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New Art Gallery in Essex

Don’t go into the new Cooper & Smith Art Gallery, at the top on Main Street in Essex, looking for Cooper or Smith. They’re not there. The gallery’s proprietors are Pamela St. Clair and Nathaniel Foote.

According to Foote, the names Cooper and Smith honor this area’s colonial heritage, when coopers made barrels and blacksmiths shod horses. Cooper is also Foote’s acknowledgement of his childhood home on Hoop Pole Road in Chester. (Coopers used hoop poles, slender strips of green sapling wood, to make barrel hoops.)

And then there is one thing more: “Cooper and Smith has a certain weight. It has a nice sound,” Foote said.

The gallery’s opening show will feature another Chester native, photographer Adam Nadel, whose work has been recognized with first place awards from World Press Photo and Picture of the Year International. Cooper & Smith will exhibit a selection of Nadel’s photographs from his recent series, Getting Water Right, a visual depiction of the ecology and people of Florida’s Everglades along with a group photographs from another project on Las Vegas.

Foote and Nadel are childhood friends.

“I think I’ve known him since we were in diapers,” Nadel said.

But more than childhood friendship went into Nadel’s decision to exhibit in Essex.

“We’ve both pursued artistic lives. I’m very happy he and Pam are doing this. It’s a very bold thing to open a gallery,” Nadel said.

Foote, an artist himself, will have several of his own works in the new gallery, among them a large canvas of the Essex steamboat dock. Several multi-colored skyscapes by Essex artist Kay Knight Clark are also part of the current show as are the abstract landscapes of Lyme Academy graduate Richard Ehler and the maritime paintings of New London artist Jeff Sabol.

The gallery is not, however, a venue that will focus exclusively on shoreline artists. Among the current exhibits are a series by another photographer, Regina De Luise. She’s from Maryland and her photographs were taken even farther away: they show everyday life in the mountainous Asian kingdom of Bhutan. (De Luise, according to Foote, is a niece of actor and comedian Dom De Luise.)

Among the other artists in the current show are among Foote’s fellow graduates of Cooper Union: Kate Lawless, who describes her art as using recognizable images to create new realities, and Gabe Brown, whose art combines geometric forms with natural and man-made objects.

Foote and St. Clair are aiming for a mix of established and younger artists, and a full range of styles from representational to abstract.

“We’re not tied to any one style; we’re all over the globe, not closed to any kind of good art,” Foote said.

“We’re willing to travel to find good art,” St. Clair added.

Before concentrating on his own painting, Foote had a career as a graphic artist and animator for which he won two Emmy awards. His paintings have been exhibited at galleries in New York, Connecticut, Florida, and in Paris. St. Clair, a poet, was a college English instructor, but will be running the day-to-day operations of the gallery. The financial aspects of the business do not faze her.

“I was a math major in college,” she said.

Foote and St. Clair, partners in life as well as art, met in Chester over a game of Monopoly. They have worked to refurbish large space that Cooper & Smith occupies. The building has housed several art galleries in the past.

“We spackled, hammered, repainted,” St. Clair said.

Foote particularly likes the size of the gallery, giving patrons the ability to stand back and look at large pictures.

“You can get 100 feet away,” he points out.

They want to make not only the appearance, but also the ambience of the space welcoming.

“I’ve seen galleries where there were no social skills; people were rude and they blew sales,” St. Clair said.

Starting any new business can be a leap in the dark, and St. Clair and Foote have discussed the challenge they are facing.

“We’ve talked about it back and forth,” St Clair admitted.

“There is an element of the unknown,” Foote noted. “But we didn’t want to ask 20 years from now why we had never done this when we had a chance.”