The Artists

Brothers Ted and Zeb work in unison to create works of art from fallen trees. They talk about their obsession for reclaiming wood and their process as follows:

“City Bench grew out of our passion for building beautiful objects with meaning and a story.  It also grew out of a reverence for the trees that line our streets, fill our public spaces, and enliven our campuses.  Those trees represent our shared space and generations of common stories–they are also vital and overlooked resources. We extend the life left in those trees by building uniquely handcrafted furniture that tells their stories.  Community and connection to place are built into everything we create-whether that community is a big city, a small town…Our pieces have a “birth certificate” describing the tree’s origin, significance and story.  Our aim is to build a meaningful and lasting enterprise, which creates positive environmental and social change and contributes to the vitality of the communities in which we operate.” 

Wladyslaw Prosol is a Polish American artist based in New England. He graduated with a Master’s Degree in Architecture and Art from the Cracow University of Technology in Poland. Before coming to the United States he used to sell landscapes and other works by the old city wall in Cracow as well as on the streets of Amsterdam.

Classically trained, he moved to the United States and shifted toward American Abstract Expressionism. This new direction launched his quest to find his own artistic identity. He works in oil, acrylic and a spectrum of experimental art. Influenced by the flow of virtual images and rapid development of digital and AI art, he explores the role of physical art within this new visual reality.

In his latest works, he seeks to find a path through a reality where visual stimuli and information flow constantly and chaotically. Imagine coming across someone’s computer screen, covered with open windows, icons, and messages. This dizzying landscape is our new normal, and becomes a challenge for the artist to navigate.
As an emerging artist he was awarded a 2021 solo exhibition – "Artwalk"– at the Hartford Public Library in Connecticut. He was a finalist in the 2021 PleinAir Salon Art Competition, won five Merit Awards at the 2022 Mellow Art Awards, participated in the 2023 Abstract Art Group Exhibition at Las Laguna Art Gallery in Laguna Beach, California, and a Group Exhibition at the 2023 Exhibizone: Grand Prize.

Informed by a rich history of painting and contemporary art-making processes, my work also calls on poetry, science, and nature. Using thoughtful and delicately painted moments, I make paintings, drawings, and mixed-media, wall-mounted installations about the shifting climate that is unpredictable, yet captivating and beautiful.

Beauty is a key ingredient in my toolbox, and I blend it with my reverence for, and humanity’s conflict with, the natural world and the mysteries of the universe, to compose evocative, experiential work that is both contrary and compelling. This is highlighted through my use of materials made of the earth, such as moss, gold leaf, ink, and oil paints, and human-made materials, such as plastics, and acrylics, which underscore our human contradictions and vulnerabilities. These contradictions and vulnerabilities seep into our relationships with each other to create challenges, and at times disharmony, both of which are opportunities for greater consciousness. Through a lens of beauty and gratitude for our abundant natural world, my work provides a positive encounter via its meditative mark-making, color combinations, subject matter, texture, and the remarkable way in which art can subconsciously reach us to foster inspiration, compassion, and love.

Resa Blatman is a Massachusetts-based visual artist who makes paintings and 3D installation projects. Her work is held in public and private collections throughout the U.S., and she exhibits at galleries and cultural institutions nationally. Resa has an MFA from Boston University and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art; her work is represented by Childs Gallery, Boston.

Bess Paupeck is an arts producer, experience curator, and maker of interdisciplinary installations and exhibitions that forge connection to community, self, story, and our shared humanity.  Living life as a work-in-progress, a love for art-making, experience building, cherished objects, and community engagement come together in the offerings she is so deeply grateful to create and share with others.

Bess lives in the Boston area and works in the cultural arena, which has included the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Somerville Museum, the Somerville Arts Council, the Boston Museum of Science, and Somerville's Nave Gallery. She has also worked in the university arts and academic museum setting at MIT, Harvard University and Brandeis University.

Seana Bill Custom Woodworking is owned and operated by Seana Bill, a self-taught woodworker who combines skilled woodworking with creative, elegant design. Wood is such an incredible medium to work with, it holds so much beauty and diversity on its own.

Seana seeks out beautiful pieces of wood to be inspired by, whether it’s two hundred year old reclaimed structural wood or pieces milled at her shop from trees removed locally. Starting with beautiful and unique pieces of wood, she handcrafts solid wood furniture and cabinets using traditional methods. She specializes in artfully combining unique color, textures and grains to produce one of a kind pieces. 

The allure of The Lodge is enhanced by the bespoke bronze handles meticulously crafted by Buccacio Sculpture Services, a testament to our commitment to excellence. Sculptor and co-owner Nina Buccacio, showcased in the accompanying photo, led the design, sculpting, and finishing process, ensuring meticulous attention to detail. Our company, Buccacio Sculpture Services, is distinguished for its expertise in sculpting, foundry work, restoration projects, and more. We pride ourselves on maintaining an unwavering commitment to exceptional quality and craftsmanship.

Susan Berstler is an artist and curator who has been developing innovative creative projects and spaces in Somerville for over 20 years. Susan founded the nonprofit Nave Gallery, which showcases local, national and international art in a variety of media and themes through a guest curatorial program. She created Project MUM, Squeezebox Slam Accordion Festival, Phone Art Box Project, and is contributing to the development of ArtFarm.

She has partnered with other arts organizations including Washington Street Arts, Brickbottom Gallery, The Somerville Museum, The Photographic Resource Center, and the Griffin Museum to produce the annual international Somerville Toy Camera Festival.

