Tag: Fine Arts

Aspiring yogis and curious connoisseurs of contemporary art, unite! Second Street Gallery is hosting another installment of the monthly Second Saturday Yoga Art Grooves series that launched in the fall of 2014. A collaboration between Opal Yoga and Second Street Gallery, each event in the series is “its own unique happening, a collusion of artist, art, curation and a particular teacher’s class,” said Opal Yoga owner and instructor, Karen Thomas.

Having a hard time picturing what it’s like to stretch and sweat in the white box of the gallery? Though galleries and museums are sometimes seen as pristine venues that don’t allow visitors to touch anything, contemporary art and yoga actually have plenty in common. “Both disciplines require going into the zone to complete the process and bring something from that place back into the world,” said Second Street’s Tosha Grantham. “Everyone has the freedom to engage.” In fact, the partnering of yoga with contemporary art begins to seem quite natural the more one thinks about it.

“While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all,” wrote renowned author Ray Bradbury. So too, yoga.

Grantham views the collaboration as an opportunity for “expanding into art-friendly communities that may not visit the gallery on a regular basis, but had expressed interest.” Similar events take place at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke and plenty of other arts venues around the state. In fact, Second Street Gallery is participating in an informal movement to invite people into galleries for more than just art. Exploring and expanding the idea of the gallery as a community art space, many galleries around the world are opening their doors to diverse programming like yoga, dance classes and other non-traditional events. Not only do activities like these begin to wear away at perceived barriers to cultural experiences, they also provide new ways to engage with art.

And local instructors keep this in mind while planning the sessions at Second Street. Thomas confirms this as one of the foundational ideas of the series. “The idea is to encourage teachers to spend some time at the gallery with the exhibit that they’ll be teaching, with the suspicion that the art will consciously and unconsciously inform the yoga classes in terms of poses offered, philosophical themes, and musical selections,” she said. Lynsie McKeown is owner of Awakening Balance Yoga and will lead the February 14 yoga session. An important part of McKeown’s planning is “visiting the gallery to view the art and learn more about the artist in order to gain inspiration for the flow that I’ll be teaching.”

McKeown is shaping her lesson around an exhibit of new work by Yeni Mao, titled “The Conqueror.” Mao is a Canadian-born artist who studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and now lives and works in New York. He has exhibited and participated in residencies around the world.

Featuring Mao’s most recent work—some pieces completed just a few days ago—this exhibit is centered on an exploration of Genghis Khan. Well, not exactly the Great Khan himself. Rather, Mao reflects, “I would say the interest lies not in actually Genghis Khan but the representation of his story.” As he focused on three films about Genghis Khan that were made in the last six decades, Mao found that “they became markers of time themselves, because the era they were made in was written all over them. I mean, the great John Wayne in yellowface, it’s comical. Of course, it’s a history that is somewhat fictionalized. I wanted to look at that fictionalization, and in turn, do it once again myself.”

To provide structure in this examination, Mao used the Fibonacci number sequence as a lens to distort and filter each film, challenging the narrative represented in each as well as the historical veracity of beliefs about Khan.The resulting video, sculpture and letterpress prints are literally, as well as symbolically, layered and complex.

Even if you have visited the gallery recently, the yoga event is an opportunity to experience the work anew. “Working at SSG, I see the exhibitions every day but getting on the mat with instruction inspired by the exhibition, allows for a totally new perspective and experience of the artwork,” said Second Street’s outreach and operations manager, Erica Barnes. The current exhibit should be no exception to this.

Second Saturday Yoga Art Grooves will take place at Second Street Gallery on February 14 from 3-4:15pm. For additional details or to reserve your spot in advance, visit www.secondstreetgallery.org. Walk-ins are also welcome. The gallery will remain open to visitors who are interested in viewing the exhibit without participating in the yoga event, and Yeni Mao’s work exhibited in “The Conqueror” will remain on display through February 28 during normal gallery hours.

What other non-traditional art forms fit in a gallery? Tell us in the comments.

