MINDFULNESS

Jason Smith

Metal sculpture allows me to push the limits on my creative freedom. When I bend a piece of steel, or shape a piece of copper, I feel no boundaries. The process of my work may come from an idea or a concept, but most of the time, the process develops and unfolds as I begin a new project. For me, it allows my art to come from my heart, and not from my head. My sculptures are a combination of abstract and Asian inspired. The abstract manipulation of form in space to create visual balance, using rhythm, action and movement, combine to create compositions that convey the implied energy found in my work.

My recent work includes two large commissions for the regional cancer care center in Berlin, MD. The project was a year in the making and I feel so honored to be able to create sculptures to help symbolize this disease and be a source of strength for the patients and caregivers.

 

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Earth Wind and Fire

Garry Childs

 

All of my work is formed on the potters wheel from terra-cotta clay. I apply glazes and pigments to my pots when they have reached a state potters call “leather-hard” which is when the clay has stiffened up enough to handle but is not completely dry. I usually do this by spraying but sometimes also with a brush. I then carve through the glaze into the still damp clay to achieve the various patterns seen on my work.

I encourage people to touch and handle my work. Pots are made with hands and they should be “looked at” with hands. Texture, particularly the contrast between the smooth glazed areas and the rougher, hard edges of the carved surface is very important. Putting both hands on a piece and moving them up-and-down allows you to truly feel the shape and the ridges left by my fingers in the soft clay. I also think it’s great fun to put your head down inside one of the big pieces and holler, the echoes are wonderful.

 

My pots are made for people’s homes. My bowls and platters look best on tables with food being shared by families and friends, my planters and vases with someone’s favorite herb or fresh flowers. Some pieces are certainly more decorative in nature than others. Those are an expression of my joy in the process that hopefully becomes a part of someone’s day to day life.

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Earth Wind and Fire

JUDE LOBE

 

When I was a child, one might have called me a tom-boy. I spent endless days exploring the woods and parks, climbing trees and building forts near our home in Maryland. I continued my exploration of  wild and natural environments as an adult. Luckily, I lived equal distance from the Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Mountains to Assateague and Chincoteague Islands. In these places I felt at home, peaceful, serene and wistful. 

These natural habitats give me a connection to a past, a history of bygone times. Being in these beautiful endangered landscapes gives me solace from stress and hope for a future. In this exhibit I revisit some of these places in my mind and attempt to capture the emotion I felt there and being captivated by the play of light on a rock cliff, or swaying grass in the wind.

 

My medium of choice for these landscapes is Cold Wax & Oil. The cold wax is a consistency of a paste wax. It is made of beeswax and resins. I mix it 50:50 with oil paints or earth pigments. It has the advantage of giving me the opportunity to show a history of the painting by building up layers of colors, then scratching through to reveal some of the obscured colored layers. To me it is a metaphor of the history of the landscape and how it has evolved over time. 

 

My paintings, rather than being a photographic likeness of the landscape, are rather an emotional interpretation of it with an abstract quality. My hope is that the viewer either gains a feeling of peace and hope I feel when in nature, or reminds them of a similar special place in their memory. 

 

Luminous

Please join us with  Eduardo Lapitina and Arianna Bara for a wine and cheese reception at Hillsborough Gallery of Arts

Sunday April 17 1-4

Dreaming While There is Still Time

MY ABSTRACT PAINTINGS

Eduardo Lapatina

My paintings are a way for me to enter the world, not an escape from it. A painting opens a door into a space in which a play may be staged, where plot points, conflict, climax, and resolution all come together. In the process of creation, a painting becomes a battlefield for my struggles about what is, what is not, what ought to be, what I like, what I love, what I hate, frustrations, disenchantment, embarrassments. My art exposes to the world my most private thoughts and feelings, forming a spatial connection between what lives within me and what is alive in everyone else.

What the Mystery of Us Knows

I want my spaces to be painted without intention, without conscious technique, without anything that might interfere with the connections I seek to create. I do not want to keep a tradition. I am not looking for beauty but the viewer might find it in my art. And it is not about any particular theme or motif, it is about effectively conveying the immaterial through materiality. My aim is to project energy, visual vibrations, light, voices,excitement, and enthusiasm, captured in a physical form that you can take home with you.

Primordial Elements

Eduardo Lapetina

http://www.eduardolapetina.com

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Resolutions 2016

The Hillsborough Gallery Of Arts Celebrates NC Artists With A Statewide Juried Show

RESOLUTIONS 2016, the title of The Hillsborough Gallery of Art’s second statewide juried show, is an exhibition of the work of artists from across North Carolina.

The Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, an artist-owned fine art and fine craft gallery located in historic Hillsborough, North Carolina, will celebrate the start of the New Year by hosting a juried fine art and fine craft exhibit from January 4 to January 24, 2016. Titled Resolutions 2016, the exhibition includes the work of two-dimensional and three-dimensional fine artists from throughout North Carolina.  All works are for sale.

Guest juror for the awards will be Dr. Peter Nisbet, Chief Curator and Interim Director of the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC. Nisbet has extensive national and international experience in collection development and exhibitions. Formerly Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at the Harvard Art Museum, he was responsible for a collection of 39,000 works of art and played a leading role in the reconceptualization and revitalization of the museum. Nisbet holds a BA and MA from Cambridge University and a PhD in the History of Art from Yale Universiity

Opening Reception

January 8th

6-9

 

 

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Preview of the Orange County Studio Tour at Hillsborough Gallery of Arts

 

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts Exhibit Previews Orange County Artists Guild Studio Tour

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts members Linda Carmel, Chris Graebner, Lolette Guthrie, Marcy Lansman, Eduardo Lapetina, Ellie Reinhold, and Pringle Teetor will be included in a preview show for the upcoming OCAG Open Studio Tour.

This marks the 21^st year that the Orange County Artists Guild will host its Annual Open Studio Tour. Over eighty artists located throughout Orange County, including Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, and surrounding areas are participating in this juried event, by opening their studios so visitors can discover where the creative magic happens!

Linda Carmel and Pringle Teetor will show together at Linda Carmel’s home studio, 101 Huntington Drive, Chapel Hill, #56 on the tour. Carmel will be giving demonstrations of her unique painting technique that uses acrylic modeling paste. Teetor, a full time glass blower, has her studio in Creedmoor but will show a video demonstration of her glass blowing. She will exhibit a variety of pieces – both indoor and outdoor: Vases, bowls, drinking glasses, decanters, garden sculpture, pumpkins, solar garden lights, and jewelry.
This is Chris Graebner’s fifth year on the tour. As a painter she most often paints landscapes in oils, but her background includes botanical art with watercolor and ink. Graebner enjoys mixing media to see what each brings to the other. Some of her recent work is a return to botanical silverpoint drawings that she colored with layers of highly diluted acrylics instead of more traditional watercolors. In addition to her landscape painting, this summer she has been exploring botanical subjects using scratchboard and colored inks. Graebner invites you to visit her in her studio, #7 on the Tour map, just a couple of blocks from the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts in downtown Hillsborough.

Lolette Guthrie’s studio is located in her home at 113 Rhododendron Drive, Chapel Hill, studio #62 on the tour map. This will be her seventh year on the tour. Painting largely from memory and painting both in oil and in pastel, Guthrie derives most of her inspiration from time spent on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She will be showing both oil and pastel landscapes and abstracted landscapes that explore what it felt like to be at a particular place at a particular time.
Marcy Lansman will be welcoming visitors to her home studio, #53 on the tour map, on Mt. Bolus Road close to the center of Chapel Hill. This is Lansman’s eleventh year on the Studio Tour. Many neighbors drop by as well as repeat customers from previous years. It is a great time to reconnect with old friends and show them the new directions her work is taking.

Eduardo Lapetina’s studio, #72 on the tour map, is located at 318 North Estes Drive, Chapel Hill. This is his seventh year participating on the tour. Lapetina will show new abstract paintings with vibrant colors and various sizes including very large pieces. His paintings are worked in complete solitude. They represent the discoveries of the unconscious mind. In the artist’s words, “They hold the promise of dreams, visions, fears, … and the magic of a private, secret language.”

Ellie Reinhold is joining the Tour for the third year. She is studio #75 on the tour and will welcome you at her studio off Roosevelt Drive in Chapel Hill, in the neighborhood across from Cafe Driade. Reinhold’s figurative art has been described as “soulful,” “dreamscapes,” and “internal landscapes.”  She explores emotional experiences using color, brushwork, and iconic imagery that often draws from nature. Her small abstract works are done mostly with knives and allow her to explore elements such as texture, shadow, contrast, and color in their own right, unfettered by the demands of specific content.
OCAG’s Open Studio Tour is a rare opportunity for art lovers to meet artists in their places of work, to view and purchase art directly from the artist and in many instances to watch as they demonstrate how they create their pieces. The Studio Tour brochures and map of participants’ studios are available at the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts and other area locations or on the Guild website: http://www.OrangeCountyArtistsGuild.com
Many of the eighty plus artists on this year’s tour will have work in the OCAG Preview Exhibit at the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts. Their work will be on display from October 26 through November 15, 2015. This preview show is a wonderful opportunity for a first look at the work to be offered on the tour to help you plan your tour route.