Nestled in the PNW, Morgan has been a pressed & dried botanical artist since 2016. Her pieces are a conversation between human/nature and healing/arts. Arts serving as medicine both in experience, and during execution. The works are notes on the everlasting beauty and light in the natural world. 

Art found Morgan, unexpected and unplanned, it has been a joyous journey into creativity. She has been a nurse and yoga teacher for over a decade and can often be found adventuring in the towering mountains or by the sea. Morgan creates custom pieces of all shapes and sizes for any occasion.

When we think of a tree we usually conjure up an image of a perfectly pruned tree, balanced and symmetrical. In nature those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. Trees grow to survive, adapting to their given environment, growing into strange shapes, producing oddly shaped limbs, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight, and bowing to the will of other larger neighboring trees.They grow in context to each other and their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situation they find themselves in. In many ways they are similar to us, part of a larger community, whose varied geography and specific environments challenge and form us as individuals.

Katie DeGroot first began painting fallen branches and limbs found on the ground, responding to their interesting shapes and the wonderful natural decoration that adorned them. Soon she was collecting branches and even large trunks, festooned by lichens, moss and mushrooms and bringing them back to her studio. At first working with only individual branches, ( Katie considers them her “muses”) she created singular portraits. Soon Katie started arranging the muses to interact between themselves, responding to something specific in the gesture or attitude of the actual real object. 

While she uses the branches as an observational starting point, Katie responds within the language of contemporary painting, not trying to realistically represent branches as natural objects. While DeGroot use watercolors, she is not a “watercolorist”, she is a painter. 

Some of the artists that Katie admires and who inform her as an artist are Gladys Niilson, Alice Neel, Morandi, Mattisse, Charles Burchfield, Catherine Murphy, Barbara Takenaga, and Arlene Shechet just to name a few. 

Aaron creates colorful paintings full of personal narratives and story telling that are cinematic in their depiction of everyday life. His work chronicles the world around him with a style he describes as “cartoon realism.”  His paintings are mysterious and humorous with unexpected scenes from historic figures like: Alexander Hamilton and Kit Carson. 

Aaron lives and works in New York City and often travels across the nation to paint in new locals, his subjects reflect this geographic bounding in its diverse terrain. From the snowy mountains of Colorado to the arid desert of Joshua tree, he works from inspiration from nature and from personal experience of how people live and play in their environment or in their homes.   His work Only Science Can Save Us is an inviting bungalow full of the abounding advances made by man to improve our own lives and knowledge of the universe.

The unseen occupants use a kitchen full of modern advances, while their objects throughout reflect an interest in human achievement and personal pursuits: a NASA poster for space exploration, a skull for anatomy and medicine and a globe for geology and cartography.  

Amy is a painter, a podcast host and a zine maker. Her diverse milieu reflects an active mind constantly exploring creatively.   Amy’s colorful and expressive landscapes discern from nature essential forms conveying the uniqueness of each tree and forest.

She works in oil paint to create both paintings and collage that in her words “create landscape compositions that live in a realm of memory, color and fantasy. I love working with unique and personified natural forms and see them as characters on a kind of stage. In my work, trees and undergrowth can seemingly come to life and become actors within an outdoor theater. I enjoy investigating and repeating these forms through painting and drawing and this process generates huge amounts of material that can further be disassembled and re-combined with other painting remnants as collage.” 

Tonya creates sweeping landscapes with vast expansive skies and atmospheric sublimity.  She works in oil paint and plays with the viscosity by contrasting thicker impasto brush work with washes of oil paint thinned by turpentine to create her tempestuous worlds.  When describing her work she says: “Color is the element that is unique to the visual realm, and painting is the medium I have chosen to integrate color into my world. Color as structure, form, meaning and the fundamental and exquisite ordering of the world in its own terms.”

Linda’s paintings are inspired by the abundant nature surrounding her in Massachusetts, from the sea to the wood; her palette is influenced by the topography in which she lives. Her work combines materials, such as wax, ink, oil and acrylic paint to create imagery that is often refracted from nature, and interpreted by the artist feelings while painting. Her abstracted work references the natural world through color and pattern, alluding to clouds, waves as well as horizon lines.  

Steven’s large-scale paintings often depict human conflict, action and movement. Their narrative imagery creating the sensation of sound: drums tumbling amongst people, crowds clashing and grappling, limbs entangled in what one imagines is a crescendo of shouts.  This works contrast with his landscapes that often evoke the industrial revolution and the large complex of rusted metal being taken over by the quiet growth of trees and vines. A conflict full of movement, to be sure, but one that is slower in the battle, of machines vs. nature.

These large narrative ideas, tempestuous perhaps in nature, are only hinted at in Edgewood, displayed at the entrance of The Lodge. This Arcadian oasis invites the viewer into the painting.  If you look closely, one can see geometric lines receding into the flora of the landscape, in this location nature thrives and the busy manmade world is at bay. Edgewood, a park near the artist studio in Connecticut is one of pleasant walks and of comfort to the artist, this location and its lush foliage offers a respite to the viewer as well.

Sharon Lacey is a painter who lives and works in Somerville, MA. She studied art and art history at the New York Academy of Art (MFA, 2001) and the University of London (MA, 2011). Her art training has focused on traditional materials and techniques for painting. Lacey has been a resident artist at The Studios at Mass MoCA (USA, 2019), Arteles Creative Center (Finland, 2013), Contemporary Art Center Woodside (USA, 2012), and Can Serrat (Spain, 2010). She has received grants from the MIT Council for the Arts (2014) and the Somerville Arts Council (2013, 2016, 2022). She teaches drawing and painting at MIT, Boston College, and MassArt.