Crozet natives Kathleen and Minal Mistry get close to nature in their duo show “Wood and Wings” at C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery. Kathleen pairs colorful bird paintings with mixed metal jewelry such as pendants displaying miniature versions of her aviary artwork. Meanwhile, Minal’s woodwork upcycles industrial products like pallets and construction waste to become one-of-a-kind furnishings. The twosome’s works capture Virginia’s natural heritage through vibrant paints and both reclaimed and unprocessed woods.

Free, 6pm. C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery, 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 972-9500.

 

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

First Fridays: February 6, 2015.

BON Cafe 100 W. South St., Ste. 1D. “Paintings and Collages,” featuring works by Nym Pedersen. 5-7pm.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Wood and Wings,” featuring paintings, jewelry, and woodwork by Kathleen and Minal Mistry. 6-8pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Vortex 2015,” featuring UVA School of Architecture student projects from an annual design-based contest. 5:30-7:30pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Sentiments of Mine,” featuring acrylic, watercolor and ink works by Judith Ely. 5:30-7pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolftrap Rd. “Selections 2015,” featuring work by Pam Black, Peyton Hurt Millikan, Kris Iden, Ann Lyne, David Summers, Theo van Groll and Sanjay Vora. 5:30-7:30pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Figure Drawing: Theme and Variation” in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Privacy in America – A Group Show” in the Lower Hall North Gallery; “Frank Riccio, 1958-2014” in the Lower Hall South Gallery; “Art Reach,” featuring children’s art and celebrating community, diversity and creative self-expression and includes over 60 paintings and mosaics in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Mudhouse Downtown 213 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Volando el Bosque,” featuring photography by Jesus Pino. 7am-11pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “A Decade of Drawing–Small Works,” featuring pastel drawings by Nancy Galloway. 5:30-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “The Conqueror,” featuring sculpture, letterpress prints and video by Yeni Mao. 5:30-7:30pm.

Vinegar Hill Cafe 233 Fourth St. NW. “Group Black & White Photo Exhibit,” featuring photography by Bill Mauzy, Brian Komatz and MB Celella. 5:30-7:30pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. Pastel and oil paints works by Julia Lesnichy. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 Water St. “Elements,” featuring encaustic works by Amanda Smith. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Albemarle County Courthouse 501 Jefferson St. “Courthouse Art Exhibit,” featuring watercolor, acrylic and mixed medium works by the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

Chroma Projects 107 Vincennes Rd. “Books, being as buildings; Buildings, being as books,” featuring paintings by Warren Boeschenstein, Richard Crozier and Ephraim Rubenstein, with a reception on Sunday, February 8, 3:30-5:30pm.

Focus Contemporary Art 385 Valley St., Scottsville. “New work by studio artists,” featuring mixed media sculptures, works on paper and oil paintings by Michelle Gagliano, Robert Strini and Linda Wachtmeister, with a reception on Thursday, February 12, 6-8pm.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Lucian Freud Etchings” and “Figures for the Soul.”

Hot Cakes 1137-A Emmet St. Watercolor works by adult students of Lee Alter. February 15 – March 28.

IX Art Park 963 2nd St. SE “Cardinal on the Wall of Wishes,” featuring a wall mural by Ollie Gillard.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Art and Country” and “New Narratives: Papunya Tjupi Prints with Cicada Press.”

Pigment 1229 Harris St. “Paintings by Dave Moore,” featuring mixed media works by Dave Moore, with a reception Saturday, February 14, 4-6pm.

Unitarian Church 717 Rugby Rd. “New Beginnings,” featuring works in oil, watercolor, acrylic, collage, photo, ink and graphite and pastel by members of the BozART Group.

 

Imagine entering a cave-like studio, its floor spotted with rags and walls textured with years of paint flicked off a loaded brush. You’re naked when you climb onto a small, sheet-covered bed, fully prepared to hold your pose for hours. Standing just a few feet away, an artist scrutinizes your body as he prepares to etch its lines into a copper plate—and when he does, you know he’ll capture your true essence in that moment.

