Emily Pettigrew: Painting in the Catskills 2021 – 2025 @ Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown

A representational painter whose work is distinguished by sparseness, subtlety, and timelessness, Emily Pettigrew’s pictures emanate a quiet reverence for both history and nature. Pettigrew’s narrative paintings, which depict lone or small groups of figures, landscapes, and American architecture, had their inception in her formative years in Maine. Pettigrew explains: “My love for the starkness of the landscape of my childhood is reflected in a spartanism in my work. My foundational principle of painting is the removal of excess parts—a paring down to an image’s most beautiful elements.”