The resident artists of Vista Studios present new work in Harvest Art from November 16th-29th in the gallery at 808 Lady Street. They will open their studios to the public and will host a free Opening Reception on Thursday, November 17th from 5-8pm during the Vista Lights celebration. Vista Studios is home to 12 artists and each will be presenting new work.
Eileen Blyth will present Manic Weather II, acrylic & graphite on paper. It is part of a group of work done during a residency in Italy last Spring.
Stephen Chesley will offer works that exemplify the poetic peace of the ordinary. These recent works will offer studied relief from an increasingly frenetic world, and summon a rich solitude. Chesley’s palette of blues and greens connote symbolic dispatches from nature highlighting the fragile gift of water, sky, and trees and their increasing demise.
Pat Gilmartin is continuing to work with glass mosaics and fused glass. For Vista Lights she will have several new pieces to show, including an intricately patterned mosaic gazing ball. She also has some new additions to her popular series of small, sculptured ceramic faces.
All year long, Heidi Darr-Hope has been breathing, thinking, and making mandalas. This is partly due to an on-line E-Course she’s developing. Creating Brave: Mindful Mandalas is an eight-week class on how to use mandala making as a form of stress reduction and healing. But making mandalas is nothing new to her as she’s been creating these circle drawings for her own private use for many years as a way to play, de-stress, unwind and get lost in the creative process. Normally, the daily drawings are sketchbook doodles and as thoughts come to mind, they are written within the mandala. For this show, she has created larger ones on canvas.
Sharon Collings Licata is returning to some of her earlier figurative forms, both animal and human, by continuing these series: Repose (rabbit) Shore Repose (egret) and Moon Goddess (reclining nude). The subjects emerge from the stone as simplified, graceful forms.
During the past year, Laurie McIntosh was commissioned to create 16 original works for the courtyard gates of the newly renovated Richland County North Main Library. Several of the paintings created from this project will be exhibited during this show as well as new pieces from her Pages series. Pages is part of an ongoing series of deconstructed paintings created with multiple layers of calligraphic marks and grounds. The deconstructed pages are then reassembled and unconventionally bound to create new visual relationships between the images.
Kirkland Smith continues to collect, sort, and assemble everyday household disposable objects into representational art. Her assemblage work evokes nostalgia while also seeking to challenge consumer habits.
Ever optimistic, Laura Spong works to capture the energy and excitement of doing new things. Responding to the upcoming changes in the gallery and to the future, in general, Laura’s work Dispense with Doubt reflects her attitude that it will be different, so let’s move on and into it.
South Carolina State Parks have been inspiring Michel McNinch this summer. She is in love with painting her home state.
David Yaghjian claims he is still trying to learn how to paint. His latest attempts involve looking at a covered chaffinch cage, which caught his attention when watching the movie Arabian Nights: Volume 3. He worked from amodel that approximates the real thing.
Also showing in the show are Robert Kennedy, and Walton Selig. Gallery hours will be from 10am-5pm daily. The gallery will be closed Thanksgiving Day. For more information, please visit their website: www.VistaStudios80808.com.
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Kirkland Smith
@KirklandTSmith
