From the Tri Town News October 25, 2007

Lakewood artist's work honored at Guild show

The Guild of Creative Art in Shrewsbury is featuring a multi-media show of contemporary American artists through the end of October. Departing from tradition, the Guild asked Michael Cagno, curator of the Noyes Museum in Oceanville and an experienced photographer and painter, to judge the entries. "This was a difficult show because of the large number of high-quality entries," Cagno said.

From more than 200 submissions of painting, photography and sculpture, he selected 162 works from 119 different artists to fill the Guild's redesigned, museum quality gallery space. Entries were judged on classic fundamentals: composition, color and line, shape, and technique, with attention to the unique challenges of working in each medium.

Five local artists won prizes at the show: Muriel Rogers (Colts Neck), Valeriy Dyshlov (Marlboro), Bernice Gaines (Manalapan), Deborah Candelora (Colts Neck) and Jean Hutter (Lakewood). Hutter received the Friedlander award for abstract.

Hutter has been making art in some form for as long as she can remember. The focus of her current work is on the qualities of line, shape, color and texture. She wants to invite the viewer to take a closer look beyond the surface, to find what is hidden in the many layers of watermedia that evokes a sense of mystery and illusion. Her award winning painting, "What Zyg Taught Me," is a tribute to one of her teachers, Zygmund Jankowski, of Gloucester, Mass., who taught her about painting abstract space. In her abstracts, she paints mostly shallow space, unlike a landscape where you have perspective and middle to deep space. To create this particular painting, she used a piece of watercolor paper that her teacher had sketched on to illustrate the concept of shallow space. Hutter covered this with a thin wash of gesso to preserve the pencil lines and used this as the inspiration for her abstract painting.