Opening Receptions

Friday, October 30

6-9

 

 

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Present Tense

Chris Grabener

Present Tense is an appropriate title for my current work. It seems to me that it is constantly moving, changing, evolving. I enjoy trying new things and learning how I can use them to achieve the effects I see in my mind.

My paintings fall into three general categories: botanicals, landscapes (including buildings) and what fellow painter Jude Lobe refers to as “mischief.” Mostly I toggle back and forth between botanicals and landscapes. Most of the work in this show falls under the broad umbrella of landscapes and they explore different surfaces and different methods of applying paint. Some of the paintings are on canvas, or linen, some on wood panel, and some on clayboard. Each of these surfaces accepts paint differently and combining their properties with different types of brushes, painting knives and painting mediums can give very different results to the same image. So after selecting an image, I consider the size, painting surface, color palette and the types of brushes and mediums for that painting. I map out a direction for the painting and begin, but I find that as I work, the painting finds its own course and often flows in channels I had not fully anticipated.

Three of the night paintings involve the use a large, dry, mop brush to move thin layers of paint from the central moon across the surface of the painting. Winter Moon is painted on panel, a hard non-absorbent surface on which the paint moves quite freely. Under the Moonlight is on clayboard, a hard but absorbent surface. On it, the paint begins to be absorbed as it moves out from the center of the moon, taking more layers and not moving as far or as readily. Moonlight Bay is on canvas, a soft, non-absorbent but textured surface which holds paint and makes the layers thicker and with a stippled appearance.

Cathedral Door is a small oil and cold wax painting on canvas. The door itself is painted with a brush and without the addition of cold wax, while the stonework is painted with a pallet knife and many layers of oil paint mixed with wax. The wax is then scraped through to create joints in the stone blocks.

 

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What I came here for

Michele Yellin

What I Came Here For was not the first name Arianna Bara, Chris Burniside and I decided on for our Featured Artist Exhibit. In fact, we were pretty committed to our first title, until we found out it was too long (and also, perhaps, slightly too boring). It wasn’t until we met for the third time over cups of coffee and Arianna shared the poem A Morning Offering by John O’Donohue that it was obvious what our exhibit should be called. It comes from the last stanza of the poem and is as follows:

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

There are so many beautiful phrases in this poem, but the line “To do at last, what I came here for” resonated profoundly with all of us. I think that it probably rings a bell with everyone. Why are we here? We have been given this great gift of life. Are we wasting it? Are we doing the things we are meant to do? For Arianna, Chris and me, this exhibit of our work is tangible evidence that we are doing the things we were born to do.

When I am in the middle of working on  a painting, and struggling to solve the puzzle of it, I am often filled with angst and despair. It seems as if I will never get it figured out. I have to remind myself over and over to have faith in the process. No matter how many pieces of art I create, I never feel like it comes easily. It feels just as likely that I will fail in my effort to create something beautiful, something joy-filled, than succeed. And yet, and yet, and yet…as many times as I have considered quitting, I continue to plod on. And then, all at once it seems, I successfully complete a piece of art! And then another! And another! I am doing what I came here for!

And now, if I only I could waste my heart on fear no more….

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what I came here for

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Uncharted

Nell Chandler

After Ali and Ellie and I brainstormed many suggestions of titles for our featured artist show Ali finally came up with Uncharted.

We could all relate to that title because they both had children that are getting ready to fly the nest and  I knew I had some uncharted territory of my own. I knew there were techniques I have long wanted to try with my jewelry.

I’d always wanted to try to work with colored pencils on metal and had just never found the time. This was the  perfect time. But I found the medium tedious as I applied layer after layer to achieve the depth I wanted to achieve. Plus the colors that I am normally drawn to wouldn’t show up on the metal as well as the colors that are not a part of my regular palette. I tried the gesso ground technique and contemplated the acrylic spray in between each layer but the gesso was just like white paper and I knew the acrylic spray would  eventually end up as gunk.

So I ended up scratching the surface with a stylist to created a rough surface for the prisma color to adhere to. It still took layers and layers but I got some satisfaction. I eventually accented it with a rapidograph (technical pen) and a white paint pen.

In the middle of this process, when I was getting discouraged, I was talking with a friend. I said how I had all these designs in my sketch book back when designs were just flowing out of me when my children were young that I never had a chance to make. We decided that that too was uncharted territory. So I fabricated a very linear group that has just been sitting on the pages of my sketchbook for years.

