The French term plein air means out of doors and refers to the practice of painting entire finished pictures out of doors.
Carol Dixon is an award winning plein air artist showing 20 of her oil paintings at the Mountain Empire Community College Library, August through October. The paintings were all painted on site in locations around the region.
Ms. Dixon uses regular oil, water miscible oil and watercolor, often combining media. She regularly participates in plein air competitions and commission work.
Carol began her art journey in the Midwest – Indiana and Chicago, and then moved to the Washington, DC area where she studied art at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia for several years. She has done series of Eastern Shore beaches and Hawaiian beaches. Carol lives in Southwest Virginia, is experiencing the mesmerizing lure of the region – the mountains, the lakes, rivers and wonderful forests. Now a committed plein air painter, she travels around the region to capture the landscape. She participates in plein air painting competitions, recently receiving the “Best Water Scene” at the Blowing Rock Plein Air Competition 2021 and a prize in the Paint Kingsport 2022 Quick Draw Competition.
As I paint, I am both lost in the moment and “found” in the sense that I am uncovering some of the mysteries of translating color, shapes and textures. What I paint is not only what I see, but also how I feel.
Painting en plein air can be a wild sensory experience – including input from dogs, horses, bees and bugs. With the light changing every minute – changing the interpretation of the painting, the experience can require quick thinking and a quick response on the canvas!
By Evelyn Hoskins
I finished this quilt in August 2022. It was made, except for the white sections, from a precut package. It came from the big red Bargain Barn in the Ramsey section of Norton, owned by Gene and Faye Huff. When they began to close the store they told my good friend, Lottie Robinette, who was a former part-time employee and family friend, to pick out some things she would like, gratis.
She hand sewed all her quilt tops. This kit had so many pieces she put off getting started on it. In spring cleaning, she ran across it and offered it to me. I started on it by machine but couldn’t seem to get my head wrapped around the angles and dog ears. So I put it aside and made about 5 more quilts. Finally, I unearthed the kit and stuck with it. It is far from perfect, but I loved the bright colors and it is a great reminder of my friend, Lottie, and the many enjoyable things we shared as two old widows.
I was taught to sew on a treadle machine, sewing quilt pieces together for many of my mothers’ quilts. Then on to making clothing for myself and my daughter. I have made quilts for all my children, grandchildren and great grands. I wish I had written down and made pictures from the beginning!
Mountain Empire Community College’s Slemp Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of a rotating exhibit featuring local, hand-stitched quilts for 2023-2024.
The Slemp Gallery, located in MECC’s Wampler Library, is currently soliciting future quilts for exhibit. Quilts will be rotated monthly. The first quilt featured, titled Grandma’s Flower Garden, was hand-stitched by 92-year-old Evelyn Strouth of Clintwood, an MECC graduate.
Ms. Strouth has quilted for 50 years and is a member of the Hamilton Chapel Church quilters in Pound. Grandma’s Flower Garden features a traditional pattern, with the green design representing the path through the garden. The quilt required hundreds of hours of hand stitching. Ms. Strouth has also been a member of the Crooked Road Quilters and Reedy Ridge Quilters guilds.
The exhibit is a collection of aprons on loan from our Southwest Virginia and Kentucky community. The aprons offer a glimpse into the fashion, personality, chores and stories of everyday women. The aprons span from 1860s until present day. The varied styles and designs are indicative of changing times and expectations in a woman’s life. The fabric of their lives pulls at our heart strings, and we are flooded with the idea of home, comfort food, and the women that are no longer with us.
Accompanying the aprons on display is a collection of historic quilts on loan from Travis Kennedy of Wise. Kennedy has one of the largest private collections of important quilts in the Appalachian region. Among the quilts on display is a remarkable example of a postage stamp quilt. The tiny pieces, each the size of a stamp, are hand-stitched into a pleasing pattern. The selected quilts take us through time, from simple calico fabrics of the early 1900s to the mod and vibrant colors of the 1960s.
The totality of this installation (which includes clothesline and pins for display) is a salute to the threads we hold to, and the ties that bind us all.