Such was the reality for the subjects of celebrated British artist Lucian Freud (a grandson of Sigmund Freud), whose subjects included Kate Moss, Jerry Hall and ordinary people like his children, his art dealer and the local welfare benefits distributor. The Fralin Museum’s latest exhibition, “Lucian Freud: Etchings,” offers a collection of rarely seen prints and one painting from the last two decades of Freud’s life.

“An etching is made when an artist uses a needle to push forward lines on a wax- covered copper plate,” said Jennifer Farrell, curator of the exhibit and the newly appointed associate curator of modern and contemporary prints and illustrated books at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. “When it’s taken to the master printer, it’s immersed in an acid bath that bites into the plate. What’s right will be left, and what’s light will be dark, and then what the work really looks like will be revealed. As Freud described it, ‘One dip, really quick and dangerous.’”

Freud worked from direct observation, so his perspective was the single lens through which every relationship was filtered. “Freud wanted to capture the essence of his exchange with a person, animal or scene,” said Farrell. “He famously described his work as autobiographical. Quite frequently, he would go out to dinner with his subjects—not the horses and the dogs—because he could see their small gestures or the way they read a menu.”

In his later years, Freud’s heavy impasto (the build up of paint as a textural element on the canvas) stood in direct opposition to seamless, invisible brushstrokes of many of his peers.

“There’s a famous story that he painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, and this was a huge deal, of course,” Farrell said. “He painted it in his own manner, and people complained and said that it was an insult and he made her look older and her skin look unappealing. What’s interesting is that one of his associates later took a picture of the Queen, a color photograph, and held half of that up next to the painting of the Queen, and it matched almost exactly.”

Freud refused to create an idealized version of people. He also refused commissions, which allowed him to choose his subjects, cultivate relationships and explore the intimate artist-sitter dynamic in his work.

“Many subjects have their eyes closed, which gives us as viewers permission to look closely at their bodies,” Farrell said.

Freud was also interested in etching women who were heavily pregnant. “He depicted Jerry Hall when she was eight months pregnant. You see that fatigue from not only posing but from being so pregnant, and he really captures that exhaustion and excitement, the contradictory feelings of the moment.”

Etching was an edgy process for Freud, who thought of the medium as an alternative to painting. “He wasn’t interested in Aquatint or wood blocks or learning how to make prints, but Freud was a well-known gambler, and prints are about gambling,” Farrell said.

“Lucian Freud: Etchings” will be on exhibition at the The Fralin Museum of Art through April 19. Learn more about the artist’s life and practice on March 21, when Freud’s former assistant, David Dawson, visits UVA for a lecture.

It’s all too frequent that I overhear someone mention that she’d “love to go to the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, if only it wasn’t so far away.” To put this in perspective, the drive from downtown Charlottesville to the museum takes about 10 minutes. It’s roughly double that if you ride the public bus. Remember though: The Kluge-Ruhe is the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to the exhibition and study of Australian Aboriginal art.

This means that you could drive all the way to New York (seven hours) or Los Angeles (37 hours) and still not have access to the exhibits and educational opportunities that the short drive to the Kluge-Ruhe enables. Beginning this month, one of those offerings is an exhibit titled “New Narratives: Papunya Tjupi Prints with Cicada Press.” The exhibit features 14 prints that were created through an eight-year partnership between two Australian arts organizations, the Papunya Tjupi Art Center and Cicada Press, a printmaking studio.

Home to the art center, the Papunya community in Australia’s Northern Territory is notable as the birthplace of Western Desert art. This movement is best known for its iconic dot paintings and for bringing international attention to Aboriginal art in the 1970s and ’80s. Largely credited to a teacher in the Papunya settlement, Geoffrey Bardon, the movement began through his efforts to encourage indigenous artists to use acrylic paint, rather than a traditional medium like sand or body paint. Though he introduced this new medium, Bardon was careful to foster the unique Aboriginal style of visual expression rather than teaching other art techniques. Today, that respect for tradition is passed down to the next generation by the elder artists at Papunya Tjupi.

