting thin wool fibers. Chris grew up drawing her own pets, but it wasn’t until 2020, during the pandemic, that she combined her love of animals, art skills, and the craft of needle felting in a business venture. She has felted dogs, cats, birds, horses (and even a piglet!) Chris has accepted commissions from doting pet owners as well as people who want to give a memorial gift to someone who has lost a special pet. She also felts wild animals. She works from photographs to create a lifelike image but also strives to capture that spark of personality in each of her portraits.
Dale Schwarz
Multi-Media
Throughout my life, I have expressed my interior and exterior landscape through visual images. For me, art making is a form of meditation, a door opening into the unknown, a source of continuous learning, healing, joy, and wonderment.
In addition to being an artist, for over 40 years, I’ve helped people bring forth their gifts and creativity, through my work as a Registered Art Therapist, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Leadership, Personal and Professional Coach and workshop leader.
I am the co-founding Director of the Center for Creative Consciousness and The New England Art Therapy Institute in Sunderland, MA., and the co-author of Facilitative Coaching: A Toolkit for Expanding Your Repertoire and Achieving Lasting Results (Pfeiffer/Wiley 2009).
Elsje Sturtevant
My paintings are abstracted landscapes, often reflecting the low horizons and expansive skies in the Netherlands, were I grew up, or the beautiful sunsets over Leverett Pond where I live now.
My fascination with painting lies in color; bold, vibrant, glorious color that lifts your spirit and makes your heart sing.
Jewell Greco
Painting, Printmaking & Healing
I am going through an introspective phase at age 70 as far as art is concerned. I want to complete work that seems to take forever (oil paintings)...Keep exploring Light and Color. And try to organize past work.
When I am in my studio now I am so happy and deep in the moment.
Every time I am here, I think I need more time.
I am still a Plant Spirit Medicine Healer and being a very involved Grandmother... So it's a challenge. Not wanting to show work now during the enduring Pandemic. Maybe it's an opportunity to just be deep in the creative.
Painting
Elena Gabriella
Mixed-Media
Elena is an artist, musician, educator, and coach living in Somerville, MA.
Their work spans across different modalities, from cyanotype printmaking to figurative painting to ceramics, and often addresses their experience as a queer and neurodivergent artist.
Elena sees art as a way of being, of moving through and making sense of the world, and a vital means for community connection and activism.
Kate Troast
I see art as an exploration of thinking and seeing.
I am moving away from using photographs as the basis of my drawings and paintings.
Increasingly I draw and paint plein aire and from my imagination.
I love playing with colors, shapes and forms.
Art is a passion for me. I am fascinated by the exploration.
Painting
Sally Dillon
Painting
I grew up in a household where people made things “from scratch”. My parents built their own house, made furniture, turned wooden bowls, made cement sculpture and sewed clothing as well as doing painting, both on the walls and on canvas.
I went on to major in studio art at Mount Holyoke College and have a Masters Degree in sculpture from the University of New Mexico. After working in commercial art for 18 years in Dallas, Texas, I started my own fiber art company, painting on silk for scarves, dresses and coats as well as elaborate narrative silk quilts which were sold at galleries and craft fairs across the country. My current interest in felting makes it possible to combine sculpture, painting and fiber art skills in one piece.
In the last few years I have also returned to oil painting, which I had not done since college years, as well as continuing a life-long practice of watercolor painting and drawing.
I am delighted to be part of the Leverett Crafts & Arts Community.
