New Jersey native Cicely Cottingham is exhibiting her artwork in Milburn, and a reception is planned for Saturday.

The exhibit "The Marjorie Paintings and Kitchen Table Drawings" is open Saturday through Nov. 27 at Stewart Leshé Collections on Main Street. The reception is scheduled 5-8 p.m. on Saturday.

Cottingham’s show features two complementary bodies of work in subject and scale. The Marjorie Paintings are large-scale works measuring 64 by 48 inches, composed of acrylic on wood panels and were produced 2000–2003.

“They are a response to the environment in and around Newark, N.J., which I now call home," Cottingham said in a press release. "While working on these paintings, pondering what was still a major change in my visual environment (country to urban), I found myself surrounded by a pool of memory of my mother Marjorie, who had died in 1999 at the age of 85. So these works are formal expressions of my experience of a new environment, but they are also a celebration of a life lived and of the creativity which Marjorie fostered in me.”

In her scaled down and more intimate works titled “Kitchen Table Drawing," Cottingham created a series of watercolor drawings on Sennelier paper with each finished work measuring six by eight inches and based on the method of “pairing” unrelated drawings to make a singular work.

The series, begun in 2007 and continuing, evolved over a period of many nights after dinner, which due to work demands and scheduling constraints was the only way she found time to work

The "drawings are a response to my frustration and a result of painting every night after dinner, my plate pushed aside from the cotton placemat and replaced with brush, paint and paper," Cottingham said in the press release. "The activity produced a diary of sorts, a moment in time, an aid to returning to balance.”

Cottingham, born in Brooklyn, attended Pratt Institute, receiving her BFA in the mid 1960s. After school she lived for a time in Manhattan, Cambridge, Mass. and England before settling in New Jersey where she had spent her childhood in an old farmhouse surrounded by woods. It was there that she immersed herself in the light that is particular to the New York Atlantic coast.

Cottingham served as Design Director at Aljira Design in Newark from 1996 to 2009, which she co-founded in 1991. For her work in the arts she has received a Pollock/Krasner Grant, three New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Awards, a Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper Fellowship Award and a Hereward Lester Cooke Grant. Notable solo exhibitions include two at the Jersey City Museum, The Hunterdon Museum of Art and Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Newark Museum, and the Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

Cottingham currently lives and works in West Orange.