Of the more than 100 emerging artists working at the Papunya Tjupi Art Center, many are descendants of the original Western Desert artists. They continue in the artistic tradition as a way to preserve and depict their ancestral narratives, called dreamings. The patterns and iconography found in their paintings are traditional in Aboriginal culture, but paint provides a more permanent and transportable display, allowing for a broader audience and enduring archive.

After playing a significant role in establishing the Papunya Tjupi Art Center, Aboriginal art scholar Vivien Johnson reached out to Sydney’s Cicada Press in 2006 to propose a partnership built to once again bring a new medium to Aboriginal art. Years later, the partnership between Cicada Press and Papunya Tjupi Art Center continues to combine Aboriginal painting with printmaking.

“Much like any artist who is exposed to a new medium in which to express their content, there are challenges to face,” said Cicada Press Director Michael Kempson. “While etching is a medium with several centuries of tradition, it is in the eyes of this next generation of artists at Papunya a new medium.”

Another challenge is the 36-hour drive that separates the Papunya Tjupi Art Center and Cicada Press. This distance means the collaborative process takes time and happens infrequently, for now. Kempson hopes to establish a self-sustaining print workshop at the art center one day. Until then, artists are lucky if they get to work together in person once a year. When they do meet, a painter discusses her vision with a printmaker, who then attempts to translate that vision into a completed piece of work.

The “New Narratives” exhibit showcases these works and demonstrates how a new medium changes the technique of representation without altering the meaning. Visually, the effect of the multimedia work is invigorating. And like much of Aboriginal art, the pieces can be viewed in a strictly abstract sense or as a narrative.

“You can see some of the standard symbols associated with Western Desert painting, concentric circles, which represent places and, of course, dots which are a kind of conventional motif,” said Kluge-Ruhe Director Margo Smith. “Yet there is a feeling of experimentation in these works. The intaglio process adds considerable depth to the two-dimensional prints, the same way that layering of dots does in paintings from this area.”

Though Cicada Press was established in 2004 and has been working with Papunya Tjupi since 2006, its relationship with Charlottesville only began in 2013, through a group exhibit at the Kluge-Ruhe. “That was when I learned about Michael Kempson’s work with the artists from Papunya,” said Smith. “The Kluge-Ruhe Collection contains quite a lot of work from Papunya so we were interested to see new developments by these artists and their descendants.” Since then, Kempson has continued to strengthen his organization’s relationship with our city, curating the exhibit at the Kluge-Ruhe and collaborating on another print project with art students at UVA.

“Kluge-Ruhe is a very significant and highly respected museum in the eyes of Australians who have a commitment to Australian Aboriginal art,” said Kempson, making it clear that, even with a roughly 24-hour flight from Sydney, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection is well worth the trip.

“New Narratives” will remain on display through mid-May. Michael Kempson will give an in-person talk about the exhibit on March 26.

How far would you travel for art? Tell us in the comments.

It’s a cold world out there for trash. The wrap on your grab-and-go sandwich, the scratched CDs and ’80s Walkman, the broken toys and worn-out furniture and colorful detritus of rich, fast-paced lives are doomed to collect in landfills, antique shops and garbage-strewn street corners—unless an artist comes along.

“In 1992, my neighbor was throwing out a piece of scrap metal in his trash. I thought it was kind of interesting and random, so I brought it into my studio,” said Michael Fitts, a Charlottesville-based artist whose photorealistic Pop Art-inspired oil paintings on metal can be seen in Piedmont of Virginia Community College’s upcoming show, “A Necessary Fiction.”

“I did an abstract painting on it, and even though abstract art is not a natural fit for me, I kept the piece,” he said. “I knew it was something that would be with me a long time.”

Fitts, who worked as graphic designer and art director for years before his retirement in 2013, began collecting interesting pieces of scrap metal wherever he could find it: local scrapyards, junk shops, construction sites. “I’m constantly on the hunt, driving down country roads looking for barns that have collapsed. There are guys who do construction or roofing work and know I’ll pay them for metal if they lob it into my yard.”

