South Berwick artist's works to be featured at RiverStones exhbit

ROCHESTER - The Franklin Gallery at RiverStones Custom Framing will host an exhibit during October featuring the artwork of South Berwick artist Julie Serrano. An opening reception will be held on Friday from 5 to 6:30. Light refreshments will be served and the public is invited to attend.

Serrano is a painter, using oil, egg tempera and wax as mediums. She is also a printmaker. She usually works within a thematic series, and this show includes work from The Nursing Home Suite, which was an original solo exhibit featured at the JFK Building in Boston. She loves creating figurative work.

"I am attracted and excited by that person's unique essence and am very present with their inner as well as their outer being," she says. "All the work here is an attempt to capture these people in their environment."

While she has worked with figures and landscapes for many years, recently, Julie began searching for expression in a more abstract way. A study of encaustics is allowing her maximum expressive possibility for subject and form. "I am very excited about the fluidity of the medium and the ability to build up, scrape away and scribe into the wax," says Serrano. "I am also very intrigued with and appreciative of the mystery of the unknown as I work with abstraction." This opening into mystery is reflective of her life as a past psychotherapist, Sufi guide, and Zen meditation practitioner.

Serrano's undergraduate work was at the University of New Hampshire in art and psychology. She graduated from Lesley University with a master's in expressive arts tTherapy. Her art has been in a number of exhibits throughout the region, including the 100 Market Street Gallery, Newmarket Creativity Center, Plymouth State College, NH Institute of Art, Boston University, the Mill Gallery at Guilford Handicrafts, Phoenix Hall in Concord, York Art Association, Cambridge Art Association, Prescott Park, and many more.

The Franklin Gallery and RiverStones Custom Framing at 33 N. Main Street, Rochester are open Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Unless otherwise indicated, all exhibited Franklin Gallery artworks are available for purchase. For information about this and future Franklin Gallery exhibits, contact Kris Ebbeson at krisebbeson@comcast.net or 603-812-1488.