Observation and reinvention

Work by Marlboro, Vt.-based Cathy Osman, in her show “I Chose These Things,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through March 31. These are still lifes inspired by the landscape of southern Vermont.

Her artist’s statement says:

“The foundation of my work grows from a deeply felt respect and connection to my natural surroundings. As a painter and printmaker living in Southern Vermont, I am attentive to the landscape’s inherent beauty. The work is a synthesis of the observed, a quirky need to re-invent through process, the particularity of materials, as a means to reconsider the appearance of things.

“This series of images incorporates renderings of the humble honey bee, generic references to birds, cell structures, and industrial detritus. The environmental and biological stresses affecting an insect, for instance, are not merely emblematic, but serve as a barometer reflecting the enormity of impact that the loss of insect life will have upon the security of our world.

“The work is often collage-based. I am constructing primarily using materials I surface through my printing press with different surface textures and color. With this raw material, I layer the collages, creating a substrata made dense with an overlay of marks, color and assemblage of shapes. Some of the work can be read as landscape, others as fragments of the man-made.

“Recently I have returned to oil painting, focusing my eye on the observed and invented structure of flowers and plants.’’

The Whetstone Inn, on the Marlboro, Vt., Town Common, was built c. 1775

— Photo by Beyond My Ken