It can take months before he decides which object he wants to paint onto his found canvas. When he does, it tends to be a consumable object that reminds him of childhood: a needle and a spool of thread, a box of Junior Mints, a collapsed can of Orange Crush.

Fitts said he avoids dark subject matter in favor of levity. “I did a painting of a ketchup pack that had exploded, which was an idea I’d had for a while. I remember being a kid in the cafeteria at school and stomping on a ketchup pack and getting in trouble for it,” he said. “People said they burst out laughing when they saw it.”

Kim Boggs, a mixed media artist whose sculptural assemblages will be shown alongside Fitts’ work, shares his appreciation for found materials—and the un-serious nature of juxtaposing these objects with artistic intention.

“When I was a little girl, my mom took me to garage sales and antique shops. She liked intricate silver spoons whereas I liked the dirty, rusty, not-completely-in-one-piece things. I was always attracted to patina and aging wood and metal and the crackling of paint that happens with age,” she said.

For years, Boggs collected objects and never used them—until 2007, when a switch flipped in her mind. “I remember thinking, ‘You know what, I’m ready to alter these.’ Things had always been precious in their original form to me, but now I saw their potential to be combined with other things and I was willing to slice them up.”

Now she creates hanging sculptures that layer drawers, toys, boards, Industrial Revolution-era foundry molds and other antique wooden objects, often in unusual and hard-to-find shades of peeling paint. “I go searching for colors,” she said. “I found a pinball board from the ’50s in all these gorgeous colors and wooden drawers that were painted with a mustard color I’d never found anywhere else.”

Boggs’ magpie tendencies allow a similar approach to Fitts’. “My very first official show was in 2012 at the Bridge, and it was all about toys and art as play. I believe that art can be elevated, but it should also have joy to sustain the artist.”

“A Necessary Fiction” opens on January 23 at the PVCC Gallery. The exhibit will be on display through April 1 alongside the group show “Summer of Love.” Info at www.pvcc.edu.

Photos of secluded beaches, colorful fishing boats and turquoise waves hang on the walls of Second Street Gallery, which has been temporarily overrun with harbor themes: a white ship-shaped structure from which dozens of folded origami boats dangle and twirl, a wash of sand and seashells across the gallery floor, a navy blue wall bearing chalk outlines of tall ships and two flat screen TVs on which foaming waves crash repeatedly onshore.

The exhibit, “Portraits of Yemaya” by Atlanta-based artist and scholar Dr. Arturo Lindsay, first appears to be an ethnographic travel diary, cataloging the sun-worn face of a fisherman as he tosses a glittering net over the sea, arranging the small ebony statue of a woman nursing a child. But for Lindsay, who has spent the last three-and-a-half years researching the spiritual and aesthetic retentions and reinvention of the African Diaspora in contemporary American culture, the show paints an image of God.

A native of the Panamanian port city Colon, Lindsay is a self-described believer in the Ifá spiritual traditions of the Yoruba, a West African ethnic group largely enslaved and brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. In his artist statement Lindsay wrote that “Yemaya is the Yoruba Orisha (maternal Deity) whose domain is the sea. Her colors are blue and white and her temperament is gentle and loving until provoked.”

Many of these images come from field research in port cities throughout the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, including Portobelo, a 16th century Spanish colonial village on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama, where Lindsay is building a year-round residency for international artists and environmentalists.

Lindsay’s projects often include workshops with children from underserved communities. His wood-and-origami sculptural piece, titled “The Dream Machine,” was created in collaboration with approximately 20 children between the ages of 7 and 11 in Cairo, Egypt, in 2012.

“When I met the kids [in Cairo], one of the questions I started asking was ‘what is the Egypt you would like to live in?’” Lindsay said. “This is right after the revolution, when energy was high and people had dreams, and I think these were orphans or children in one parent homes. They started to call out things. Things like ‘clean streets,’ ‘no more bullying’ and ‘everybody getting along together.’ There was such an outpouring—you could not hold these kids back.”

