UMVA Showcase – Summer 2026: Buzz Masters, Ed Nadeau, Marcie Jan Bronstein, Todd Watts, Ruth Sylmor

Buzz Masters

During the past two years, I have been recognizing how my current work is influenced by artists I knew in my childhood. This has led to the landscape seeping into my work (the majority of those artists painted what they saw around them). I have found I am drawn to long, low horizons and the complex layering that open vistas provide.

When I work I usually cover half of the panel, working on the painting in pieces as if there are multiple stories or actions happening at the same time, but unrelated to each other. As I progress, I unveil the whole piece, working it as one, and link the narratives in the painting with multiple horizons and setting/rising suns and moons. In my pieces the time of day is related to the tides, people are walking, maybe not connected to each other, and maybe there is no exact destination. They reflect loneliness and loss mixed with ease and contentment.

 

Ed Nadeau

How I portray light in my paintings is very important to me as a painter. The Maine landscape is flooded with beautiful light that is unique in comparison to almost any place that I have been.

Through my paintings, I want to share with my audience how the light that surrounds us influences how we see. My narrative paintings are enhanced by my close observation of light and how it affects objects.

I also see the light that I observe as transcendent and aspire to convey this perspective in my imagery.

 

Marcie Jan Bronstein – Candlelight Series

These works are part of a series of wheel-thrown and hand-built improvisations, pushing up against the border between functional and sculptural ceramics. Each piece, a collage of stoneware, porcelain, glazes, and shiny, gold-leafed details, was created in my studio, then fired in the kiln room in my garage. Candlelight plays an important role in my home, and designing candleholders has become part of my ceramic practice. But given the distressing, sanity-challenging events of the past year, I’ve been even more compelled to create work to spread light and equanimity. Lighting a candle is a gesture of ritual, reverence, and peace. It is a way to mark a moment and define a space. My sculptural candle holders are an invitation and an offering.

 

Todd Watts – Light

Dinner is simmering on the stove and I sit on the porch to continue the page-turner I started in the morning. The light is fading and soon it will be too dark to read. I retire to the living room and relax into a club chair by the window. Still it is too dark. Jemma returns from her studio, announces that she is hungry and turns on the floor lamp. The lamp is twelve feet away and from where I am sitting, it is still too dark to read. I put down the book, get up, and set the table for dinner. There is a hanging lamp over the dinner table and candles, but glancing at the pool of light surrounding the floor lamp and how little of it reaches the club chair, I am reminded of Newton and his inverse square law. “Light is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source.”

Or, the intensity of the light from the floor lamp diminishes rapidly as it crosses the room. This effect is particularly evident when making a photograph in a studio or in any interior space. Roughly, if the floor lamp has a 100-Watt bulb, the club chair twelve feet away will receive only about six Watts of light.

Outside under the sun the effect of the inverse square law is negligible because the sun is 93 million miles away and the Earth is only 8,000 miles in diameter so the fall off of light across the surface of the Earth is essentially immeasurable.

You didn’t need to know all this.

In human terms, we live in two different light environments. One interior, the other exterior, and our awareness of these environments is simultaneously understood on two levels. One conscious, the other unconscious or sensual. Usually, an agreeable collaboration. Without conscious intervention, our senses absorb everything around us. They know and we can feel that we are in an interior space simply by the propagation of light. Our conscious mind may be delighted by a romantic candle-lit dinner, and if our senses agree with our observations we simply enjoy our meal. If they don’t agree, it produces tension. The collaboration is then at odds. If the candles suddenly fill the room with an even light, it would be worrying. In extreme cases, it can induce a hyper-adrenaline state. Fortunately, this rarely happens in life, but it does happen in art. Artists have used the conscious/unconscious dichotomy to great effect in the depiction of light in ways that alter the natural relationship of light and objects. The dichotomy can transport us to a high-energy state. I enjoy the sensual comfort of a candle-lit dinner, but when it comes to art, I want to be transported.

 

Ruth Sylmor

Light in photography is a source of illumination and revelation and a metaphor for knowledge. It reveals where things are, how they work, and why we need them, imbuing its subjects with power and releasing the total sum of everything within them.

Ah, Paris, La Ville Lumière . . . Is there a city in the world where light is so honored? As a photographer I question what my photographs portray. Do they carry emotion? Feeling? Discovery? Does each capture not only the image itself but the complexity of the entire experience?

The search for knowledge is an ongoing concern. Walking about with my Pixel phone, I follow the light, ponder how I got where I am today, and wonder if this path of preserving fleeting time might lead to an ever-changing moment—the whole essence of some situation unfolding before my eyes.

These photographs have a quality of the past but are a moment of the present. They include La Rue du Prévôt, an ancient narrow street in Le Marais; the appearance of a rainbow in Cloître Notre-Dame; a troubled sky in Le Jardin du Luxembourg; and, in Parvis Pompidou, a young fellow meticulously licking an ice cream cone while searching the “latest” on his smartphone. The images provide a whiff of humor in our difficult, suffering world.

 

 

 

Full view of the image at top: Buzz Masters, Low Tide Island Dog Walk, gesso, acrylic paint, pencil, and varnish on birch panel, 30 x 40 in., 2026.