Community Gallery
Featured artist: Christine Copeland
When you visit Hitchcock Center for the Environment, enter our Visitor’s Center and go left through the glass door to see what’s on view in our Community Gallery. Beginning in February, visitors will get to see work by local painter, illustrator, and children’s book author Christine Copeland.
On view from February 12 through May 29, 2026
Meet the artist: Christine Copeland
Our world is infinitely complex and changing. Painting it can help us see this as we focus on the details. I paint and draw to express my fascination with recurrent transitory processes in the natural world — the seasonal movements of animals, both large and tiny, the ephemeral beauty and power of clouds, and my own movement through the ever changing landscape. My paintings tell these stories but do not instruct so much as share glimpses of color, form, movement and purpose. I want to illustrate a story but I also want to paint a picture that has a life of its own.
In this exhibit, I am particularly interested in scale. How can we imagine an immense space by viewing a small 6” x 9” painting? And yet we do. We translate that small image into a huge space in our imaginations and can remember our response to expansiveness. On the other hand, when we look closely at a very small life form, a hummingbird moth, a bee, a tadpole, our experience is different, more focused, more immediate. We dive deeply into a world that is, in many ways, foreign to us, and we make it large. Laying down wet paint on a wet surface yields surprises — colors and forms that emerge and blend with my intention or happy accidents! I use Royal Talens water based oil paints on canvas and Van Gogh watercolors or acrylic inks on paper. I return to oils and watercolors out of a desire to use more traditional and naturally processed materials. The acrylic inks look and act like watercolor paints but are more convenient for the book illustrations because they are easier to modify and change..
I’ve come back to painting after a long hiatus of professional publications work during which I did illustration. Living on Masson Ridge, a conserved “forever wild” woodland, allows me to observe firsthand the subject matter of my work. These days, I’m paying attention to how still one must be to see things in the forest. A new sighting is always very exciting, even if it’s a previously overlooked Painted Trillium hiding behind a tree. Animals are generally shy so to see a coyote returning to its den requires senses on high alert. This is good for a painter.
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