FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16th – SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15th, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17th from 3-5 p.m.
Longyear Gallery of Margaretville is pleased to announce the opening of two new concurrent exhibitions, featured artist Sheila McManus’s solo show “Colors of the Year” and a Longyear Members’ Group Show. Opening on Friday, October 16th, these exhibitions will run through Sunday, November 15th with the Opening Reception on Saturday, October 17th from 3-5 p.m.
“Colors of the Year,” Sheila McManus’s new solo exhibition, features a group of paintings begun in the summer of 2025 after visiting the Thomas Cole House in Catskill, New York. According to McManus,
“I was surprised by how much the restored interiors affected
me—the carpets, wallpaper, and decorative borders were so bright, busy,
and colorful. I took some photographs and began making paintings
based on a small section of one of the carpet designs.”
As the artist explains it, after “painting landscapes for several years, trying to achieve some subtlety in the color, inspired by painters like Lois Dodd, Albert York, and Fairfield Porter, it wasn’t going so well, and I became curious about what might happen if I gave up some control over color.” She thus began “choosing colors blindly from a collection of colored pencils that had accumulated over the years,” with the result being “the first group was a grid of sixteen paintings based on the carpet design, each using six randomly selected colors.” McManus then tried to bring the values of those colors close together, occasionally successfully. “The randomness became a way of getting myself to use colors I never would have chosen deliberately,” explains McManus, “and I was also taking some color theory classes focused on Josef Albers. His ideas about color interaction and his square paintings, became an important influence. I’m intrigued by what happens when colors have similar values but different hues or degrees of saturation—how colors advance and recede and sometimes seem to disappear into their neighbor colors—the point where the differences become almost imperceptible. These works bring together the colors of the past year with patterns and graphics I came across over those twelve months—a visual record of the year, translated through my color process.”
Sheila McManus worked as a graphic artist and web designer in New York City when she took a watercolor class with former Longyear member Alix Travis in Halcottsville. After becoming really absorbed with watercolor, after a while she returned to oil painting, which had been her area of focus in college and favorite medium. Back in New York City, she also studied with Nicholas Evans-Cato, painting plein air on the city streets. Along with studying painting at the University of Connecticut, McManus has taken classes with Elizabeth O’Reilly and Henry Finkelstein at the Art Students League. Her current paintings are a mix of Catskills plein air, New York City street paintings, flowers, still lives and, recently, abstractions.
Future fall 2026 Longyear Gallery exhibits include Longyear’s Holiday Invitational Exhibition: “Artists Choose Artists,” running from Friday, November 20th through Sunday, January 3rd, 2027, accompanied by a Longyear Gallery Members’ Group Show.
Longyear Gallery is located Downstairs in The Commons, 785 Main Street, Margaretville. The gallery will be open from 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. For information, please see Longyear Gallery’s website, email the gallery at info@longyeargallery.org, or call 845.586.3270 during gallery hours.
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