Teresa Robinette
Curator, Slemp Gallery
Bertha Brock Napier passed this life on April 25, 2023, at the age of 92. She learned at a very young age how to provide for her family. She was only 7 years old when her mother passed away leaving behind 8 children. Bertha grew to love quilting at a young age and has made many quilts for her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and friends. She spent many hours using her fingers to sew stitches as her heart and soul sewed prayers and praises into heaven. It brought her much joy to provide a warm quilt for someone and her quilts never came with a price tag, only given with a heart full of love.
Proverbs 31 says: “Who can find a virtuous and capable wife? She is more precious than rubies. She brings good all the days of her life. She gets up before dawn to prepare breakfast for her household and plan the day’s work. She is energetic, strong, and a hard worker. Her hands stay busy spinning thread, she extends her hand to the poor and opens her arms to the needy. She makes her own bedspreads. When she speaks, her words are wise. Her children stand and bless her”. There will never be someone to tread this earth that has carried those attributes as closely as my mother, Bertha Brock Napier. She was revered by all as a very loving, kind, and Godly woman with a servant’s heart, always putting others above herself.
Students from Jenkins Middle High School in Jenkins KY, together with their teacher Luann Vermillion, created origami stars in their high school Art classes. They studied about the Japanese art of paper folding and tried out a variety of paper types as they practiced folding different shapes. They settled on 20lb white bond paper for the origami stars because of its ability to hold a crisp fold. A light coating of spray-on glitter was added to finish off their origami creations and to help preserve them for display.
– Luann Vermillion and students from Jenkins (KY) Middle High School
I machine pieced and hand quilted this quilt as a gift for my husband of 50 years, Jim Branham. He served as commander of three Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal Units, one in New Jersey and two in Vietnam. We both come from families with a history of army service in every conflict from the French and Indian War to Vietnam. My husband has made me proud and served his country well in a War whose warriors were not welcomed back as heroes, to this nation’s everlasting discredit. This quilt is to say that I think he is a Hero.
Jeff Chapman-Crane is a full-time professional artist from the southern Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky, where he has lived and practiced his art for the last 27 years. His art focuses on the culture of Appalachia, with an emphasis on portraits of mountain people.
He has been painting for over 35 years since being challenged and inspired by his high school art teacher, Don Hilton. Following the tenets of the American Society of Classical Realism, Jeff’s work encompasses the highest principles of traditional representational art – fine drawing, balanced design, harmonious color, and skillful craftsmanship. While not in the stylized realism of American Regionalism, his work shares a strong identification with a particular region – conveying geographic features of the land and unique human, cultural and social characteristics.
Among the artists who have greatly influenced Chapman-Crane’s work are Rembrandt for the shear power of composition, mastery of brushstrokes, and the profound depth of human understanding revealed in his portraits; Vermeer in his use of light and portrayals of everyday, domestic life; the French Impressionists for their revelation of the color of light; and Edward Hopper’s ability to stop time and capture a moment. Jeff gives much credit to Vincent Van Gogh, his favorite artist, whose emotional intensity, and absolute devotion to his work move and inspire him. His realistic work follows well-established traditions in American art, in the vein of Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Andrew Wyeth for their portrayals of ordinary life. Social commentary photographers Dorothy Lange, Ken Murray of Tennessee, and “Picture Man” Mullins of Jenkins, Kentucky have also influenced the content of Jeff’s work.
His work has been featured in American Artist magazine, and he is a four-time finalist in the Artists Magazine’s annual portrait competition. He was the illustrator for the children’s book “Ragsale”, which won Best in Show at the 1995 New England Bookfair. In 2020 he was one of 125 artists worldwide to receive the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.
Together with his wife, Sharman, Jeff operates the Valley of the Winds Art Gallery in Eolia, Kentucky, where their works can be seen. They are open by appointment 606-633-8652 or chance. Jeff’s website is www.jeffchapmancrane.com
While researching my book on coalfield baseball, I visited many coal camps in southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky and in southern West Virginia. They ranged in levels of dereliction, from the bare skeletons of previous communities to some still filled with life although a little worse for wear. So many empty houses and company stores, offices and small businesses.
I saw the remains of a few New Mexico coal towns as well. Just as in Appalachia, it seemed like the spirits of the long gone idled on front porches and tapped on the remaining glass in windows. These images of abandoned spaces haunted me until I began recreating them.
They still do.
