The Maude Kerns Art Center presents the 29th annual “Art for All Seasons Membership Show” and “Club Mud Ceramics Holiday Sale,” opening on Monday, November 22 and on view through Friday, December 17.
The Art Center’s largest exhibit of the year showcases the varied and diverse artistry of 175 Art Center members and Club Mud ceramicists, the largest participation in the exhibit’s 29-year history. Art for All Seasons features paintings, drawings, prints, photography, sculpture, jewelry, fiber art, mixed media, digital art, art quilts, jewelry, and functional and decorative ceramics by members of the Art Center and of Club Mud, the Center’s onsite ceramics cooperative.
Tara Kemp, a local graphic designer, painter, and illustrator, exhibits two oil on linen canvases for this year’s exhibit, Stopping at the Market, a plein air painting of the Farmer’s Market, and October Explosion, a vibrant still life of a bouquet of dahlias. Kemp paints in a contemporary impressionist style that she refers to as “abstract realism” – realistic from a distance, yet upon closer inspection, full of abstract shapes and brushstrokes. Kemp is especially attuned to the way colors change in the movement of light into shade, reflecting the colors of the surroundings.
Ginny McVickar, a textile artist, shows two of her striking art quilts in “Art for All Seasons”: Mark the Way, inspired by memories of leading pack horses through the Pecos Wilderness of New Mexico, and Time to Go, showing two white-faced ibises with iridescent red and green wings probing the mud flats of Eastern Oregon. After 20 years as a park ranger in California and Oregon, McVickar discovered her passion for textile art. Largely self-taught, she uses a sewing machine and free motion stitching to create her quilts, moving the fabric under the needle to “paint” images with thread.
Karen Piehl displays two acrylic and collage mixed media works for the 2021 exhibit. She uses a process that includes layering paint, collage, and drawing with pencil, sometimes scratching through and incising the surface with mark-making tools. In Clair, images of a birdcage, musical notes, and a singing bird are combined in a bright palette of colors. The central image in Soaring is a joyful, dancing figure that Piehl refers to as the “inner child.” She says that both of her pieces “uncovered her deep desire to be released from the oppressiveness of these last years, and to find joy.”
