"Summertime" Brings Four Distinct Visions of the Season to Bernay Fine Art

"Beach Pavilion" by Linda Pochesci

Now–September 13 | Great Barrington, MA

Bernay Fine Art opened its annual "Summertime" show on August 15, a group exhibition pairing four artists working in painting and mixed media around the warmth, color, and quiet reflection of the season. The gallery, founded in Chicago in 2008 and operating in Great Barrington since 2019, has made this kind of thematic group show a recurring part of its summer programming.

Here's the skinny on the four featured artists:

F. Lipari, spent decades as an art director for a graphic design and advertising firm before turning to painting full-time. That background shows in the work: spare, precise compositions of barns and fishing shacks set against pure, clutter-free skies, with almost no shadow and a flattened, graphic sense of space. Lipari has said he's drawn to structures in poor shape, wondering what they looked like when new, and stripping away visual clutter.

Linda Pochesci grew up in New Jersey, studied under painter Mel Leipzig as an undergraduate, and earned her MFA at Massachusetts College of Art, where she studied with George Nick. A 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient, she now works out of Fenway Studios in Boston, drawn to architectural forms and how they hold and reflect the world around them—her recent work traces the Italian hill towns her grandparents left at the start of the 20th century when they emigrated to the U.S.

Janet Rickus is a largely self-taught as a painter, yet has spent decades creating near photorealistic still lifes of fruit, vegetables, and vessels rendered at actual size and eye level. Rather than the rich, shadowed drama of Dutch old-master still life, she favors bold primary colors against soft, muted space—compositions she describes as painstaking to set up, since getting the objects to feel like they're in conversation with each other is, in her words, the hardest and most crucial part of the process.

Roxa Smith, born in Caracas, earned a BA in art history and German from Bowdoin and a postgraduate fine art degree from UC Santa Cruz before moving to New York in 1991. She started as a landscape painter but shifted toward dense, patterned interior scenes after relocating—rooms and furnishings rendered in vivid color that channel her dual North and South American heritage and questions of belonging.

Bernay Fine Art, 296 Main St., Great Barrington, MA. More at bernayfineart.com.