New Hope Sidetracks Art Gallery opens its 2010 season with a duet of artists who each present a somewhat fractured view of the world around us. Working in different mediums, they look quizzically at life as it seems, and portray outtakes as it were of its mingled pain and pleasure, its juxtaposed melancholy and humor.

Celebrating Second Saturdays in New Hope, an Artist Reception will take place at Sidetracks on Saturday, Feb. 13 from 6-9 p.m.

Jane Henry, a Sidetracks Gallery artist since her local debut as one of the two artists in the opening show in November of 2005, returns with 15 new whimsical yet on-target sculptures to delight those in the New Hope-Lambertville area whom she has charmed over these past four years. A native New Yorker, Jane’s works range from twisted ballet dancers to quirky critters to fanciful, if-strange scenarios, presenting her individual take on the wonders and foibles of us all. The multimedia works seem meant both to charm and to puzzle, both to perplex and to delight.

She explains her attraction to sculpture in the following words:

"I grew up surrounded by painting. I was trained as a painter and both my parents are painters, and I think I grew to feel that I took painting too seriously, that it was too grand a calling. It made me remember that when I was very little I used to create things out of whatever I found, and felt I had to go back to just making objects to be closer to my true self. Also working as a gilder and restorer of antiques, I became very influenced by the materials I use, and my art slowly became three-dimensional. I started with elaborate boxes and dioramas, which were, in effect, stage sets for the figures I eventually began to fashion."

Jane’s choice of materials owes as much to her training in restoration as to her formal art education as an abstract painter. Most of the medieval furniture and polychrome objects she works with are carved wood with a traditional gesso base, then covered with gold leaf and painted with natural earth pigments. Her sculptures take form in large part from the limits and the possibilities of these materials.

Major influences include: first, Santos figures from Central America, the American Southwest and the Philippines (small polychrome figures of Christian saints); and second, Southeast Asian decorative and religious object figures, objects both functional and personal which serve a communal purpose but remain highly individual, each retaining the distinctive touch, even the devotion, of its creator.

Henry sees her resulting sculptures as facets of my personality that need either to be nurtured or celebrated by whoever looks at them.

Her sculpture has been shown in Manhattan at the National Academy of Design, the Schoenberg Center, G.W. Einstein Gallery, Atlantic Gallery and Ceres Gallery; in Dallas at City Hall Gallery; and in Provincetown at Berta Walker Gallery.

The South-Asian connection continues with the artworks of Quakertown’s Edgar Hall, who together with his bride Alison, followed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Wayne State in Detroit with two Peace Corps years in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. His works to this day retain that influence, particularly in the rich and complex backgrounds of his drawings, and in the thematic influence and structure of his works in oil.

Building on those textured graphite rubbings and hatchings, Edgar’s foregrounds present on the one hand mystical even startling figurative work, and on the other hand natural forms progressing in varying ways toward abstraction. His most recent work shows a developing passion for color.

In the time following his India adventure, Edgar pursued a Master's degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He then taught art back in Michigan at Hope College in Holland, Lansing Community College and Charles Stuart Mott Community College in Flint. For six years he joined with three other artists in opening the first gallery in Lansing’s Old Town. He continued exhibiting silkscreens, photographs and drawings at Old Town galleries until quite recently.

Locally, Edgar is retired from a long career in commercial printing, and has returned full-time to his Quakertown studio, where his long-neglected brushes have rediscovered the challenges and joys of oil painting. Recent exhibitions have included the Cheltenham Arts Consortium, Banana Factory Members’ Exhibitions and the Greenshire Arts Consortium.

Both Hall and Henry have been selected to participate in all three annual Naked in New Hope exhibitions at Sidetracks.

New Hope Sidetracks Art Gallery neighbors the New Hope Arts Center at 2A Stockton Ave., where Bridge Street meets the railroad tracks, with parking best at nearby Union Square.

For more information, call 215-862-4586 or e-mail sidetracksart@gmail.com