By John Chambless
Staff Writer

The Chadds Ford Gallery has been at the heart of the local art community since 1969, but it will be closing at the end of July and moving to online sales only. So the owners are bowing out with a show spotlighting the region that's nurtured the gallery since the beginning.

Watercolors by Don Shoffner and Timothy Wadsworth are on exhibit from May 19 to June 4. There will be an opening reception with the artists on May 19 from 5 to 8 p.m.

The show centers on the homes and barns that still dot the roads of Chester County, lovingly depicted just as they are. Both artists do step out a little here and there. Wadsworth's “No Fences” is a fine winter scene with cattle distantly regarding the viewer in a vast sweep of tan, white and a whisper of evergreens. He also contributes a small watercolor of a fox with a rooster clutched in its jaws in “Villain.”

Shoffner has a splendid little silhouette of a raven on bare tree branches (“Once Upon a Midnight Dreary”), and his “Creek Road Composition” is an unusual view of old tanks that has an interesting perspective and nicely rendered surfaces.

Among the local landmarks, you'll find Shoffner's “Strode's Mill,” showing the building in happier times, before its devastating fire. His “Bullfrog's Paradise” shows a green, algae-covered pond that blends almost imperceptibly with the lawn around it.

Wadsworth shines in his view of old trees and a meandering stream in “East Brandywine Bayou,” and Shoffner's “Needed: Lots of TLC” shows a boat on a trailer in a subdued autumn landscape. The simplest work in the show, Wadsworth's “Red Tail,” finds the details in a single feather and celebrates them, just as much as the show revels in the quirks and angles of the architecture of centuries past.

The Chadds Ford Gallery (Route 1, Chadds Ford) is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Call 610-388-2412 or visit www.awyethgallery.com.

To contact Staff Writer John Chambless, email [email protected].