by  Molly M. Schoemann

The feeling of intimacy and camaraderie at the reception for the latest show on display at Willoughby & Baltic, a small art gallery on 195 Elm Street in Davis Square, may have something to do with the gallery’s modest origins.   

“This was a garage last November,” said Meredith Garniss, the owner of Willoughby & Baltic. “I used it as my own studio.”

Since its first official show in September, Willoughby & Baltic has grown quickly in the past few months. “We try to have a solo show every two weeks,” said Garniss. On one recent weekend, there were as many as 450 people in for a look.

A recent show, on display from March 1 through March 13, featured Somerville artist Karen Molloy. 

A Boston native who has spent the last fifteen years living in Somerville, Molloy’s work is constructed using photographs of different cities where she has lived and visited, Molly said.

Molloy uses a photographic printing process, developed in the mid-19th century, called Cyanotype.  Her Web site http://users.rcn.com/kmolloy explains the process:  A sheet of paper or cloth is soaked in a special chemical sensitizer.

When it is dry, the surface is exposed in sunlight with negatives, flat objects, drawings or textures. 

When the print is developed in water, the images are a deep blue color. Many of the full-color mixed-media pieces in the show, however, included montaged photo fragments laser reproduced on transparencies, and stitched to a cyanotype print, according to the Web site.

“I’ve done lots of monochromatic work, and I’d like to think of this added color as a continuation of a theme I’ve worked on for most of my artistic life: the expression of the urban experience,” Molloy said.

"Each piece draws from the textures and rhythms of urban color and patterns of architectural shapes and motifs, and remnants of urban decay,” she said.

“An individual in a city is constantly bombarded with lots of visual imagery– many different things which remind you of other things in turn.” Molloy said.

“There is a lot of layering, which I try to express in my work. I think of the pieces as visual echoes,” she said.

Molloy said she is influenced by all of the different cities that she has visited, such as, Paris, London, New York City, New Orleans and Boston. “These pieces are not from any specific place but rather are an amalgam of the different cities I’ve traveled in.”

Several different pieces that used fragments of photographs which had been taken in Somerville. “You may recognize some of these images from places in the neighborhood,” she said.

“I have done a lot of shows in Cambridge and greater Boston but I really enjoy getting to show here in Somerville, on my own turf — there didn’t used to be as many galleries here as there are now.”

“Willoughby & Baltic is a great asset to the city,” she said.  “It’s wonderful to see that the art scene is really percolating in this area.”

“Karen Molloy has really been watching this space grow. She’s been involved with it from the beginning,” Garniss said.

Willoughby & Baltic got its start when Garniss said she noticed that she was receiving visitors to her studio. “People would walk by, see the work displayed inside, and ask what the hours were,” she said. “I‘d tell them, ‘This is a garage, not a store.’ ”

“Eventually, fellow artist Ron Brunelle and I and decided to pretend we were a gallery.  We hung up some of his work and had a showing,” she said.

The day someone walked in and bought a painting, they realized they were a real gallery, she said.
Garniss put up walls in the small cinderblock room, and decorated the space to make it feel cozier, then added a large comfy chairs and a fireplace, she said.

“People began coming in, all sorts of different people; mothers in the middle of the day with their babies,” she said.

“We’ve get visits from lots of people in the community who don’t necessarily get to go to galleries all the time,” she said.

“A lot of the community doesn’t know we’re here, but many of the artists do. There is a community of a few hundred artists in Somerville; I’m trying to gradually go through all of them in this gallery,” Graniss said.