The FMAAA Art Center Main Gallery provides the venue for hosting the travelling exhibition of Iowa's best and brightest watercolorists for the month of February. The Iowa Watercolor Society was organized in 1977 by a small group of enthusiastic watercolorists. IWS now celebrates well over 150 members and offers the opportunity for interested painters to network with artists statewide The Opening Reception for this amazing show is 5pm to 7pm this Friday, February 3rd. Stop in for light snacks and beverages and take in some of Iowa's finest work.
This travelling exhibit moves to Fort Madison from the Mt Pleasant Main Street Art Center (and Art Domestique in Washington before that) and will be showing in the Main Gallery at FMAAA through the month, then at Addington Place for March. We are grateful for the sponsorship and support of Addington Place to help make these two months of exhibition possible.
The Art Center will be hosting two different watercolor classes this month. Beginners or people who have always wondered about how to engage with this medium are encouraged to try out the monthly class by Jerri Sparks on Wednesday, February 22 or the Watercolor Workshop being put on by Watercolor Society artists Vicky Prosser and Mary Johnson on Saturday, February 25th. For more information about the classes or to register contact the Art Center at 319-372-3996.
More information about the Iowa Watercolor Society and images of their current and past exhibitions can be found at:
Iowa Watercolor Society
The FMAAA is very pleased to once again be hosting our youngest area artists in the Main Gallery of the Art Center for the month of January. This exhibition opened on Saturday, January 7, 2023 and will run through 5pm on Saturday, January 28, 2023. The FMAAA is open from 10am - 5pm Tue-Sat. We are very grateful to our sponsors who make it financially possible for us to provide monthly exhibitions. This month, we thank King-Lynk Funeral Home for their generous support of this month's exhibit.
Fisher is masterful in depicting rural Iowa - rural life, kids
being kids, animals being animals. With a BA in Art Education from Iowa
Wesleyan, Robin credits influences of Garth Williams the illustrator of
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, Mary Cassatt's paintings,
right along with her own mother and sister for helping her to find her
own style. We are pleased to share her work with you for the month of
November. This exhibition will be on display through November 30th,
2022. The FMAAA is grateful for the generous sponsorship of Carol and
John Janosik.
"The real things
haven't changed. It is best to be honest and truthful, to make the most
of what we have, to be happy with SIMPLE PLEASURES, and have courage
when things go wrong." Laura Ingalls Wilder
"We
who live in QUIET PLACES have the opportunity to become acquainted with
ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own lives in a way
that is not possible for those keeping up with the crowd."
Laura Ingalls Wilder
“I always loved color and wanted to paint but had no time or money. I was inspired and encouraged by Cris’ work and began sketching when she shared Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
by Betty Edwards. That same year I selected the Art Easel which included a set of watercolor and acrylic paints as one of the prizes of the Mary Kay Cosmetics quarterly Star Consultants Program. My first painting was an acrylic of my favorite childhood vacation spot: Mount Baldy in Grand Lake, Colorado. It was a gift for my father who had just moved into a nursing home. He was not a happy camper at the time. He looked at my art and replied, “Oh, calendar art.” I immediately called Cris and said “I think I got slammed, what is calendar art?”
Being sisters-in-law and living in different states we spoke by phone often, and as the years went on, we noticed that we had a mutual love of color and art. In 2012 while we were in Fort Madison together, we took a class offered by Pat Wynn. We thoroughly enjoyed it so in 2019 we did it again. We had so much fun that week that we swore to do it every chance we got. We became brave and tried new things. We went plein air painting with comic results, and decided that one needs the proper setup. We even played with acrylic pourings. We learned to laugh at our disasters and urged each other to try something
outside our comfort zones. But it was a watercolor plein air class in Tubac Arizona that cemented our painting relationship and started us thinking about how to grow as artists. When we’re in Ohio we head for Lib’s Market and sketch the folks there. When we’re in Colorado we paint the mountains. When we’re in Iowa we paint the prairie and prairie houses. We always look forward to the next time we’re together and can paint and sketch.
