This guest post comes from Carley Stempel, a newly minted UVM grad who has just wrapped up an internship at Seven Days.
Visitors to Shelburne’s Village Wine & Coffee this month find might themselves feeling transported from the bustle of Shelburne Road to the streets of Paris on a balmy spring day. Katra Kindar’s watercolor series “Les Bicyclettes de Paris” depicts the romantic nooks and crannies of the City of Light as seen through the spokes of its bicycles.
At 8 a.m. on a recent Wednesday the specialty wine and coffee shop’s patrons are primarily on the go. People place orders at the coffee bar, chattering over the frequent churn of the coffee grinder. The tables in front of the far wall, where Kindar’s work hangs, are vacant, allowing the watercolors to take center stage. Patrons who stop to look will find the whimsical paintings a pleasant respite from the chaos of their morning commute. They’re worth lingering over.
“Each painting has its own story to tell, its own narrative,” writes Kindar in an artist statement accompanying the exhibit. “Very simply, ‘Les Bicyclettes de Paris’ expresses the functional and elegant beauty of the bicycle in the most beautiful and elegant city in the world.”
The Vermont artist is no stranger to the delights of Paris — her son, tightrope artist Jade Kindar-Martin, lives there, and she visits him often.
Kindar’s series beckons with an alluring color palette, and perspectives that may make viewers feel as if they’d hopped a ride on the handlebars. In these paintings, bicycles are the real denizens of the city.
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