Stage on Main Gallery Annex opens with 22 Valley artists on display

It isn’t common to find depictions of Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln and Pennywise the clown sharing the same wall space, but Stage on Main’s gallery annex will provide you with that rare opportunity through New Year’s Eve.

The space at 17 South Main St. currently features 22 Valley artists, many of whom were on hand on Nov. 13 for a two-hour artists reception. The annex display is presented by Stage on Main and the Orange Revitalization Partnership.

“Tonight’s been wonderful. We’ve seen people who have never been here before,” Lynn Boudreau, Stage on Main’s volunteer manager, said at the reception.

The eclectic exhibit of drawings that include Jesus Christ was the work of 16-year-old artist Samantha Lupien, a junior at Ralph C. Mahar Regional School. She has been drawing since she was about 8 years old and aspires to be an illustrator. Lupien is the annex’s youngest artist and her display, which includes a drawing of the Disney heroine Moana, lies mere feet from the work crafted by the oldest.

Robert G. Osborne, 95, is an Athol-based sculptor and carries with him nearly a century’s worth of experience in the art world. Born and raised in Manhattan, he cut his teeth as a contemporary art dealer for years and witnessed some significant moments in artistry, such as the first showing of abstract artist Robert Ryman’s almost-all-white paintings.

“I’ve been a sculptor for about 10 years. I was an easel painter for about 50, and before that I was an art dealer in New York, and moved up here about 10 years ago from Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. “So I’ve been … an artist for a long time.”

Osborne mentioned he went back to school in his early 80s and attended Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, “and I started all over again, taking courses with the kids … and they thought it was a little bit weird, but we all got together and had a wonderful time and I learned quite a lot.”

His pieces in the gallery annex include solid aluminum bar sculptures — which he bends — with glass pipes.

“The important thing is that these are outdoor pieces,” he said. “And some of them float.”

Living on a working farm at 95 years young, he said he has no intentions of slowing down any time soon.

“I worked today for about five hours, on a new piece,” he said. “So I’ll continue to work until I’m not able to anymore.”

In the same room, his wife of 21 years, Margot Parrot, also has paintings hanging on the walls. One depicts a section of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams and others portray dragons, which she enjoys painting because of their interesting look. She said she is inspired by the dragons in the children’s books written by artist Leonard Baskin, whom she once knew.

“And his dragons are just absolutely to die for. They’re so good,” she said.

Parrot said she has been in the art world most of her life, having grown up in western Connecticut, not far from New York City.

“I did not grow up in New York, so I didn’t get to walk to the [The Metropolitan Museum of Art] instead of going to school the way my dear husband did,” she said with a smile, “but I did get to go into New York quite a lot. So, you know, I grew up with art. My father liked to paint.”

Julie Pepper, whose artistic media is predominantly ground pigment, has 19 pieces hanging in the annex. She is particularly proud to say she created an oracle deck titled, “The Fountain of Trabazon,” which consists of 56 of her paintings compiled over 20 years. An oracle deck is a set of cards used for divination, self-reflection and guidance, but unlike a structured tarot deck, it has no fixed number of cards or specific system.

The cards “The Fountain of Trabazon” were aligned with positive affirmations from Pepper’s studies in herbalism and Raja-Hatha yoga therapies.

Eric Arce has 13 pieces on the Stage on Main gallery wall and he will be the spotlight artist for the rest of the year. A recent animation graduate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, he said being the featured artist is “quite exciting” and “a learning experience.”

“My work is very character-based, and so I usually try to illustrate characters that have some sort of story,” he said. “A lot of my characters come from me processing a different emotion or state of mind, and I usually try to represent that through some sort of creature or monster, which [is] usually tied to nature in some way.”

The Stage on Main store carries roughly 60 vendors. For more information visit Facebook.com/stageonmain.