MILTON — Amy Abattoir moved to central Pennsylvania from New York City a couple of years ago.
She’s still amazed with the beauty of the region.
An artist, Abbatoir has been working on a series of paintings she calls “Driving in the Pennsylvania Dusk.” Tonight, a six-painting preview of the series opens at Cherry Alley Cafe, 21 N. Third St. in Lewisburg, with an artist’s reception from 6-8 p.m.
Her series was inspired by evening drives she made with her husband. “I was interested in the light and what happens in those few minutes just before it gets too dark to see,” she said. “I took pictures and then tried to paint what I saw. I wasn’t sure they would work as paintings.”
The half dozen works she’s completed do work. Dominated by the subdued blues and grays of late evening, with small spots and slashes of yellow, the large paintings evoke warm summer nights in the country.
She’s often worked from photographs, she said, but usually from black and whites.
“I like to invent the colors,” she explained. “I’d stare at the lights and darks on the print and imagine the colors.”
She was an Air Force brat, moving from base to base with her family. She finished high school in Germany and went to the Paris branch of the Parsons School of Design for a year. After that, she returned to the U.S., but she didn’t go back to school.
She was too busy trying to earn a living, first in Los Angeles and then in New York City.
“I was waitressing and doing some free-lance textile designing,” she remembered. “But all the time, I was wishing I was a painter.”
“I painted a little, but I really didn’t have much time for it,” she said. “Sometimes I was working three jobs just to pay the rent.”
Not until she met her husband, heavy metal guitarist Burton C. Bell, did she have a chance to get back to painting.
The couple and their children moved to the area a few years ago.
“Your mind can relax and expand out here,” she explained. “It’s really an affordable high-class area for artists.”
Abattoir’s studio occupies the third floor of their large home in Milton. It’s flooded with light from windows on all four sides.
“This is bigger than some entire apartments I’ve lived in,” she laughs.
“I can work on a painting while the kids are napping,” she continued. “I can carve out a few hours every day.”
Her husband is often away on tour for weeks at a time, but he also has significant down time when he’s home.
“When he’s home, he’s really home,” she said. “We sort of trade time. He works at night, and I work in the afternoon.”
Her real last name (Johnson) isn’t very interesting, she said, so she chose her “artist’s name,” Abattoir — meaning a slaughterhouse — out of the blue.
“It’s a beautiful word, but it’s an ugly thing. I just sort of liked it.”
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