SWAMPSCOTT — After a year and a half of online programs, arts organization ReachArts is holding its first in-person gallery show since the beginning of the pandemic.
The show, titled “Groove,” opened Friday night at ReachArts’ basement gallery and features work by nine artists with ties to the North Shore and Boston area.
“It’s good to get like-minded people together again,” said Vinny Comeau, an artist in the show who helped curate the exhibit.
Comeau, a Marblehead resident, has several acrylic abstract dot paintings in the show, inspired by Australian Aboriginal art. The largest, a canvas painted with a pattern in dots of pink and orange, took him five or six months, he said, while he was working doing COVID-19 tests.
Other works in the show included paintings in acrylic, oil, gouache and watercolor, as well as some sculpture.
Dan Brenton, another artist in the show who moved to New Hampshire during the pandemic, said that the environment there provides him with plenty of inspiration for his landscape oil paintings.
“My bread and butter has been the man and the dog painting,” he said, adding that he loves to walk with his own dog in the woods around his home. “I feel like I’m walking in one of my paintings.”
Like Comeau, Brenton has participated in ReachArts shows in the past, and he said he was happy to see the organization holding events again.
“It’s always a fun time to display artwork here,” he said.
Red Carroll of Salem echoed these sentiments, saying that “Groove” is her first in-person gallery showing since the beginning of the pandemic. The painter and glassblower has several acrylic paintings on display at ReachArts, including landscapes and surreal portraits.
“I miss people looking at art. There’s something really intimate about art that can’t be achieved online,” she said. “It’s nothing at all like talking to people and answering their questions.”
Other artists in the show are Matt Curley, Chris Reid, Danielle Wager, Adric Giles, Mike Boroda and Courtney LaMay.
The show will be open at ReachArts, 89 Burrill St., this weekend, Sept. 4-5, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
