NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Residents entering transitional housing at 111 Bracewell Ave. can look to the left to see a light at the end of the tunnel. 

 

The dark painting with its pathway toward lighted element brought to mind the Hoosac Tunnel, said Kathy Keeser, executive director of Louison House, on Friday.

 

"Somebody who was going through something could think, well, this is a way out — or a way in," she said, of why she selected that piece.

 

Plus, she added, the colors really worked in the front hallway of the Bracewell Youth Housing Project. 

 

The work was one of three donated by artist Sarah Sutro, whose paintings also hang in the Flood House and in Terry's House in Adams. A regional and international artist who makes her home in North Adams, her artworks have been in collections and exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including at the State House. 

 

Sutro's recently been going through her works of acrylics, inks and watercolors she's created over her career.  

 

"I just have enjoyed giving some of my paintings that are in storage in my studio, not doing anything with them, and having them out in the community instead, and having other people enjoy them and relate to them," she said.

 

"In a way, paintings should go out and flow into spaces where they can have a life with people and not be just, you know, stashed."

 

On the stairway up to the second floor is a second painting — tall and luminous in pastels and giving a sense of upward drift — and a third on the landing, a small watercolor of a serene landscape.

 

"I was originally a figurative artist," Sutro Said. "I went through my own hard times and sort of struggled with what I was going to paint and how did I express it, and I gradually got more and more abstract, and then I did real abstraction. 

 

"That is fun, and then, but I was always doing watercolors. So there's a landscape up here that's always been like something I love to do outside. And so that's continued. Now I'm kind of doing combination of abstraction and realism."

 

Keeser said Sutro invited her to pick out which ones she liked. 

 

"I picked up three different ones, way different than the other two that we already have," she said. 

 

There's a palm one in the living room at Terry's House (the original Louison House) that's not really open to the public, and a large landscape and fan painting that's been the background for events at the Flood House.

 

Keeser said she selected the locations based on which painting seemed to fit best in the house, which is designed for young people seeking temporary shelter. One of the building's first tenants, Doug, was moving out that day into his own apartment.

 

"I thought of youth going through different phases, because this is a lot what we're at with youth here," Keeser said of the tunnel painting. "They're going through those phases in life that we're talking about for 111 and all of that we were talking about in the opening ceremony, to the positive direction. 

 

"We can't say that everybody's going out or in, or whatever direction to the positive angle. But that's what we'd hope."