Caldwell Arts Council Gallery - September 2011

The Caldwell Arts Council Gallery is located at
601 College Ave SW - Lenoir NC 28645
Open Tuesday-Friday 9am-5pm

    

SEPTEMBER EXHIBIT:

TOWN & COUNTRY

Featuring Artwork by
Jean Cauthen
Diane Pike
Chrys Riviere-Blalock
Rudy Rudisill
 

 

September 2-30
Opening Reception Friday, September 2, 5-7:30pm
hosted by Lenoir Woman's Club

 

Painting by Jean Cauthen

 

Painting by Diane Pike

 

Painting by Chrys Riviere-Blalock

 

Sculpture by Rudy Rudisill

 

 

Mint Hill artist Jean Cauthen will be exhibiting her landscape and still life paintings. Jean is strong in her use of color and light. Many of her landscapes reflect her travels, while the still life paintings are from overhead viewpoints, embedded with narratives.   All of her landscape paintings are done “plein-air” - painted outdoors, on location.

 

Cauthen earned a BFA from East Carolina and MFA from James Madison University. She has taught at various colleges and universities, headed the art department at CCC&TI, served as curator at the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center in Virginia, broadcast designer at WSET, courtroom artist and free lance illustrator.   She has exhibited internationally, including the Broome Street Gallery in New York City. She currently teaches painting and Art History at UNCC.

 

Diane Pike’s paintings are a result of her pursuit to understand and express how light creates color and how those different notes of color convey light. Diane met Jean Cauthen at a plein air event shortly after moving to North Carolina from Colorado. They share a passion for painting outdoors and have different approaches to the subject matter.  She says, “Jean and I thought a show based on paintings we did plein air of the same subject but from two different viewpoints would be interesting. And so we have spent a good part of the last year painting for this show in September.”  

Born in Iowa, Diane moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1959. She lived in that area until December of 2008 when she relocated to Denver NC.

A degree in Fine Arts from the University of Northern Colorado where she studied printmaking and graphic design led to 10 years in Denver, Colorado as a graphic designer/artist in the advertising field.

 

Shelby NC artist Chrys Riviere-Blalock studied in New York at Parsons-The New School for Design and earned an MA in art at Appalachian State University. She has lived in western North Carolina, teaching in small colleges for 25 years, and also taught summer 2007 in Provence, France.  She is a 2011 recipient of the North Carolina Regional Artists Project Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Arts and Science Council.

 

Chrys says “What I see is exhilarating…vast space, a robust and wondrously alive landscape that is simultaneously as delicate and fragile as each spring’s new leaf. These paintings are a visual response to the disappearing rural landscape. In the last few years cell towers, gigantic storage silos from multi-national corporations and housing developments have encroached on the farmland I have known and loved all my life in the foothills of North Carolina. Four years ago I began to realize a sense of urgency in the need to respond as a painter to the beauty and fragility of this area; this is when I began a series of paintings of the landscape that surrounds us.

 

Rudy Rudisill of Gastonia, NC, uses sculpture to conjure a building lost and abandoned, excavating it from memory. The illusion of change arises via galvanized steel and copper brushed with acid, yielding a corrosive effect. The work is simultaneously contemporary and traditional, industrial and pastoral as Rudisill explores the relationship of physical elements to their symbolic implications. By bringing together various textures and architectonic forms, personal, cultural and historic elements bring together in and homage to the changing landscape. Each anthropomorphic piece carries with it a narrative and a particular relationship - sometimes familial, other times structural. A working artist for over thirty years, Mr. Rudisill's fabricated sheet metal sculpture has won international awards and can be found in public, corporate and private collections in North America, Europe, and Asia. He is a member of the International Sculpture Center, Tri State Sculptors Association, Piedmont Craftsmen, Inc., and American Crafts Council. He is presently the Exhibits Preparer/Artist at the Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia.