JANE SMALDONE

Solo Exhibitions


2018 Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA

2016 "Rocks and Roses & the Return of the Fox," Clark Gallery, Lincoln. MA

2014 Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA

2011 Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA
2009 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2008 "Sight for Sore Eyes," The New England College of Optometry, Boston MA
2006 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2005 Loch Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2003 "Portraits and Still Lifes," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2002 "New Paintings," Nancy Poole's Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2001 "Heroines and Saints," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2000 Nancy Poole's Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1999 "New Paintings," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1995 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1992 Nancy Poole's Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1991 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1988 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1986 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1984 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1984 Zoe Gallery, Boston, MA
1984 Bromfield Gallery, Boston, MA


Group Exhibitions


2018 "Likeness"/Contemporary Portraits, Clark University, Worcester, MA

2017 "We Dream! Beauty Beyond and Beneath," Suffolk University Gallery, Boston, MA

2014 "The Expressive Voice: Brought to Light " Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Danforth Museum, Framingham
2013 The Salon Show," Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA
2012 "Group Show of New Paintings" Gallery Bergelli, Larkspur, CA
2011 "Salon Show," Clark Gallery, Lincoln MA
2011 "The Expressive Voice"- Selections from the permanent collection at the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham MA
2010 "Off the Wall," - Juried Show at the Danforth Museum, Framingham (honorable mention - 2nd place)
2010 "Head On," Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA
2009 "Salon Show," Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA
2008 "A Dog's Life," Memphis College of Art, Memphis TN
2008 "The Best of the Contemporaries" Explorations in Realism, The Loch Gallery in Calgary, Canada
2007 Summer Exhibition, The Loch Gallery in Toronto, Canada
2006 "Summer Invitational", Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2006 "Independent Views", Loch Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2005 "Offspring," Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, MA
2005 "Interiors: Fantasy, Illusion, Reality", Loch Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2004 "Trees," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2004 "Portraits," Kleinert / James Art Center, Woodstock, NY
2003 "Summer Invitational, " Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2003 "March Heat," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2003 Toronto International Art Fair, Ontario, Canada
2002Toronto International Art Fair, Ontario, Canada
2002 Frey / Norris Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2002 Nancy Poole's Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2001 "In the Spirit of Landscape VII," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2001 "Portraits: More Than Skin and Bones," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2001 "In the Spirit of Landscape VI," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
2001 "In the Spirit of Landscape V," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1999 "Nielsen Gallery 35th Anniversary Exhibition: Part II - New Work," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1999 "Odyssey: A Journey into World Art," Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
1999 "From Boston to Boca," Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, FL
1999 Exhibition in Tribute to Stephen D. Paine, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
1999 DeCordova Annual Exhibition, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA
1999 "In the Spirit of Landscape IV," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1998 "In the Spirit of Landscape III," Nielsen Gallery, Boston,MA
1998 "Invitational: Portraits,' Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1998 Boston International Fine Art Show, Boston, MA
1998 "Dreamweavers: Symbolist Tendencies in Contemporary New England Art," Brush Art Gallery, Lowell, MA.
1997 "In the Spirit of Landscape II," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1996 "Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: A Painting Invitational," The Art Gallery, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
1995 "Ordinary Object/Extraordinary Experience," Summer Invitational, Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1994 Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1994 "The Studio Show," The Cyclorama, Boston, MA
1994 "Metaphor as Reality," Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA
1993 "Beyond Dreams: 20 Years of the Bromfield Gallery in Boston,
1993 "Part One: The Retrospective," Bromfield Gallery, Boston, MA
1993 "Crossing the Line: Abstraction/Figuration," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1993 "INSIGHT/INCITE/INSITE," a group exhibition of Nine
1993 Women Artists, Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1992 "In The Spirit of Landscape," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1992  "Drawing Show," Nesto Gallery, Milton Academy, Milton, MA
1991 "Summer Group Exhibition," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1990 "Spirituality In Contemporary Art By Women," Watson Gallery,  Wheaton College, Norton, MA
1989 "Summertime," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1989 "Works of Contemporary Women Artists," Bank of Boston, Boston, MA
1988 "Common Ground," Joint exhibition of Nielsen and Hurst Galleries, Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1987 "The Narrated Earth," Bank of Boston, Boston, MA
1987 "Seven Women Artists," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1987 "Expressive Systems / Eloquent Voices" exhibition of Boston Area Painters, " Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
1987 "Brockton Triennial," Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, MA
1987 "Interior Spaces," Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA
1987 "Boston Baroque," Vault Gallery, Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company, Curated by DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA
1987 "Ten Boston Artists," Nielsen Gallery, Boston, MA
1986 "Summer Review: Gallery Artists," Zoe Gallery, Boston, MA
1986 "50th Anniversary Celebration," Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
1985 "Six Painters," Northeastern University Art Gallery, Boston,MA
1985 Brornfield Gallery, Boston, MA
1985 Viridian Gallery, New York, NY
1983 MFA School staff exhibit, Museum of Fine Arts School, Boston, MA
1983 East Wing Gallery, Mount Wachusett College, Gardner, MA
1983  Bromfield Gallery, Boston, MA


Public collections


Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Danforth Museum of Art, Frahimgham, MA
DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA 
Fuller Museum, Brockton, MA 
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA 
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 
Wellington Management Company, Boston, MA 
Women’s and Infant’s Hospital, Providence, RI


National competitions


Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, 2009 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, semi-finalist


Reviews

Boston Globe

October 19, 2011

"Flowers have always had the power to seduce  -- Smaldone gives them the power to apprise"

Painter Jane Smaldone swims in surrealistic waters at Clark Gallery. Her dreamlike and moodily bizarre imagery is underscored by art historical references that reach further back than the 20th-century movement that spawned Salvador Dali and Man Ray.

Smaldone’s recipe includes folk art and Chinese landscape painting. Her weighty floral still lifes stand before backdrops of willowy Asian landscapes and shimmering, lacy patterns.

Some of the flowers have human eyes, staring out placidly. This animates them; what would have been a demure but exquisite flower arrangement, as in “Still Life With Compassionate Flower,’’ now seems to regard you thoughtfully - and that’s unnerving.

For years, Smaldone has been painting her daughter, Isabel, now in her mid-teens. Where Isabel appears here, she looks away from the viewer. “Portrait of a Girl With Lace Curtains and Butterflies’’ has her seated against a smoldering red background of what looks like stenciled lace, full of texture and femininity and suggesting obscuring veils. Isabel looks to the right, but the radiant flowers in the vase beside her gaze out at us. They are the girl’s guardians.

Flowers have always had the power to seduce, but Smaldone gives them the power to apprise. -- Cate McQuaid



New England Journal of Aesthetic Research

December 15, 2006
         
"Energized with an air of mystery that's right out of surrealism."

The best show on Newbury street right now is Roslindale painter Jane Smaldone's exhibit at Nielsen Gallery. Smaldone paints portraits and floral still lifes in a naive-looking style recalling Colonial American folk art and energized with an air of mystery that's right out of surrealism...— Greg Cook 

The Boston Globe

May 23, 2003

"Precise paintings with a surreal twist"

It's hard to place Boston artist Jane Smaldone's paintings at the Nielsen Gallery in time and space. She casts her portraits and still lifes in a pale light that seems more from the moon than the sun but more day than night. She suggests an interior by setting a vase on a wooden table, then paints a misty, mountainous Chinese landscape unfurling into the distance behind it.

Each piece, made with precision and facility, appears straightforward: Butterflies cling to branches; rose blossoms sit in porcelain vases; portraits of women and girls look regal. Then Smaldone adds a curious touch — the shadow of a frown, a dark rose among white ones, a surreal twist—that tugs like life's undertow.

The Red Jacket (Portrait of Isabel) shows the artist's 7-year-old daughter, adopted from China as an infant and the inspiration for the Chinese tones and references in Smaldone's works. Isabel, clad in a satiny smock, stands inside a door frame and beside a still life of a rose and a carnation in a vase. Each flower, eerily, has a human eye at its center. The girl is clearly indoors, but butterflies hover about, and behind the vase a sepia-toned, rugged landscape spreads.

This startling conflation of portrait, still life, and landscape, each in its own way contained and understated, suggests different aspects of either the subject or the artist.

These paintings are more surreal and aching than those in Smaldone's past shows at Nielsen, so many of which featured portraits of Isabel. Those embraced and celebrated the child and the joys of parenting; these, perhaps, are more about letting go. — Cate McQuaid


Art New England

December-January 1995/1996

"Smaldone breathes new life into an ancient tradition"

The multiple vantage point Jane Smaldone employs in her new floral still lifes — vases seen front on, flowers seen as if from the top — presents forms as they appear to the mind's eye, in their most typical or iconic guise. It is a mode that derives from folk art and other "primitive" styles: In Egyptian art, the human figure was rendered from simultaneous front and profile views to give the most conceptual form possible. The primitive folk quality is conveyed as well in the muted palette, largely earthy tones and slightly jaundiced pastels that reminds one of old painted toyboxes and benches seen in antique furniture stores, and a deliberate stillness in the drawing that emphasizes flat pattern over three dimensionality. Borrowing from the past allows Smaldone to invest her paintings with a gravity and intensity that far surpasses their decorative subject.

Smaldone is clearly interested in the complex moral and religious iconography that is a staple of sophisticated art as well as folk traditions. While there are no skulls in these works, many have the quality of a memento mori or vanitas; they are meditations on life and death, a theme that seems almost inevitable when serious artists set down to paint the fleeting beauty of nature. All the Yearnings in the World is draped in mourning black — the milky vase, lace curtains and flowers nearly submerged in the penumbra. A butterfly and a bird's nest remind us of life's beginnings and marvelous transformations, the fateful twists along our journey into that good night.

Witness is equally serious. Here a simple white bloom bursts forth at the center of the canvas, both sensitive and virginal. Approaching silently is the serpent who has twined himself around the leg of the table; this classic scene of impending sexual consummation is played out on a stage framed by curtains whose undulating fall creates a pudendal opening.

In this and other paintings Smaldone is exploring territory covered by O'Keeffe. Smaldone demonstrates an actual command of flat abstract pattern but, unlike O'Keeffe's, her works aren't all brittle decorative surface. Despite tackling themes that could become generic— love and death; birth and regeneration— Smaldone's still life's possess an earthy integrity that rewards sustained engagement. These are not works that are completed when the image is arrived at; they are discovered in the slow traverse of the brush. Silent Sky with Tulips is a deceptively modest painting, a few simple forms painted in a narrow range of hues, but each brushstroke is laid down with exquisite sensitivity in this quiet show. Smaldone breathes new life into an ancient tradition. — Miles Unger.


Galleries


Clark Gallery, Lincoln, Massachusetts