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HCA Presents: Joan Baldwin "What Is Really Going On?"

By contributor,
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Why is that love seat in the woods? Why are those armchairs and the wall behind them smeared with lipstick? Why is that chicken walking away from that egg and eyeing us like that?

Welcome to the questionable world of Joan Baldwin’s paintings. Working in oils and also in pastels in her Waltham Mills studio, Baldwin crafts scenes with attractive surfaces and effulgent light that are quite nice. If you don’t look too closely. On first glance, these are meticulous and lovely landscapes with, admittedly, odd touches here and there. Looking thoroughly, however, we seem to have fallen into the land of pastoral painting a la Blue Velvet.

In a website statement, Baldwin herself acknowledges as much: “I appear different from what is really going on in my mind. The same is true of my artwork.”

Joan Baldwin: What Is Really Going On? runs from February 19 to March 15 at the Lotvin Family Gallery in the Hopkinton Center for the Arts. A free reception for the artist and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, March 2, from 6 to 7:30 pm.

HCA co-director Kris Waldman, who organized the exhibition, offers this take: “They’re gorgeously painted, so they’re accessible. They’re often of benign subjects, but Joan adds unpredictable kinks. That, to me, suggests a peculiar and curious tension.”

As a community arts center, HCA serves an audience from elementary school students to seniors. All of these can ask, and provide answers for, such questions as, “In that painting Diving Deep, where those tiny human legs are thrashing upside down in the water between grasses and leaves, who’s diving deep into what? And why?”