By Page H. Gifford
Correspondent
Local artists are celebrating the visual arts including the annual Tiny Art Show with an exhibit at the Fluvanna County Public Library sponsored by The Friends of the Library. Featured are community members sharing their love of art from teens through adults. The library has the exhibit set up near the front desk in the main library and displayed as a tiny art show with tiny viewers looking at the variety of work, mostly of miniature paintings. The work is diverse in style and skill, from abstract to impressionistic. The exhibit will be up through May 25.
The Fluvanna Art Association has its spring exhibit displayed in the library’s main meeting room. This year’s theme is Elements. Last year, the FAA featured the decade of the ‘60s and that was challenging but this year presented a different challenge since elements could be anything. Most artists chose landscapes, featuring earthly elements including water and air. Artist Linda Bethke’s painted an impressive watercolor of a group of stones representing a Scottish cairn. A cairn, derived from the Scottish Gaelic word carn, is a group of stones, placed on top of one another to form a mound. It is a man-made construction by one person or a group of people. In Scotland, the purpose for a cairn are as grave markers in memory of loved ones, which Bethke alludes to in her title – Remembrance.
Similar to Bethke’s theme was Nance Stamper’s Elements of Life, looking at the religious and spiritual elements with a loaf of bread, a chafe of wheat, and a cup of wine. Many of the paintings, collages, and mixed media were up for interpretation based on the work of the artists.
What drew onlookers was the creativity and skill the artists chose from the creative collage in Marcie Stahl’s stunning Warrior, featuring diverse yet similar objects and colors; Jim Wilkin’s wood sculpture of a soaring bird carved from a found piece of natural wood in Flight; Mary Volin’s soft, hazy Coastal Fog, and Alyce Walkovich’s Rhizome, an ethereal, abstract print depicting a natural root system. One of the most interesting was a 3-D painted paper accordion featuring a children’s rhyme about lady bugs in A World on Fire.
The show will run through June 17.