 

It’s all about the story

Hillsborough is well known for its art community and the nationally known authors who choose to make the town their home. Each year members of the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts join with one of their author neighbors for a show called IT’S ALL ABOUT THE STORY. This event, now in its third year, features author Lee Smith, winner of the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Thomas Wolfe Award, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction and recipient of the 1999 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Lee Smith is a masterful storyteller, renowned for short stories that exhibit Southern charm and a wry sense of humor. The artists of the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, together with Ms. Smith chose to respond to short stories from her book, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger.

After reading through all of the stories painter Linda Carmel returned to the first story, “Bob, A Dog.” Says Carmel, “in the opening of the story, Lee Smith graphically describes the husband, David, on the threshold of a new life – leaving his wife Cheryl and house behind. The story ultimately centers on Cheryl but I found myself still thinking about David and the mixture of nostalgia, fear and excitement that he must be experiencing.

Painter Lolette Guthrie describes how she arrived at her piece: “While reading Lee Smith’s wonderful stories in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger I kept thinking about how so much of the real story was hidden beneath the more obvious narrative. About half way through the collection I came to the story “Between The Lines” and experienced an ah ha moment! The result is an abstraction exploring the idea that often in life one must not only know how to read between the lines but must also be able to see beneath the surface.”

Alice Levinson created a cloth composition, “No Stranger To Blue Eyes,” a play on the title of Smith’s story collection. Though varied in setting, personae or narrative twist, these stories share a common theme. “To me they read as narratives in which the personal drama in individual daily lives is affected by the ever-present reality of human mortality, finally personified by the blue-eyed stranger in the ultimate story,” says Levinson. “Mortality, as presented by Smith, is a natural aspect of human existence, to be understood and accepted, not feared. It becomes a prompt for opportunity, enriching the present moment. Finely drawn characters are the hallmark of these bittersweet tales. Each is clothed in specific details which makes them instantly familiar and endearing. Their courage and dignity is their backbone. She animates them with humor and affection and my resulting abstract hopefully reflects the colorful folks I met on the pages of her volume.”

Chris Graebner, a painter, was inspired to make a mobile instead of a painting. Graebner occasionally creates lighthearted mobiles and decided to approach the story through this medium. “The young protagonist in Toastmaster is working on his vocabulary and enjoys using his newly learned words. I thought it would be fun to juxtapose these words to create interesting images.”

Opening Reception

Feb. 27

6-9

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Discoveries

Make New Discoveries At The Hillsborough Gallery Of Art

As a landscape painter, Lolette Guthrie seeks the essence of a place in order to create visual metaphors celebrating the incredible beauty and diversity of our world. “My paintings are always paintings of light and atmosphere” says Guthrie “and I strive to capture the ephemeral nature of light at a moment in time that transcends the subject and captures a mood that is timeless.”  Working in both oils and in pastels she applies countless layers of pigment one on top of the other, allowing each layer to show through, giving a wonderful richness to the surfaces.

For this show, Guthrie concentrated on painting skies that by themselves give the viewer a sense of space, light, time of day, temperature, and weather. In most pieces, the foreground is the accent note.

Mark Kinsella has been working with glass for more than 10 years and continues to develop his technique. Incorporating new processes into his work, he is always evolving and changing, trying new styles, and producing fresh and different work. Kinsella draws inspiration from nature, movies and life experiences, using his photography background for interesting composition and color combinations. His work is sometimes functional, sometimes sculptural and often both.

Most of the work in this show will have a combination of transparent and opaque glass, which look very different depending on whether light is reflected off the surface or transmitted from behind. Says Kinsella, “Some of my work also contains optical illusions. Discoveries are possible in so many ways! I hope that everyone will pick up and touch the glass and feel its texture. I truly believe that working with glass is a metaphor for life. Things can be very random and seemingly disconnected but with patience, creativity, and a little hard work one can pull it all together into something beautiful. I’m motivated to leave the world in better shape than when I arrived and feel that I can do that by creating art that could possibly last hundreds of years.”

Michele Yellin has this to say about her work. “Michelangelo said that every block of stone has a statue inside it and that it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. For me, searching the textured, abstracted, multi-colored surface of my canvas, I ache to discover what each painting wants to reveal to me, and thus become. This is my great challenge, and when detected and captured, my great joy. I have no luck in forcing things along. There are processes I rely on and yet I have no formula guaranteed to bring the painting into being. It is only with the alchemy of materials, skills, intent and some form of magic that allows me to discover what the painting’s true nature is. To see it, I have to not look for it. I have look in an oblique manner, and then, if I am lucky, I make my discovery. These paintings are what were waiting in the paint to be painted.”

 

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