COVER ARTIST PROFILE Chris Reid

Lush, colorful gardens surround artist Chris Reid's Jaffrey home and gallery. She captures the bright, bold flowers in still-life and landscape paintings, their cascade of changing colors reflecting the season's emerging blooms. &emsp;Her tree-surrounded studio, transformed by her husband from a former 1800s post-and-beam shed, holds paintings, an easel, a box of brilliant pastel colors from Paris, France, and a high-quality box of gray tones also from France. Others are organized in varied color groupings. North-facing windows invite the ideal light for in-studio painting, she says. &emsp;Yet her favorite method is plein air painting, where she becomes one with the natural world, learns to understand air currents, and delights when a dragonfly lands on her shoulder or a bee on her finger. &emsp;"I fell in love with the landscape here," says Reid of her move to Jaffrey 40 years ago. &emsp;When you view Reid's paintings, you can feel movement draw you into the scenes. She developed techniques to create this movement during her many years of art education and experience. &emsp;"I've studied art, probably, most of my life," says Reid, adding that she paints "for herself and well-being." &emsp;Her pastel paintings are layered atop an undercoating of quinacridone red or orange that she allows to show through as accents in the completed work. She starts with dark colors and transitions into lighter ones, aiming for a painting that is either dark-dominant or light-dominant, which helps create movement. &emsp;She describes her work as "a choreographed dance of the eyes, where the viewer is invited to look deep into the depths of the work and see the subject's spirit and life force." &emsp;Capturing the luminosity she sees beneath an incoming winter storm or just below flowers like peonies is another skill. &emsp;The accomplished pastel artist — a juried member of the New Hampshire Art Association, a juried associate of the Pastel Society of America, and a member of many other prestigious organizations — has won awards in dozens of art shows. &emsp;"An artist's perspective changes over time … being older is a real advantage," she notes. &emsp;In 2022, she collaborated with her daughter, Leah — a talented music composer and Guggenheim Fellow with a PhD from Stanford University in California — to produce a musical art experience called Sounding Landscapes-Bee Conservancy, which explores sight, sound, and the environment, stirring the senses with emotional expression. First featured at New York University in New York City, it later went to the Goethe Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. &emsp;Reid earned her art education degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she later took graduate-level courses in Brockport, New York. Her studies at the University of Siena, Italy, highlighted her education, followed by travel throughout Europe, where she visited museums and experienced live, up-close views of historic art pieces by Van Gogh, Monet, Rothko, and others. &emsp;Her teaching included the Sharon Arts Center, Manchester's New Hampshire Institute of Art, public schools and private teaching. &emsp;"I love painting; you're always learning," says Reid. "When you paint, you really see yourself." &emsp;To view more of Chris Reid's work, turn to the Farm Directory of this issue and visit chrisreidstudio.com