MAIN STREET COMMUNITY CENTER - Amy Silberkleit: Lithographs With a Local Look

If you think you have seen “Durham Road” (offered in lithograph form by Amy Silberkleit), it’s highly likely you have, not far from where the artist lives, in the rural hamlet of Conesville, out betwixt Schoharie and Greene counties. “I get a certain feeling when I walk on this road and see the three sugar maples that anchor the house,” Silberkleit says. “I can’t help but get a sense of the farm that used to be. It seems like it is always windy there, at the crest of a hill, but I am drawn to this place by the quiet too.”

Main Street Community Center in Windham, partnering with the Windham Arts Alliance, is hosting “Pressing Matters,” a solo show featuring the traditional lithography of Amy Silberkleit such as “Crop,” inspired by a cornfield along the Rail Trail between the towns of Bloomville and Roxbury. The exhibit runs until April 1 including a meet-and-greet reception on March 22 with live music and refreshments (3 to 6 p.m.) and a free print-making demonstration on March 29 (4 p.m.).

One leaf clings to its life-giving branch as another is “Letting Go” in a lithograph on transparent paper fused it to a monotype of the plant, Equisetum. “I love drawing the forms that leaves take when they wither in the Fall,” Silberkleit says. Two of her works are part of the Albany Institute’s permanent collection.

“Sunflower” became “more interesting to draw once the petals fell and the seeds ripened,” says Silberkleit, a Windham Arts Alliance member and onetime artistic director of The Rod and the Rose Puppet Theatre, receiving her Certificate in Natural Science Art and Illustration from The New York Botanical Gardens.

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