Tucked between the Dog Village Salon and StetchMed on Common Street in Cushing Square, the Hawthorn Gallery promises a new center for art and community.
The green-paneled walls are chock-full of canvases from coastal seascapes and wintry watercolors to realistic portraits and small renderings of seashells.
Next to one, you might see a smudge of lipstick. That happens when Marianne Lynch, a Belmont resident since 2023 and the owner of the Hawthorn Gallery, doesn’t have her marker to designate a sale.
Ice Cream for an Art Auction
Lynch, a lawyer and former district attorney in Maine, and her late husband were longtime champions of the arts and collected a vast array of pieces. They attended art fairs and found emerging artists showing their work. Lynch remembers one experience buying a large piece from an artist.
“I remember the artist just started crying,” Lynch said. “She’s like, ‘I can eat this month.'”
When Lynch’s husband died during the COVID-19 pandemic, she decided to go back to school, enrolling at Oxford to study art history in 2023. She spent 13-week stints in England studying artistic masterpieces before returning to Belmont for summers and breaks.
Early in life, Lynch learned the impact art has on both the buyer and the viewer. Her parents were first-generation Americans and settled their family on Hawthorn Road in Guilford, Connecticut.
“With [their] disposable income, they followed artists, as did other people in the neighborhood,” Lynch said about her parents.
Her family would go to an art auction every Friday night, Lynch said. While her parents examined the art, Lynch waited, usually bored, until they took her out for ice cream after the auction.
That memory of boredom is why she catered baked goods from Bakehaus, located a few doors down the street, for the gallery’s opening day, Lynch said. She believes that young people might stay in front of a painting a little longer if they have a treat in hand.
Artists Currently on Display
Currently, work by both Lynch’s old friends and newly discovered artists lines the walls at the gallery. She enjoys introducing younger artists to older ones so they can receive feedback on their work. All the artists on display are selected by Lynch.
Tree Heckler creates embroidered canvases featuring elaborate narratives and characters, each composed of found objects that are handwoven onto the screen. Lynch learned of Heckler’s work years ago.
“I found a piece in her trash that I dug out,” Lynch said. “I forced [Heckler] to sign it, and I framed it.”
Diana Young paints mostly seascapes. She has created more than 4,700 paintings and drawings, which is unsurprising to Young, who, at 90, has “had a long time to paint.”
Other local artists include Sophie Lucas, Moira Lynch, the gallery owner’s sister-in-law, and Adele Travisano.
The Hawthorn Gallery is about connecting people with original, local art and helping young artists make their way, Lynch said.
Mentorship and Connections
That mission is part of what brought Ian Trance to the gallery.
“She is making an effort to teach people how to buy art again and show people that they can sell art,” Trance said about Lynch in an interview with The Voice.
Trance specializes in small-scale drawings and cards with intricate features. In one, there are hundreds of small fish swimming in two paths. One lone fish is swimming upstream between the two schools. Lynch asked Trance to scale up that image for a mural in the gallery entryway.
Trance has never shown his work in a gallery before, sticking mainly to flea markets, art fairs, and social media. He didn’t know if his work would find its way into a gallery.
“And definitely not one as nice as the Hawthorn Gallery,” Trance said.
The Hawthorn Gallery is located at 436 Common St.
