GUILDERLAND — Corlis Carroll, a Guilderland artist, is opening a gallery with an exhibition of her work, which she calls a lost art.

Carroll hand paints color onto black-and-white photographs.

For the past 18 years, she has spent her summers on Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, where a well-known artist’s colony has been active for more than a century.

Year-round, her husband ran a hearing aid business on Western Avenue. The building that housed the business will now become the Corlis Gallery of American Art.

Carroll received a degree in art from the state’s University at Albany and, after graduating, she took a job as a housekeeper on Monhegan Island so she could have a living space there while she painted.

Her paintings sold, she said, but she did not feel as though she wanted her art to focus on painting.

“It was not my original intent for artistic expression,” she said. “My original intent was to work with a camera.”

Painting, she said, was the best way to study color, but she decided to go back to school to study photography.

The first class she took was darkroom photography and the second class she took focused on tinted photography.

“I was smitten,” said Carroll.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the arts and crafts movement was thriving in the United States, and going through a major renaissance.

In 1901, she explained, there was no color photography.

“The real beginnings of color in photography came from the hands of humans,” she said.

It became a lost art, though, when color film was invented.

“It ended up either some housewife’s hobby or it was done in some portrait studios, but there is no real professional activity surrounding it,” said Carroll. “Not like what I am doing.”

She described what happens when you put color over something gray.

“You end up with a palette that is softened and comforted by the gray underneath,” she said.

Over the past 25 years, she said the medium has “evolved beautifully.”

The ink is better, she said, as are the papers, which are “more willing to accept a wet medium.”

Her printer, she said, has never had another customer who practices the art of painting photographs.

Carroll plans to hold an exhibition on Dec. 6, from 3 to 7 p.m., at 1855 Western Ave., followed by four days in which she hopes people will drop in as she works on her art in the studio.

 She also hopes to schedule lectures with area art students.

“This is significant to the history or art in America and I am, in my heart of hearts, an educator,” she said.

A selection of her pieces will be available for sale during this time.

Her gallery will be open for only a short time because, starting Dec. 20, she will be traveling the country, photographing the 10 most influential sites of arts and history in America.

She hopes to offer a program to colorize photographs from archives at these sites or to photograph them in a contemporary way.

In the spring, she plans to hold a series of three shows at the Guilderland gallery featuring artists who have worked on Monhegan Island. She hopes to feature an artist who lives there year round, an artist who has spent the winter there, and an artist native to New York State.

Although it won’t be a traditional business-style gallery open year-round, Carroll said she hopes to keep the property and hold exhibitions there for as long as she can.

“The town has been great,” she said. “The Capital District is going to get the benefit of my experience.”