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In Art, Age Is No Limit

Kathy Axilrod has three upcoming shows of her paintings, two before the end of April and one next fall. It’s a lot for an artist of any age, but Axilrod’s age makes the number of upcoming exhibits even more special. She is 91 years old.

This month, Axilrod has a month-long solo exhibit at the Essex Library Association. From April 19 to May 11, she is an invited artist in a group show at Gallery One at the Guilford Art Center. Next fall, she will have another solo exhibit at the gallery at Essex Meadows, where she and her husband Stephen live.

Axilrod’s three shows will include a variety of genres.

“I’ve done landscapes, figures, still life. I just want to enjoy painting,” she said. “I want to feel warmth, sensitivity, intelligence, beauty, how things relate.

The upcoming exhibit at the Essex Library will feature a selection of her landscape paintings. For many years, she set up her easel outdoors, but now it’s in an extra bedroom in her apartment. She paints from pictures, often ones she has taken herself with her cell phone camera. In all her landscapes, many of which are of places in Lyme, where she and her husband had a summer and weekend home for many years, she emphasizes the interplay of line, shape, and color.

At the moment, her interest is landscapes that depict beaver lodges and dams. One of her paintings is of a beaver lodge very close to her own home, on Bokum Road where Essex Meadows is.

“You can find everything in their building—buttresses, arches,” she said.

She describes the planes and angles of the solidly built beaver constructions in artistic terms as cubist and expressionistic.

Axilrod begins paintings with large brush strokes, blocking out shapes and giving the composition a sense of drama and movement. Starting out on a blank canvass, she said, is always a moment of mixed trepidation and excitement.

“You take risks when you start painting. You’ve got a white canvas; you make marks, but you are not sure of where everything is going,” she said.

Axilrod does all her work in oil, which enables her to return again and again to the painting to do parts of the composition over.

“You can make things clearer if you go back, keep the feel of the paint alive,” she said.

Sometimes going over work produces what Axilrod terms a particularly happy accident.

“You go back over paintings and they are better,” she said.

She never uses watercolor.

“You only get one crack at it,” she explained. “You do 100 watercolors and only 10 or 15 will be any good.

There’s no inflexible rule Axilrod uses to determine when a painting is finished. Her criterion is simple: When she thinks there is no mark that would make a useful addition.

Axilrod, who once thought she would be an economist, began painting when her now-grown children were small, but it was not at her own volition. Her husband signed her up for a painting class on a Saturday when he could stay home and watch the children. Since those early experiences, she has earned a master’s degree in fine arts and also taught college-level painting for some 20 years.

Exercise, Axilrod said, keeps her in shape to paint. When she and her husband lived in Manhattan, she had a trainer. Now she uses the exercise facilities at Essex Meadows.

“I can work longer hours now than I could 10 years ago. I wouldn’t be able to sit at an easel if I didn’t work out,” she said. “Now, I can work three, four, five hours at a time.”

Still, balance is a problem.

“I fall a lot,” said Axilrod, who uses a cane. “Still it’s late in the game and I’ve just broken minor things.”

Late in the game though it might be, Axilrod, who will be 92 in May, said she is “painting like mad,” adding, “After all, I don’t have a lot of time left.”

Paintings by Kathy Axilrod

Essex Library

33 West Avenue, through March

Gallery One, Guilford Arts Center

411 Church Street, Guilford, from Friday, April 19 through

Saturday, May 11

Opening reception on Friday, April 26 from 5 to 7 p.m.;

closing reception May 11 from 3 to 5 p.m.

Essex Meadows Art Gallery

30 Bokum Road from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31