Three Contemporary Landscape Artists in New COSMOS Gallery Exhibition, Gloucester MA

LANDINGS 3 VISIONS
Tom Glover, Vanessa Michalak, and Jan Roy
Exhibition Dates: September 4 – October 11, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, September 4, 5:00–7:00 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, September 11, 5:00 PM
COSMOS Gallery
20 Pleasant Street
Gloucester, MA 01930
Exhibition website: Landings 3 Visions
 
THREE CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS TRANSFORM THE ENDURING TRADITION OF PAINTING PLACE
 
For centuries, artists have looked to the landscape not simply to record the visible world, but to interpret it. From the idealized vistas of the Renaissance through Impressionism and abstraction, successive generations have reconsidered what a painting of a place can be. In contemporary painting, the landscape may remain recognizable—or become only the point of departure.
 
LANDINGS 3 VISIONS
The next exhibition at COSMOS Gallery in Gloucester, Landings 3 Visions, opens September 4 and features three accomplished New England artists: Tom Glover, Vanessa Michalak, and Jan Roy. Each is an accomplished contemporary landscape artist, and together their paintings explore the territory between observation and interpretation.
 
Land, sea, forests, rocks, harbors, boats, and the built environment provide the elements; their three visions explore what happens between seeing a place and making a painting of it.
 
Tom Glover explores the New Hampshire and Maine seacoast through its harbors, estuaries, docks, rocks, boats, water, and changing coastal light. Glover’s artistic interpretation of the natural scenery exists in the space between realism and abstraction. This practice reflects the longtime influence of painter John Laurent (1921–2005), an American painter renowned for landscapes along the Maine coast. Glover may begin with direct experience, photographs, and sketches, but then uses abstraction to distill a scene, finding its essential forms and colors. Artist website:  Tom Glover
 
Vanessa Michalak, a Maine native and Gloucester-based artist, approaches the visible world with an exuberant vocabulary of color and expressive gestures. Forests, rocks, water, gardens, boats, and harbors remain recognizable in her paintings, yet observed forms become scaffolding for something more painterly: flattened shapes, unexpected color, energetic strokes, and rhythmic movement across the canvas. As Michalak explains, her paintings are often driven by her love of “expressive mark making versus subject matter alone,” with nature providing a continual source of inspiration. Artist website:  Vanessa Michalak
 
Jan Roy takes the transformation of place further. Beginning as a silk-screen artist before focusing primarily on oil painting, Roy brings a strong graphic structure to landscapes, harbors, architecture, and other observed environments. Recognizable imagery may remain, but it is compressed, fragmented, and reorganized into interlocking planes of color and shape, bringing the landscape to the threshold of abstraction. Artist website: Jan Roy
 
Seen together, the three artists reveal how elastic the centuries-old tradition of landscape painting has become. Glover distills the physical experience of a place; Michalak releases its energy through color and mark; Roy reorganizes it toward abstraction. None abandons the visible world. Each makes something distinctly personal from it.
 
The title LANDINGS 3 VISIONS reflects that common ground. A landing can be a shoreline, an arrival, or a point of encounter. In these paintings, it also suggests the place where observation meets imagination—three artists arriving at three very different visual conclusions.
 
LANDINGS 3 VISIONS continues COSMOS Gallery's focus on contemporary art by accomplished regional artists and on exhibitions that place their work within broader currents in art and culture.
 
The exhibition runs September 4 through October 11, 2026. The public is invited to meet the artists at the opening reception on Friday, September 4, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM. An artist talk will be held on Friday, September 11, at 5:00 PM. Admission is free.
 
For additional information, images, or interviews:
Christiane Munkholm
Founder & Director, COSMOS Gallery
978-828-7448
capeanncosmos@gmail.com