On her return as a Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist, we invited Sage Tucker-Ketcham to contribute an “Ideas & Influences” column. With roots reaching back fourteen generations in Vermont, Sage transforms daily walks into botanical compositions based on her memories of observed wildflowers and native vegetation. She is particularly interested in overlooked plants that she finds in unexpected places. Sage will be in residence from Sunday, January 4 through Friday, January 9, 2026. Please join us for an Open Studio on Wednesday, January 7, from 5–7 PM.
Resident Artist
Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist: Joseph Smolinski, November 9–14
Contributed by Sharon Butler / From November 9 to 14, Two Coats of Paint will host Joseph Smolinski, a multidisciplinary artist and educator born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and based in New Haven, Connecticut. Over the past 15 years, his research-based work has explored how communication networks, energy and oil industries, and industrial agriculture infrastructure fundamentally shape both our conception of “the natural environment” and its physical reality.
Two Coats Resident Artist: Lawre Stone, October 20 – 27
Contributed by Sharon Butler / On October 20, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Lawre Stone from the countryside near Hudson, New York. She is aesthetically as well as socially concerned with ecological displacement and how species adapt, invade, and persist in landscapes reshaped by human intervention. Her paintings reveal the hidden-in-plain-sight world of botanical life.
Apply now for the 2026 Two Coats Residency Program
DEADLINE to send a letter of interest for a 2026 residency is October 30, 2025. / Over the years, intimate, artist-run residency programs have helped move artists’ work forward in unexpected ways….
Two Coats Resident Artist: Alice Pixley Young, October 12–17
Contributed by Sharon Butler / On October 12, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Alice Pixley Young. She hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, where the Rust Belt and ancient fossil beds meet nuclear contamination sites. She creates installations that tease out ideas about the complex archaeology of the industrial landscape, uncovering stories of displacement, exploitation, and environmental degradation that have come to characterize twenty-first-century America.
Two Coats Resident Artist: Anne Hayden Stevens, September 14–19
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In September, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Chicago-area painter Anne Hayden Stevens. Her primary endeavor is to examine how we navigate and relate to physical and psychological spaces. How do we claim territory, seek refuge, and forge paths, literally and metaphorically? Her deft brushwork captures the psychological nuance of this exploration, creating surfaces that from a remove present as bold but reveal their fragility up close. Images of shadowed groves seem to offer sanctuary, and tiny, meandering figures speak to one’s often precarious search for a place in the world.
Ariel Bullion Ecklund, August 3–8
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Next month, Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Ithaca, NY, artist Ariel Bullion Ecklund. Ecklund creates ceramic objects and photographs that draw from the memories she accumulates as she moves through the world. Universal themes such as absence, impermanence, memory, and yearning inform work that is also deeply personal. For our next resident, our bodies hold memories as much as our minds do. This understanding is the foundation for everything she makes.
Two Coats Resident Artist Sage Tucker-Ketcham, July 20–25
Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Vermont artist Sage Tucker-Ketcham. Sage’s recent nature-based work operates in the space between observation, memory, and imagination. Each painting begins with something she saw on a walk or caught in her peripheral vision from a car window – moments that lodge into her consciousness, like seeds waiting to germinate.
Two Coats Resident Artist Marie Thibeault, June 15–19
Contributed by Sharon Butler / From June 15 to 20, Two Coats of Paint will be hosting LA artist Marie Thibeault for her second residency. Marie has spent years immersed in the world of color and geometry, vividly translating the rigid language of architecture, the logic of technical data, and the unpredictable realm of human emotion onto the canvas. She explores the intersection of science and imagination in visual stories of environmental instability that incorporate references to scientific diagrams, predictive models, cartographic references, geological graphics, weather charts, and photographs. Although she employs abstraction to clear and substantial effect, she considers herself primarily a landscape painter and counts among her strongest influences Paul Cézanne, drawing especially on the dynamic horizontal planes of his work.
Two Coats Resident Artist Katie Butler, June 8–13
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Katie Butler (no relation to me as far as we know) creates vivid still life paintings that dive into the fraught realms of American politics and economics, riffing ironically on the “kitchen-table” and “bread-and-butter” issues affecting average people that political figures are supposed to address. While she establishes a journalistic sense of authenticity by sourcing her imagery from White House archives and the Ohio Statehouse, the discrepancy between reality and painted presentation raises burning questions about the veracity and integrity of the sources.
Meet Two Coats Resident Artist: Bryce Speed
Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Bryce Speed, a painter and professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his intriguing abstractions from 2023–24, Bryce embedded architectural structures but refrained from fully imparting the specificity required to identify a particular situation or place. Instead, he played with the position of shapes within the picture plane to create subtle relationships and illusions of space….
Two Coats Resident Artist: Deborah Zlotsky
From November 1 to 6, the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Deborah Zlotsky. An abstract painter who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, Deborah has developed an idiosyncratic syntax of contours, stripes, planes, and near-trompe l’oeil passages, which inventively probe the intersection of imagined visual language and observational translation.
Two Coats Resident Artist: Afarin Rahmanifar
Contributed by Sharon Butler / From May 4 -10, after a two-year Covid hiatus, the small Two Coats of Paint Residency Program returns with Iranian American artist Afarin Rahmanifar. Born in Tehran and based in Connecticut, Afarin explores the points where Eastern and Western culture intersect.
Two Coats of Paint Resident Artists: Peter Dudek and Monika Sosnowski
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Peter Dudek and Monika Sosnowski, as Two Coats of Paint artists-in-residence, will present an exhibition of their work on Thursday, […]
Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist: Nancy Evans
Contributed by Mary Jones / Veteran Los Angeles artist Nancy Evans is bringing an installation of sculpture, painting and works on paper to Two Coats of […]





























