Paintings by Alice McGowan on display at the Bushnell-Sage Library through the month of April.

Alice McGowan lives with her husband, Brian in North Egremont where they grow a large garden together. She paints in oils and pastels.

I’ve been looking at vegetables and fruit most of my life, in kitchens— my own and in those of restaurants where I’ve worked— in fields, planting, growing, and harvesting wholesale vegetables on our farm. I’ve packed peppers, red, green, and turning, and harvested and graded acres of tomatoes. I’ve canned many sinks full of them too.

These days, my husband and I grow gardens mostly for our own pleasure and to fill the pantry.

When I’m painting, I partner with light. My gaze is more relaxed than it could be in the past; I now have time to more thoroughly appreciate colors and shadows.

My paintings often reference personal history—my grandmother’s and my own canned peaches, the larger than life vegetables that sat in the shadows of postwar Japan where I was born. And they are also about the tomatoes ripening on the counter today.