Bell Street Artists presents ‘In Tune With the Season’

From autumn leaves to winter landscapes, with a musical twist on top, The Bell Street Artists are “In Tune With the Season” at the Bay Area Friends of the Fine Arts Gallery in Sayville this month.

The ten-person arts group is showcasing its members’ pieces, which take unique approaches and mediums to the show’s subject, from acrylic paintings, to charcoal drawings, and nature photography. “In Tune With the Season” is open to the public on weekends in November from 1-4 pm.

Nancy Ruth Cronin, head representative and president of the Bell Street Artists, said the group is small by-design, and meets monthly at each other’s homes, where they can bounce inspiration and seek help from one another- while preserving an individual’s style and preferences.

“Everything is different, and we’re always amazed when we all come together and have a show and that it works,” Cronin said about their current show. “[Everyone] kind of plays off of each other.”

Cronin’s pieces, which are on display on the right wall of the gallery’s first room, include mixed-media work that feature warm tones of cut out papers that make up figures like a beautiful bird of paradise, and a humble bumble bee roaming on a bed of bright sunflowers. Most of her pieces are positioned before a background of torn sheet music, bringing her autumnally-colored imagery “In tune” with music she received from her grandmother, who encouraged her to shred them for her art.

Other artists like Doris Rueger also feature autumn scenery in their pieces. Rueger’s watercolor still lifes of pumpkins, gourds, and flowers all grown inside her Bellport home’s garden, line the left wall across from Cronin’s pieces.

Rueger also showcases wildlife watercolors, like a hedgehog relaxing in a leaf pile, and a hummingbird feeding her babies. The German-born painter calls The Bell Street Artists “a family” which has kept close with one another in its roughly 50-year history.

“Depending on whose house you go to, that’s the food you eat. So it’s always something special,” Rueger said. “We paint and be creative, and then we entertain.”

Fellow artist Bernice Corbin, like Rueger, also features birds in some of her pieces, like a giclee house sparrow, but is also “In Tune” with the looming season of winter in her snowy landscapes. In “Warm Glow” a distant acrylic village glows across a white meadow, broken off by a flowing river. And in “Colorado Snow” another river rapidly passes below a towering Rocky Mountain.

But not all artists work with paint. Sculptor Peter Montemurro is displaying welded steel pieces crafted from objects he’s found or repurposed from larger mechanical or electronic equipment. For the first time, Montemurro, inspired by his fellow Bell Street Artists, dabbled in paint for the background of his woodland and seascape pieces “A Walk in the Woods” and “Under the Sea.”

“These are old-fashioned electronics from before solid-state days that I found in my father’s workshop,” Montemurro said, pointing to transistors used for coral reefs. “I like using recycled stuff, old stuff that has one purpose or one idea, but when you put it together with other things, it creates something that represents something else.”

Like the components making up Montemurro’s art, The Bell Street Artists, on occasion, sees new life in its tight-knit group. The organization recently welcomed new member Mike Braun, who is displaying his work in an art show for the first time.

Braun is showing 13 pieces, including charcoal and mixed media charcoal and pastel portraits of people and animals. In creating his pieces, Braun said he’ll usually sketch from pictures and figure out what each subject’s energy is, capturing that in a facial expression. Some portraits include familiar figures like Bob Marley, while other, more recent ones, feature abstract imaginations that came into Braun’s mind, without a reference point.

With it being his first ever show, Braun’s friends and family, including his wife Erin and two kids Adam and Rachel, crowded the exhibition space in support.

Braun joined the group through a connection with founding member Will Ryder, who is displaying his brightly-colored acrylic and mixed-media pieces that each tell a story, at the show. Geometric torn-paper pieces like “Falling Leaves” are “In Tune” with autumn, while others like  “Cellist with Yellow Dog,” play more into the musical component of being “In Tune” with a season.

Ryder said the group looks for new members, like Braun, not merely on their artistic merits, but on whether they have a non-competitive mindset that’s compatible with the organization.

Ryder has been with The Bell Street Artists since around the group’s beginning almost 50 years ago at late member Gerry Grace’s home on Bell Street in Bellport.

“We’ve known each other for a long time,” Ryder said “It’s a very nice group.”