18 AAG Members in Belton Show
The Belton Standpipe Heritage & Arts Festival’s 20th Juried Art Show opened on Sept. 28 and runs through Nov. 9 at the Belton Center for the Arts. Eighteen Anderson Artists Guild members had works selected for the show, with seven of them taking home awards.
Alice Burnette won a Purchase Award for Caribbean Cove (watercolor). “I was inspired by a family member’s trip to the Dominican Republic and just loved all the blue shades in her pictures,” said Burnette. “And I love anything with boats! So happy it has a new home, possibly at the beach!”
Debbie Bzdyl won a Purchase Award for Taking a Different Road. "The loose, impressionist style was a bit of a 'different road' for me," she said. "I tend to paint in a more controlled way with harder, more precise lines and shapes. So this started out as just an exploration of how I could make myself paint in a different way. I wanted to explore depicting a scene without using hard edges and precise shapes. As the painting progressed, it began to take on a broader meaning of following your own path and staying true to who you are. The bright, joyful colors, the lack of hard lines, and the title hopefully convey that staying true to who we are is ultimately the road to being happy."
Merit awards were won by Marion Harvey Carroll, Jane Friedman, Garret Hamm, Craig Johnson, and Diann Simms.
Carroll won for Bars and Stripes (photography). “On a church retreat in Myrtle Beach last fall, I had a break in the schedule,” she said. “While my roommate took a cat nap on the sofa, I went out on our balcony to shoot an ocean scene with my iPad. There I became fascinated with the geometry and the lighting of the balcony itself. Some of the chairs had been propped against the railing. At the moment, the sunlight was hitting the bars in the railing and creating striped shadows on the chairs, a table, and the balcony floor. Turning from the ocean view, I started shooting that interplay of shadows and light. Bars was one of my last shots as I moved closer to tighten the downward perspective of the picture and almost became part of the scene myself. I imagine someone else could have taken a funny picture of me, nearly bent over double, holding the flat iPad down like I was shooting my own feet.”
Friedman’s winner was Pendleton Oil Mill (watercolor). “I just thought I had better paint it before it completely implodes,” she said. “It is a part of local history.”
Hamm, who had two pieces in the show, won for Lions, Tigers and Cotton Candy. “I have always enjoyed county and state fairs,” he said. “They used to put posters on most of the telephone poles. So that covers the pole. I decided to use a circus poster instead of a fair poster to appeal to more people and put the location anywhere the viewer liked. The ‘view’ is from the driveway of some property we owned years ago. One day when I was there I saw this weather moving across the distant horizon and took a photo of it. Twenty years later, I was searching my brain for a painting idea and remembered the sky photo. I added the town in the background, the pole and the poster and ta da. . . a painting was born! I always enjoy painting but really enjoy using something from my past in a painting.”
Johnson won for Heaven on Earth (photography). “There was not a lot of inspiration or process on my part,” he said. “I simply showed up for the most stupendous of natural events one can experience [the solar eclipse]. I did make my own filters for three cameras and did some shooting of the sun weeks before the event so I would have some idea of what I was doing. There wasn't going to be time for me to figure out proper values during the real deal. Shutter speeds ranged from 1/8000 second with high density filters to 1 second with no filters at all. The cumulative light collected at different values varied by as much as a factor of 800 million! I was able to collect about a hundred usable images despite cloud cover. Happily, the cloud cover had seams in it and I was able to work with those, getting flares and corona. I used a Nikon P900 with a 2000 mm lens and a Canon 7D with 200 mm at 2.8. The third rig was a Canon T2i I used for video of the whole dark field phase. All were on tripod. I have sold more than two hundred works based on this series of images.”
Simms won for Green Door. “The reference photograph was taken on King's Street in Charleston while I was waiting for a friend who was shopping in a real ‘temptation’ store,” she said. “I not only saved some bucks by not being tempted in the dress shop but also got a great shot of the ‘Green Door.’ I am always inspired by common and uncommon architecture. Doors, windows, nooks, crannies, building material and unusual views interest me the most!”
Other AAG members in the show were Michael Brophy, Barbara Mickelsen Ervin, Carolyn Gibson, Laurie King, Kathy Moore, Rosemary Moore, Linda Parker, Polly Richardson, Lori Solymosi, Diana Walter, and Barbara Yon.
