Turning 21

Gallery owner Jane Eckert keeps changing the frame around her love of art but the central picture remains the same. In the nearly quarter century since she first opened Eckert Fine Art in Naples FL, she has moved her gallery from Florida, to Connecticut, then to New York State, back to Connecticut and now to North Adams MA.

“I keep reinventing myself,” she said, “but I have been involved with MassMOCA for a long time. I love it up here and it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted a gallery in the Berkshires.”

When she learned that one of the two galleries on the MassMOCA campus in North Adams was open, she jumped at the chance. “My lease was coming up (in Kent Barns) and I always wanted to live in the Berkshires so I sold my house and moved to Williamstown.”

The move came last October at a time when the world was largely constrained by the Covid crisis but now Eckert is ready for a grand opening. That opening has been planned for May 29th and will feature the art of Eric Forstmann, whom she has represented since he was an emerging artist.

“I am calling the show ‘Eric Forstmann-21’ because I have represented him for 21 years and this is our 21st show together,” she said. “We have already extended the show to July 18th because he has such a huge fan club and it is hard for people from New York City to get up here to see it. They have been calling to ask us to extend it.”

Eckerts first learned of Forstmann, a New England artist, while she was still living and working in Naples. “My ex-husband and I were friends with the artist Don Gummer. He invited us to a lunch where he gave his wife, Meryl Streep, a beautiful little still life. We said, ‘Who is that artist?’ and Don said, ‘You should meet this young man.’ He connected us and we took some of Eric’s art to Florida. It sold out and I thought, ‘this is good … .’”

The long association has continued happily throughout the years and Eckert said Forstmann is creating a new body of work for the upcoming show. Forstmann, who lives in Sharon and works in Torrington, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “So, he has some history in Massachusetts,” said Eckert. “He has a friend on the Board of the Clark Institute in Williamstown and has permission to work on the Clark’s grounds. He has been doing a lot of landscapes and because he works en plein air he was there every day last week.”

Forstmann is known for both his still lifes and his landscapes, a process that allows him to alternate the intensive attention to detail of his still lifes with days spent in the open, painting the expanse of earth and sky. “After working with such intensity in his studio, he loves to go back outside and breathe,” said Eckert.

“I’m a strong believer in slowing down and looking more closely at things that may appear totally innocuous,” said Forstmann in an earlier BerkshireStyle interview. “There is beauty in so many ordinary things, a little moment or a particular angle of the sun. I try to draw beauty from the simplest and perhaps overlooked images.”

Eckert explained that landscape paintings tend to attract a regional audience while still life paintings appeal to art aficionados anywhere. Eckert, who has done a lively business online even during the pandemic, recently shipped a large Forstmann still life to Los Angeles. “But when people purchase a landscape, they like to be able to say, ‘I know where that is,’” she said. “The thread through all his art is his attention to detail, light and eyeball realism.”

With Covid beginning to abate, foot traffic in the gallery is picking up. “The traffic at MassMOCA, just in last couple of weeks, has ticked up a lot,” she said. “The gallery has also been reaching a lot of Boston people which is a market I never had before.”

Forstmann’s works can be found in many important public and private collections. His work has been featured in Architectural Digest, American Art Collector and many other publications. In 2020, he was the Artist-in-Residence at Silo Ridge, a Discovery Land Company Community, in Amenia NY, and serves as the president of the Board of Directors for the Five Points Center for the Visual Arts in Torrington CT.

Eckert Fine Art Gallery, Mass MoCA, is located at 1315 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA; 413-398-5905; linked below.