Esther Geller
Dancing Godess

Esther Geller
Hindu Godess

Both of these women are accomplished artists with many solo and group shows and works in numerous private collections. The musical works of their composer husbands, Harold Shapero and Joe Maneri, will be the highlight the September concert series.

Esther Geller trained at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and was the recipient of a Cabot Fellowship. Her first major show was a group exhibition at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. For thirty years she was associated with the Boris Mirsky Gallery on Newbury Street and exhibited widely. Her works are in numerous museums and private collections. Esther's preferred medium is encaustic, an ancient wax technique involving the heating and mixing together of dry pigment and wax which is applied with brushes or palette knives to gesso-treated masonite panels. The surface is then “burned in,” softening the boundaries and blurring or fusing the color. The result is brilliant color variations and surfaces imbued with the translucent quality of wax. Esther’s sources of inspiration are the natural landscape and mythology—nymphs, goddesses, angels, sirens, dancers, and musicians. Robert Taylor, a long-time art critic for The Boston Globe called her "the Vladimir Horowitz, the Ted Williams, the Houdini and the Escoffier of the local art scene…anything she turns her brush to is bound to dazzle. In short, she is a virtuoso."

Sonja Holzwarth Maneri is a prolific artist who has won numerous top prizes and has had a long string of one-woman and group shows. In her early years she received a scholarship at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, as well as studying with some of the most notable artists of the 20th century, including Hans Hoffman, Rubin Tam and Yonia Fain. Sonja is also an accomplished pianist and an educator. She finds harmony, tension and counterpoint essential to both music and art and represents them in her artwork as form, color, and psychic wholeness. Sonja works in oils, watercolors, pastels and collage. "The idea of improvisation as correlated to music has been the focus in my work...just as a modern musician will improvise off his years of training and history of experiences, I improvise to culminate my ideas into an individual expression."

Everyone is welcome at a reception for the artists on Sunday, September 9, 2001 from 1 to 3 PM in the TCAN Gallery at 31 Main Street, Natick. Refreshments will be served. Directions to TCAN, gallery hours and performance information are available by calling 508-647-0097 or at www.natickarts.org. The art is in the same venue as the performances and can also be enjoyed while attending these events.