NEWBURYPORT – When Donna Marie Sein, the author, and Susan Spellman, the illustrator, launched their series of children’s books last year at Illume Bookstore, Spellman thought the store was a perfect space to exhibit her art.
After looking at her portfolio, store owner Jen Perry and her art curator, Elizabeth Lorayne, agreed.
Spellman has exhibited her paintings and illustrations in one-artist shows at the Newburyport Artist Assn., at the Firehouse Theater and in the cancer ward at MassGeneral Hospital, but never in a bookstore.
Now she has. For the next two months, she has hung a new exhibition of 30 paintings in oils and watercolors at the Illume Book Store’s new art gallery. Entitled, “I Hope You Dance,” the exhibit features paintings that express her love of dance and human movement.
“This body of work explores the language of dance as a form of human storytelling,” Spellman wrote of the exhibit. “My intention is to not just capture the grace of the dancer’s body, but the unspoken emotions that live between gesture and stillness.”
The new exhibit, the store’s third two-month art show in its well-lit back room, was installed over Labor Day weekend. It is Perry’s third artist since she took down a wall to make the room large enough to house an art gallery.
The official opening of the art show was held last week at Illume, 10 Market Square.
“I’m thrilled” at being able to exhibit in the new gallery space, Spellman said.
Spellman, who moved to Newburyport in 1975 when the city was a less-affluent haven for artists, paints in oil and watercolor in her studio here. She began as a staff illustrator for a film strip company in Westport, CT, after graduating from Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY. She illustrated books by Donna Marie Seim, including children’s books that are on the shelf at Illume.
But in recent years, she has focused her compositions on dance. The paintings feature dancers in various poses from jumps and extreme movements to dancers at rest and reflection.
“Art and dance have been driving forces in my life,” she said. She is a frequent participant in the dance classes at The Dance Place in the Tannery, owned by Fontaine Dollas Dubus.
“I am drawn to dancers because they embody vulnerability and strength at once,” Spellman wrote. “Their movements reflect the paradox of being human: grounded yet striving, disciplined yet free, fragile yet powerful. I am aiming to reveal dance not only as performance, but as a dialogue between body, space and spirit.”
Her love of movement, she said, even creeps into her landscape paintings.
Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord, a calligrapher, has posted her cards with quotations throughout the exhibit.
Elizabeth Lorayne, the first artist to have an exhibit at Illume, now serves as the store’s curator. An artist, printmaker, award-winning author, ICF Associate Certified Coach, an accredited Jungian and Expressive Arts coach, Lorayne was followed in the Illume space by Celine McDonald.
Described as “hauntingly beautiful” by Cape Cod Magazine. McDonald’s paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums from New York City to the Berkshires before finding her way to Illume. ♦