He told them they folded their dreams into every paper boat and promised to showcase their work in future exhibits. Their ideals no doubt resonated with his own experience as a junior in high school, when “an anti-poverty program office of economic opportunity created a Brooklyn theater for kids in Brooklyn [where Lindsay migrated with his family at age 12]. You had to audition for it, but it got us off the street and into the discipline of art.”

While studying theater at Central Connecticut State University, he began to paint as well. After hanging his work at the student center, a group of visiting student directors took interest and he began receiving exhibition requests. Soon the self-taught artist was accepted to University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

While Lindsay seeks to capture divinity in his work, he continues to use art as a vehicle for bringing about positive social change. On January 16, he will lead kids from Charlottesville’s Boys & Girls Club in a workshop to fold origami boats and arrange them in a circle in front of “The Dream Machine.” “It will become ‘The Circle of Hope,’” he said. “My handler [in Egypt] is going to appear via Skype. The children will hear someone in Egypt, their minds will be transported to Cairo, and the kids in Cairo will know I kept their promise.”

Arturo Lindsay appears at Second Street Gallery on January 16 at 5:30pm for a discussion with curator Tosha Grantham.

Paul Handler is difficult to shoehorn. Despite possessing uncommon creativity, he subscribes to no single genre in his pursuits. It is rare, if not impossible, to find work that is attributed solely to his particular genius. Rather, Handler’s name has been made through his behind-the-scenes work in support of artistic co-conspirator Mara Sprafkin—until recently.

In 2014, Handler took the lead in organizing the New City Artist Exchange in which 17 local artists created limited edition work to share within the group. Though Sprafkin helped inspire the idea, local nonprofit New City Arts offered a home and administrative support for the project early in the planning process. At that point, Sprafkin took a backseat, and Handler, ahem, handled it from there. “Paul is pretty open for thinking outside the box,” noted Sprafkin. So, it is fitting that New City Arts’ Executive Director Maureen Brondyke managed certain project logistics, including the selection of boxes in which to package the artwork.

Since Handler was still largely unknown in the local arts community at the beginning, Brondyke also provided guidance and expertise in selecting the participating artists. While shaping and coordinating the Artist Exchange, however, Handler developed close relationships with other Charlottesville artists, and encouraged them to do the same. “The artist community in Charlottesville is pretty disparate. This is why it was important that all the participating artists were Charlottesville-based. This was really a chance for us to begin to connect with each other,” said Sprafkin.

The group of artists who piloted the project are Hannah Barefoot, Kendall Cox, Dean Dass, Amanda Finn, Stephanie Fishwick, Jessica Lee, Matt Leech, Victoria Long, Malena Magnolia, Joy Meyer, Matt Pamer, Pamela Pecchio, Katie Pennock, Laura Snyder, Ashley Walton and Sprafkin. Together, their works represent a diversity of tastes and local skills, including photography, painting, drawing, calligraphy, textile design and printmaking

“One of the most exciting things was that artists were at the center of it; they made and received artwork for and from each other, which resulted in new art and new friendships,” said Brondyke.

At an event in November, each artist received one set of work, containing a piece by each participant. One set was also donated to The Haven’s winter art auction to support the local day shelter, and another set will be archived by New City Arts. When Brondyke also offered to have New City Arts host an exhibit of the work from the Artist Exchange, Sprafkin said that she and Handler “decided it was important to let the community see some of the great and interesting artwork made by local artists. Many of the artists in the exchange don’t show regularly in Charlottesville but show elsewhere in the country and internationally.”

All 17 works will be on public display in January at the WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery on Water Street. Individual works will be available for purchase at an opening reception on January 9 from 5-7pm. Sprafkin summed up the mutual satisfaction from the collaboration: “As Paul said, it was surprising to just see so much wonderful work. When you ask people to participate in something and it ends up happening, it is really amazing.”

 

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

First Fridays: January 2, 2014.

