Between

Two person exhibition featuring Bonnie Baird & Kathryn Milillo

August 29th – October 4th, 2026
Opening Reception, August 29th, 4:00PM – 6:00PM
featuring poets Becky McMeekin & Mary Elder Jacobsen

Edgewater Gallery on the Green – 6 Merchants Row, Middlebury

Landscape painting has never been solely about the landscape.

Long after a place is left behind, something remains: the glitter of reflecting light, the soft rhythm of wind through tall grass, the quiet familiarity of a distant structure on the rolling hillside. These fragments become memory, emotion, and intuition. Between brings together the work of Vermont painters Bonnie Baird and Kathryn Milillo, two artists whose paintings emerge from remarkably different visual languages while sharing a common pursuit. Both explore how our connection to familiar places seeps inward, shaping how we perceive and embrace the world.

Kathryn Milillo distills the ordinary into something quietly extraordinary. Barns, neighborhoods, fields, and roadside moments are pared down into thoughtful arrangements of shape, color, and light. Her delicate yet powerful palette and deliberate compositions invite contemplation, suggesting that beneath the everyday exists a world of subtle wonder.

Bonnie Baird approaches the landscape from within, her paintings are guided as much by feeling as by her relationship with the land. Her expressive brushwork, scraping techniques, and surface textures reveal earth-toned passages and shifting skies, evoking what she describes as core memories or “memory-scapes” – landscapes transformed through lived experience and recollection. The result is less a depiction of place than an intuitive translation of the emotional resonance a place leaves within us.

Though distinct in palette, process, and gesture, Baird and Milillo arrive at a shared understanding: every landscape is, in some way, a self-portrait. The places we return to, the colors we remember, and the moments we choose to preserve reveal as much about the observer as the scene itself.

The title Between speaks not only to the dialogue between two painters and two dear friends, but to the fertile ground their work inhabits: between memory and presence, between the tangible world and the one we carry within us. It is in these spaces—not entirely real, yet entirely true—that their paintings resonate most deeply.

On Saturday, August 29th, from 4:00 – 6:00pm, we will open this exhibition with an Artist Conversation and Reception followed by an open floor for questions and discussion. Guest poets, Mary Elder Jacobsen and Rebecca McMeekin, will accompany the discussion with spoken poetry. Please join us as we celebrate the work of these two Vermont landscape painters.

For more information about Between– call the gallery at 802-989-7419 or email us at info@edgewatergallery-vt.com.