Josie Merck, Path to the East

- Oil on canvas, framed

- Beginning on August 10th, Tori Jones Studio will present a show of Block Island painter Josie Merck’s vibrant and expressive work. 11 watercolors, oil paintings, and collages in the artist's signature, imaginative style depict the island's distinctive and precarious ecology: its stone walls, rolling fields, trees, and bluffs.

- Josie Merck was born in Canada. As a child, she lived in New Jersey, Mexico, and Brazil where she grew up with a love of art and nature, color and celebration. Nearly forty years ago, she fell in love with Block Island upon landfall after a rough ferry crossing in blustery October weather. The island's open, coastal landscape and its vernacular architecture had a powerful and immediate impact on her– and quickly became one of her most beloved subjects. Personal experiences in nature define her work; many of her pieces are painted atop the roof of her island home or pickup truck.

- The founder of the Ocean View Foundation, Merck has long been a conservationist and climate change activist. Her art education began at the Museum of Modern Art summer school as a young teenager, then Sarah Lawrence College where she studied painting, and later, Yale University School of Art for her MFA. She also attended Skowhegan School in Maine, the Art Students' League, and SUNY, Purchase. She has worked at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, exhibited her work throughout the country, and been the recipient of several awards at the National Academy of Design and Silvermine Guild. This is her first solo show on the island in several years after her longtime partnerships with the Encore and Aurora Galleries.