Batesville Market 6624 Plank Rd., Batesville. “Locals,” featuring photo portraits by Rich Tarbell. 4-6pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Transcending Material,” featuring sculptural and functional work by Marti Mocahbee and Phillip Nolley in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “New Members Show,” featuring the work of McGuffey’s 18 newest members in the Lower and Upper Hall galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Heart of Home: A Treasure Chest of Memories,” featuring oil on canvas by Randy Baskerville. 6-8pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

C’ville Arts 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Studio Sale,” featuring the work of several local member artists.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Crescent Hall Quilters,” featuring handmade quilts by the Crescent Hall Quilters group, through January 16.

Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Art at the 9: The Holiday Show,” featuring oil and watercolor paintings by the Charlottesville-Albemarle Art Society.

Focus Contemporary Art 385 Valley St., Scottsville. “Ongoing Exhibition by Gallery Artists,” featuring works by Robert Strini, Linda Wachtmeister and Michelle Gagliano.

HotCakes 1137 Emmet St. N. “Impressionist Landscapes and Still Life,” featuring the work of Julia Lesnichy.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Art and Country,” featuring a selection of works from the permanent collection.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Twenty!” featuring over 30 artists celebrating the gallery’s 20th anniversary with a reception on Friday, January 9, 5:30 – 7:30pm.

Mudhouse 213 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Volando El Bosque,” featuring photography by Jesus Pino.

Pigment 1229 Harris St. “Pleasant Days,” featuring mixed media paintings by Jim Calhoun with a reception on Saturday, January 10, 4-6pm.

Robertson Hall McIntire School of Commerce, UVA. “50+ Works by Russ Warren,” featuring paintings in acrylic and oil crayon with a reception on Thursday, January 22, 4:30pm – 7:30pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Portraits of Yemaya,” featuring photography, painting and installation by Arturo Lindsay.

The Garage 100 Jefferson St. “Here and There,” featuring multimedia works by Victoria Long and Roger Williams with a reception on Friday, January 9, 5-7pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “BozArt Gallery Member Show” with a reception on Sunday, January 4, 12:30-2:30pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 103 3rd St. NE “Small Works for the Holidays,” featuring local artists Nancy Bass, Elizabeth Geiger, John Grant, Tim Michel, Priscilla Whitlcok, John Younger and many others.

WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 Water St. “New City Artist Exchange,” featuring original works from 17 Charlottesville-based artists, with a reception on Friday, January 9, 5-7pm.

Every week for the last 10 months, I’ve interviewed area artists for this column.

Over coffee and phone lines I’ve been privileged to speak with writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, actors and mixed media creators. We’d talk for an hour, I’d write for three more, and in the process I’ve found a few themes that cause ordinary people with recognizable lives to wake up every day and slip on the artist’s mantle because they feel they must.

They make art for no money (or very little) and range from wide-eyed hopefuls to seasoned vets. They are full-timers and freelancers, parents and children, teenage students and octogenarians, and they measure the meaning of life not by profit or social approval but by something else entirely.

The new year is a time when most of us resolve to improve our lives. If your best life includes viewing your world through an artistic lens, here are 13 of my favorite suggestions for becoming an artist in 2015.

1. Pay extraordinary attention to ordinary things.

“These aren’t just people sharing their stories but what connects us in those stories. Even when these [nonfiction essays] are about a man with alcoholism or a breakup, they’re about me on some level. There’s something to me about paying attention to our experiences and allowing them to be meaningful. Mundane things that happen to us can be transformed if we really notice them.”—Susan McCulley, contributor to the online literary journal Full Grown People, on essay writing

2. Chase experiences, not beauty.

“If people describe my work as pretty, I feel insulted on some level because all it means is that I was present for something beautiful. A picture is what it is, it’s accurate, but the truth of a picture is extremely subjective. I’m trying to harness some sort of visceral experience.”—Photojournalist Philip de Jong on creating beautiful photography

