Above: The downtown artists studio & gallery is inviting the public to a “Grand Opening” gallery showing. (promototional image)
Next week, Apothecary Artists Studio and Gallery is holding a reception for the first gallery exhibition in their 11 Main Street location.
They are inviting the public to a night of “unique” art, “tasteful accoustic music”, and refreshments.
The event is marketed as a “Grand Opening”.1 The public is invited to join them a week from Saturday. The March 29th reception will run from 6:00 – 9:00 pm. (Ignore the time on the flyer!)
The exhibit will feature the work of Carl Ristaino, also known as “Mad Carl Art”. The artist’s website describes him as “A Boston area artist who primarily paints with acrylic on canvas” and a “self styled Illustrator”.
To get a glimpse of what will be on display, the Instagram post below shows him setting up for the showing. (For a better look, click on it to play the video.)
View this post on Instagram
(For more about Ristaino, scroll down.)
The event flyer promotes “Southborough’s first ever speakeasy brings you music by the little black dress”.
Chelsea Steele who created the flyer tells me that “speakeasy” was a playful reference to the vibe she hopes the music and art will create. (They won’t actually be selling any alcohol!)
Little Black Dress is the professional guitar and voice duo of Sherri and Rick Fiorentino. On Facebook they describe their music as:
smooth and jazzy songs ranging from Jazz Standards to current day Pop and everything in between!
You can check out their music here.
As for the featured visual artist, on Ristaino’s website, his bio further describes:
He received the nick name “Mad Carl” in his youth due to a combination of his unique drawing style and unconventional personality.
Carl draws inspiration from Music, Nature, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Primitive Art, the Divine and the Mundane. He seeks to incorporate an element of mystery in his work that he hopes will inspire the viewer to ‘fill in the blanks” of the story in any given painting. These elements may appear to have a life of their own , almost existing before and after the painting was made.
Ongoing themes in Carl’s work include expressionistic cityscapes (grown organically across the canvas) and stylistic bar scenes (populated with bizarre characters and charged emotions.) Carl paints through intuition; sometimes a certain line, brush stroke, color or texture just feels and looks right. He seeks to capture that blurry memory; that corner-of-the-eye hallucination inside of a fever dream, the almost untranslatable feel that is there and then gone.
Updated (3/22/25 1:18 pm): I fixed the time for the art show after being told the flyer had the wrong starting time.
- I admit the “Grand Opening” took me by surprise, since that’s how I described their Open House in October when Apothecary Artist first opened their 11 Main Street doors and welcomed the public to check out their new space. But that event didn’t include a gallery exhibit. I checked in with the business, and they confirmed this is the Grand Opening of the “Gallery” in their “Studio and Gallery”.