“I think I always dabbled in artsy things. I think I’m most comfortable with a pen, pencil or brush in my hand. I taught myself decorative art from books. I painted the walls, chairs and baskets. I turned rocks into cottages and painted greeting cards to send to my granddaughter. I painted wisteria cascading from vines on the wall to a wrought iron fence, egrets on the stairway wall and a street scene on the wall in the basement. There were grapevines and lizards and chickadees in the kitchen. I’m reminded that I told people that if they stood still too long, I might paint them. And for a short time before I found watercolor and pigment, I painted birds in oils.”
The September group exhibition of Magic in Pencils by Mandy Robertson, Ray McKee, and Vicky Dovenspike is of hyper realistic pencil work, with all three artists engaged in highly detailed renderings yet retaining their own recognizable style.
Mandy Robertson's primary medium is colored pencil. She states that she, "likes to render what I see as accurately as I can, with the occassional bit of whimsy thrown in. I consider my work 'pencil paintings' because of the layering involved and richness of color achieved. My subjects are varied: portraiture, still lifes, landscapes, florals, etc... I also enjoy working in graphite, pastels, oil pastels, acrylics, and wood burning."
Ray McKee is a retired investment broker and former Air Force Reserve Lt. Colonel. Because of his color blindness, he sticks with black and white graphite as his medium of choice.
Vicky Dovenspike is a poet and an artist. Of her artistic practice she states: "What I feel I paint, and draw what I like. There will always be somebody who does better than me. But this I know - there will never be another me."
This exhibition will be on display from Sep 2 - Oct 1 in the Main Gallery. We thank month's sponsor Great River Health Systems for their generous sponsorship which makes exhibitions like this possible for our community.
an exhibition of paintings by Elisabeth Heying
Aug 5 - 27, 2022
Matter endures until it doesn’t, and then it becomes something else; we don’t notice until we do, and then what becomes of us? Shifting Matters is
an exhibition of paintings exploring the transience of our
surroundings, the fluidity of the stationary, and our ever-human
response to change. In this exhibition, the painted surface plays
different roles from one piece to the next to mirror the act of
perception. The natural and constructed world around us gradually
transforms as a result of construction and demolition, erosion and
accretion. We shape the world around us, and the world shapes us in
return. This body of work investigates the material of paint and the
materiality of the world around us as a negotiation of time, space, and
energy.
Curatorial support: Journie Kirdain
Design: Bruno Suarez Bango
Sponsored by: Chuck & Kathy Osmanski
www.elisabethheying.com | @elisabeth.heying
More information about the artist:
Elisabeth Heying is an
artist, material researcher and educator. Her paintings explore place,
landscape and surface as records of and containers for human experience. The
inherent identities of material, both within the landscape and within the
painting process, serve as a reflexive key to unlocking connection between
people and place. In Elisabeth’s work, the painted surface plays different
roles from one piece to the next to mirror the process of perception. Paint is
used as color and form to render pictorial space, it’s accrued to physically
evoke textured surfaces, and it’s used in complement to the actual minerals and
objects of the land. This varied approach to materiality engages ideas of truth
and artifice, nature and construction, and entropy and control as poetic
metaphor.
Born in Minnesota, Elisabeth has been living and working in Chicago, IL since
2011. She received both her MFA in Painting & Drawing from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2022, and her BFA in 2015. Elisabeth was
the director of a state of the art facility called StudioLab at SAIC, where she
educated students on how to make and use traditional and modern painting and
drawing materials for over six years. She developed education resource
collections including a Library, a Material Archive of historic pigments and
materials and a Virtual Database of instructional videos. Elisabeth received
the Roads Scholarship for Research and Travel in 2020, has exhibited widely in
group exhibitions throughout the Chicago area and debuted her first solo
exhibition, Ache of Erosion, at SITE Galleries in 2021.
Fort Madison Area Arts Association | 825 Avenue G Fort Madison, Iowa 52627 | 319
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All image rights retained to Fort Madison Area Arts Association or the artist unless otherwise noted.