Renowned Artist Raines Helps Adirondack Council Celebrate the Adirondack Experience with 78-piece Art Exhibit
Renowned Artist Raines Helps Adirondack Council Celebrate the Adirondack Experience with 78-piece Art Exhibit
Exhibit to Open June 19 with Reception at Lake Placid Center for the Arts
For more information:
John F. Sheehan
518-441-1340 (cell)
518-432-1770 (ofc)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, Monday, June 8, 2015
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. – The Adirondack Council and renowned artist Kevin Raines will hold an opening night celebration on Friday, June 19 to kick off a month-long exhibit of Raines’s Adirondack paintings at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts.
The party is free of charge and open to the public. The celebration will run from 5 to 7 p.m.
The exhibit is titled Share the Experience: Adventures in the Adirondacks and features 78 of Raines’s stirring paintings and drawings of Adirondack nature scenes and people enjoying the outdoor life in all seasons. The LPCA show is just the first stop in the 2015 tour.
“We are thrilled that Kevin Raines is lending us his awe-inspiring talents to celebrate the water, wilderness and people of the Adirondack Park,” said Adirondack Council Executive Director William C. Janeway. “His paintings depict the places and the people that make this park a national treasure. Many of the scenes portray the importance of the Adirondack Council’s conservation efforts: from the stark, bare rock of alpine mountain summits to wild rivers to the glow of sunset on the lakes of the St. Regis Canoe Area. His work calls you forth into the wild.”
“The LPCA is delighted to partner with the Adirondack Council to present the work of Kevin Raines,” said James Lemons, Executive Director of the Lake Placid Center for the Arts. Kevin’s ability to highlight the beauty of our natural environment goes hand-in-hand with the Council’s work to secure the long-term future of that same landscape. We are honored to be able to share the beauty of the Adirondacks with our patrons.”
Raines lives in the Essex County hamlet of Wadhams, not far from the Adirondack Council’s headquarters in neighboring Elizabethtown.
“What I express through my paintings echoes the sentiments of the Adirondack Council and its work to protect this amazing park,” said Kevin Raines. “I want to put conservation into a contemporary context and celebrate the wild experience that we are all hoping to protect for the future.”
Janeway noted that Adirondack artists have always played an important role in conservation by bringing a small piece of the Adirondack experience to other parts of the state and the world. Raines’s work follows the path of great American landscape painters who inspired Adirondack conservation, such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Cole or Frederic Church, but is uniquely his own style, he said.
“Some of his work shows scientists engaged in field studies, photographers capturing wildlife images, guides plying the park’s rivers, kayakers plunging over waterfalls,” Janeway explained. “All of it shows a great appreciation for the natural wonders and people who make the Adirondack Park unique and special. His work communicates the importance of Adirondack conservation and the integral role of the human experience in protecting the environmental, cultural and historic assets of the Park.”
Among his subjects are Boreas Ponds, which is due to be purchased by the state this year and added to the “Forever Wild” Adirondack Forest Preserve; John Dillon Park, a wild-but-wheelchair-accessible, public camping area created by International Paper; and the Bob Marshall Wild Lands Complex, which the Council has proposed as a means to expand and link seven existing wilderness areas to 25 small communities in the western Adirondacks.
The Raines show will continue at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts through July 12, when it will move to View in Old Forge (July 24 opening reception through Oct. 11).
Raines grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania, where he loved to fish, hunt and trap. He entered college intending to major in forestry and wildlife management, but his creativity soon led him to change his field of study to painting. Raines earned a master’s degree in Painting at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and returned to the states in 1979 as a figurative artist, commission portrait painter and liberal arts college professor. In 1982 he moved to Baltimore in to teach at Notre Dame of Maryland University.
"In 1984, I noticed I was spending far more time on the stream and in the woods than in the studio. Seeking solitude, sanctuary, and peace, I began painting landscapes of some of my favorite hidden natural places," Raines said.
A couple of years later, he returned to the Adirondacks and began working with the Adirondack Nature Conservancy and the Adirondack Council. Raines has also worked with the Audubon Society, UNESCO, the Champlain Land Trust Cooperative, Champlain Area Trails and others in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan.
In 2011, Raines had the opportunity to create field studies of the landscape when he got to fly between 1,000 and 4,000 feet in a small plane with Adirondack Council staff and with Project LightHawk, a volunteer-based environmental aviation organization.
From the cockpit, he created preliminary drawings for a series of paintings about The Bob Marshal Wilderness and Wild Lands Complex and also was able to see the immensity of the Five Ponds Wilderness.
Raines said that he is ultimately inspired by the "primordial land, and the tenacious park residents who attempt to create, develop and maintain a balanced coexistence of the extraordinary beauty of wild and human presence and place. From my home in the Adirondacks and working in the field I plan to take the Park to a national and international stage in my next series entitled ‘Three Rivers’ which will feature three heritage rivers from North America, Asia, and Europe. The series will begin with the Hudson River who’s headwaters spring from the high peaks of the Adirondacks and provide New York City with much of its water supply.”
The Adirondack Council’s mission is to ensure the ecological integrity and wild character of New York’s six-million-acre Adirondack Park. The Council envisions an Adirondack Park with clean water and clean air, comprised of core wilderness areas, surrounded by working forests and farms, and vibrant rural communities. Adirondack Council members live in all 50 United States.