3. Be prolific, not perfect.

“Think about humans versus dandelions. We gestate our young, these singular creatures, and take care of them for years. Some artists work that way, but there’s another way of looking at it. Dandelions release thousands of seeds. The majority don’t survive, but everywhere there can be a dandelion, there will be a dandelion.”—Artist Warren Craghead on his rapid production of mixed media works

4. Tell your truth.

“[Writing is] an act of translating what’s in your head to what someone who’s not in your head can understand. I’m always a little suspicious if there’s a book that everyone loves because it’s probably safer somehow—more eager to please. I don’t think fiction should be likable. I only care if a story is complex and compelling and feels real.”—Elliott Holt, author, on what she’s learned since winning the Pushcart Prize

5. Trust your instincts.

“So much of the work I’m doing now, from teaching to coaching to writing, has been created because of people who knew Dirty Barbie and either wanted to see it again or see more of my work. The biggest lesson has been to be true to my roots, my storytelling and my personality. I hadn’t trusted myself like that before.”—Denise Stewart, writer and actor, on the success of her blog- based, one-woman play Dirty Barbie and Other Girlhood Tales

6. Embrace change.

“Even in real life, we don’t know how much we’re embellishing in our heads. When I try to fact check my memory, I’m shocked by how much it morphs. Art morphs too.”—Writer Araxe Hajian on collaborative non-fiction

7. Create a connection.

“Art has a unique role in claiming what matters, of saying, ‘this is meaningful,’ and bringing the next layer of wonder to those experiences. Whether that’s setting a table or arranging a house—even how I stack the wood I use to heat my home feels like the art of the everyday to me. For all our differences as people, the similarities are what I come to. Human beings want to connect to themselves and each other and plants and something higher than themselves. And growing food and eating it on Sunday nights with my neighbors is one of the most profound experiences I can create.”—Farmer and artist Kate Daughdrill on social sculpture

8. Share your practice with others.

“It’s difficult to make a living wage in this mass-produced society, and I think it’s important to support people who want to make a living from a craft or [art] that they make with their hands. It’s a very human desire to want a tribe, to feel like you’re not alone. I think letting other people see you doing something [creative] can be really comforting. We want people to come up to us and talk to us. That’s the root of why community can be an asset, because you connect with people who can guide you through the good and the bad.” —Amber Karnes on performance knitting

9. Do whatever you want.

“The mediums themselves are nothing but tools, like you’d choose a paintbrush or pencil. Painting is a tool, photography is a tool and the English language is a tool for me to use at my discretion. If I need to write a story, I’ll write a story. Any artist can do anything they want to do at any given time. The art world that I see is just a celebration of that idea.”—Comic artist, musician and writer Andy Friedman on creating through multiple art forms

10. Change your perspective.

“When you focus in on this really small scale your eyes have to adjust. Now, if I brush up against a wall with moss on it, I see a whole microcosm is destroyed. Even while we’re drilling offshore, barnacles are attaching to the ship. Salt is corroding the hull even while we’re destroying the bedrock.”—Sculptor Justin Poe on micro- and macro-landscapes

11. Believe in magic.

“In nonfiction, the truth defies belief with much greater regularity than even the most imaginative fiction does. So many of my stories, I’ve thought to myself while writing, ‘There is no way anyone would believe this if I were writing a novel. It doesn’t pass the smell test.’ And yet it happened, and I can prove it.” —Earl Swift, longtime reporter and novelist, on the nature of reality

12. Make your mark.

“I have a pile of stuff. In the end, I know they’re gonna pull a dumpster up, and there goes the stuff. When the apocalypse comes, this will outlast everything. You know what most artists do? They fill up space. It’s how they say, ‘I was here.’”—Saul Kaplan, fine artist and poet, on switching to ceramic canvases after 65 years of drawing

13. Enjoy the process.

“Everyone is doing it for the love, not the money. I think artists get caught up in making art with a capital A, but I’d rather create an experience where people feel relaxed and engaged and invited in, and they can walk away saying ‘That made me think, but I also had some laughs.’ You want the end product to be good, but in the meantime you want to have fun.” —Miller Murray Susen, writer, actor and director, on her work in volunteer theater