This show is a testament to what is now lost to the coalfields, wherever they may be in this country. The camps are mostly deserted and the communities that lived and breathed baseball are gone. My books and my art are in tribute to them.
L.M. Sutter (Lynn)
In May 2024, I had a wonderful opportunity, along with 11 other photographers, to participate in a 14-day photo safari in Namibia, Africa. Not quite lions, tigers, and bears, but lions, giraffes, and elephants! And scores more!
After a 14-hour flight from Richmond VA to Cape Town S.A., we flew to Windhoek, the Capitol of Namibia, where we spent the day exploring the history of the German occupation of South Africa in 1884, and then on to Lüderitz on Africa’s West Coast. Kolmanskop, a deserted diamond mining town now reclaimed by the shifting sands, was an early highlight of the trip. Foggy, diffused morning light created interesting conditions to capture the sand-strewn, pastel-colored interiors of the deserted buildings.
The trip included an early morning hot air balloon ride, my first. In addition, besides lots and lots of sand, the group got to see flamingos and other shore birds, as well as goshawks, kestrel, lilac-breasted rollers, red-eyed doves, the dark-capped bulbul, the grey go-away bird, the white-throated canary, and, of course, lions, elephants, giraffes, zebra, leopards, wart hogs, kudu, jackal, dik-dik, banded mongoose, ostrich, oryx, springbok, and blue wilderbeast. Tiny animals were not missed either. Geko, stick bugs, termites, lizards, scorpions, and countless flies and beetles were photographed as well. Strangely enough, we never saw any snakes or mosquitoes! No complaints there!
We spent a couple of days/nights in Sossusvlei, and tried our hand at photographing the Milky Way under some of the darkest skies in the world. Early one morning we made our way to the famous salt pan known as Deadvlei, arriving just before sunrise to capture the morning light contrasting with the white salt pan, orange dunes, and black camel thorn trees. It’s a striking place to visit and photograph!
Other highlights of the trip include a visit to the Skeleton Coast and a stop at Twyfelfontein to photograph rock carvings between 2,000 to 6,000 years old, which are among some magnificent rock formations.
Next was the small town of Opuwo, followed by an off-road trip (actually, everywhere in Namibia is “off road”!) to visit a nearby Himba village. The Himba are one of the last semi-nomadic tribes in Africa, where the natives truly live off the grid (except for a cell phone or two!!!) Amazing people! They live in mud and straw huts, and have to travel great distances daily on foot to get water for the camp. They tend herds of sheep which have to be penned at night to protect them from wild animals. The men bathe infrequently, while the women take “smoke” baths every other day.
Our final days were spent photographing the abundant wildlife around the salt pan and watering holes in Etosha National Park, and engaging in a game drive and leopard tracking adventure at the AfriCat Foundation at Okonjima Lodge.
Africa is a wonderful place to visit!
I have spent the last two-thirds of my almost 80 years on the planet photographing scenics, wildlife and nature, and have recently become interested is Astrophotography. I use Olympus digital cameras and lenses exclusively for my work.
Bill Harris
Phyllis Bolling Williams, a seventh-generation Wise Countian, has created over 100 quilts for family and friends throughout her lifetime. Now 89 years old, she continues to craft intricate pieces, including her current project—a quilt for her granddaughter’s college graduation. A longtime member of a quilting circle at the Lonesome Pine Regional Library in Wise, Williams’ featured quilt, “Sunshine and Shadows,” showcases her talent for blending colors and patterns.
Suzanne Stryk is an artist who finds equal fascination in the natural world and the visual arts. She’s shown her conceptual nature paintings and assemblages in solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including at The National Academy of Sciences (DC), The Taubman Museum of Art (VA), and The Illinois Institute of Art (Chicago). Suzanne is the recipient of a George Sugarman Foundation grant (2005), a fellowship at Centrum Center for the Arts (WA, 2005), and a Virginia Commission for the Arts fellowship (2011) for her project “Notes on the State of Virginia.” That series evolved into her first book, The Middle of Somewhere: An Artist Explores the Nature of Virginia (Trinity University Press, 2022), which was selected for the Carol Weinstein Lecture Series at the Library of Virginia. Suzanne maintains a studio in Abingdon, Virginia, at the ArtLab, part of the William King Museum of Art.
