Paintings and Watercolors by Athena Billias

Dates: January 21-February 26, 2012
Location: Kaaterskill Fine Arts, Route 23A, Main Street, Hunter, NY
Gallery Hours: Thursday, Friday, Sunday 10am-5pm, Saturday 10am-7pm (Closed Monday-Wednesday)
Information: 518 263 2060
Email: gallery@catskillmtn.org

It was one hundred and forty-six years ago that Sanford Gifford delivered to the world of 1866 what would become a rallying point for launching the conservation movement in America when he painted Hunter Mountain Twilight. This painting was a dramatic rendering of the devastation being wrought by the 19th century industrialists who were laying waste to the beautiful forest, rivers and mountains of the Catskill region all of which, in the eyes of Gifford, was epitomized by the deforestation of Hunter Mountain, a subject very dear to the artists of the Hudson River School who equated the mountain with man's material link to the sublime in nature.

It's one of those pleasant ironies in life that Athena Billias, an employee of Hunter Mountain Ski Resort, is painting contemporary landscapes of today's very healthy, reforested Hunter Mountain. Her unique renderings of this local subject include her unusually captured expressions of the early morning snow-making atop Hunter Mountain. These dazzling luminosities are reminiscent of the wonderment akin to what one might feel experiencing the shimmering translucence of an aurora borealis seen in a brilliant dawning sky.

Athena, a long-time painter of this area, follows in the footsteps of a long line of illustrious Hudson River School women painters among whom of note are Sarah Cole, Harriet Cany Peale, Julie Hart Beers, Josephine Chamberlin Ellis, Charlotte Buell Coman, Edith Cook, Jane Stuart, Evelina Mount, Laura Woodward, Susie M. Barstow, Elizabeth Jerome and Mary Josephine Walters. We cordially invite all to join us in our appreciation of these women painters through the work of this contemporary artist who carries on the tradition of feeling and expressing Nature as our visible link to the Divine in our world.

Click Here to read an article about this exhibition in The Daily Mail!