The Flying Pumpkins by Trish Ferrara; oil on canvas
The Flying Pumpkins and Friends
A Series of Paintings by Trish Ferrara
The Flying Pumpkins by Trish Ferrara; oil on canvas
Community Gallery Exhibition:
Oct 2nd – Nov 23rd, 2024
Attleboro Arts Museum
86 Park Street, Attleboro, MA
Free and open to all
Attleboro, MA
The Community Gallery is located in the lobby of the Attleboro Arts Museum’s Emory Street entrance. For over a decade the Museum has been pleased to offer this prominent gallery space as an exhibition opportunity for both promising and professional artist members.
Community Gallery artist exhibitions span two-month periods. This extended exhibition period provides member artists more exposure in the museum’s high-traffic Community Gallery space. A two-month long show will also allow visitors to spend more time with the works on display and provide an opportunity for the scheduling of special group tours and visits with coinciding exhibits in the main gallery.
From October 2nd – November 23rd
The Flying Pumpkins and Friends
A Series of Paintings by Trish Ferrara will be shown.
This series of paintings sprung from the beautiful mind of Trish Ferrara. She has a wonderfully entertaining anecdote and biography that connects the works and her art experiences together.
Trish narrates her inspiration as follows:
The idea for this series started with an auction lot of huge Mardi Gras masks.
I didn’t buy the masks, but I took pictures of them, and the pumpkin and fish masks are featured in most of the paintings. After that, an illustrated book of carousel animals came my way.
My initial thought was to have the big-headed figures in robes go out on Halloween night and find a magic carousel, where the carousel more animals and the white-robed figures would metamorphose into their true selves.
The Pumpkinis themselves decided they were children. I have no idea why they hang around with so many cats. In the end, Fish Head was the only figure to be transformed before I started to see the Pumpkin Heads as more cheerful figures. My attention turned to a family of pumpkins, the three sisters:
Miss Jane Pumpkin, who is perfect;
Miss Louise Pumpkin, who is a troublemaker;
and Miss Cecilia Pumpkin, the youngest (and my favorite).
Miss Cecilia is dressed as a vampire
Frankenstein fairy ballerina skeleton.
Mummy said she could only go as one thing, but fortunately, Cecilia has a Fairy God Bat with more imagination than Mummy.
Their foray in search of Halloween candy leads them to the house of Baba Yar, a Russian witch whose house is built on chicken feet. To my surprise, it turns out that they are part of an extended family, including their cousins, The Flying Pumpkins.
The idea for this painting came from the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Flying Down to Rio.
The Pumpkins have not finished their adventures yet. I know for a fact that they are already planning a celebration of ice cream and a trip on camelback.
Trish Ferrara was born and raised in Attleboro. She went far, far away and got a Ph.D. and taught English literature for ten years, mostly in Atlanta, Georgia. There she learned to love everything southern, especially the smothered and covered grits at Waffle House.
It is a great tragedy that the nearest Waffle House is in Pennsylvania, and she keeps checking to see if there are any plans to locate a shop somewhere near Providence, RI.
After a decade of teaching, Trish reformed, moved back to Attleboro, and became an antiques dealer, which is much more fun. You get to spend a lot of the summer on Cape Cod. She also likes to garden, and is currently poring over Gertrude Jekyll’s color schemes, and wondering how to fit a ten-acre garden onto a suburban house lot.
She began taking art lessons at the Attleboro Museum when the building was still in Capron Park, sometime in the 1960’s.
Then there was a long hiatus when she went off to study and teach Shakespeare, and then she came back to Attleboro, and started taking art classes at the Attleboro Arts Museum again, only you can’t fool me, this is London’s Department Store.
It’s very nice here, but you can’t find anyone to wait on you if you need to buy a new skirt.
They hold the art classes downstairs in the household linens department. To learn more about exhibition opportunities in the Attleboro Arts Museum’s Community Gallery contact office@attleboroartsmuseum.org or 508-222-2644 x15.