‘Paper Canvas Clay’ to open at Alabama Center for the Arts

DECATUR – An exhibit featuring ceramics, paper and canvas from six local artists is opening this weekend at the Alabama Center for the Arts in Decatur.

“Paper Canvas Clay” opens Friday and runs to Aug. 30. The collection of 50 pieces includes works of ceramics, acrylics on paper, oil on canvas, acrylics on canvas, and mixed media illustrations.

The exhibit features humor, recovery, current issues about the ever-changing environment, colorful abstract, and dream-like imagery that will take visitors on a visual journey. An Opening Artist Reception will be held at noon Friday in the Main Gallery. The reception will be free and open to the public.

“Curating ‘Paper Canvas Clay’ was an opportunity to bring together fellow artists that voice different drums, carrying sounds that, I hope, you will hear and enjoy, as much as I have,” said exhibit curator Gail Bergeron, retired art professor at the Alabama Center for the Arts.

“Paper Canvas Clay” will be free and open to the public. The Alabama Center for the Arts is open Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Fridays from 8 a.m. to noon.

The exhibit will feature works Robert Cox, David Edwards, Dennis Johnson, Fay Littrell, Paxton Mobley, and Doris Welch.

• Robert Cox is a visual artist based in the Bankhead National Forest of North Alabama. Cox’s work is informed by the regional landscape of the Southeast and focuses on the biological and cultural heritage of our National Forests and Wilderness areas, Wildlife Refuges, and other public lands. His drawings and paintings, while contemporary, reflect a deep respect for the natural world and the tradition of landscape-inspired art.
  “I believe landscape and environmental-based art is as relevant today as ever. Even in the 21st century, humans still seem to struggle with our relationship with nature, perhaps now more than ever,” said Cox. “The images in my work are totemic rather than narrative — a visual iconography based on the physical characteristics of a specific place. Yet the space a region occupies within my psyche — its spiritual essence and significance — is not so easily documented. My work attempts to bridge that divide. Filtered through memory and emotion, my paintings serve as both memento and map — a reminder of the physical and sensual experience of a region, and a chart to a place beyond the tangible world.”
• David Edwards is a potter and sculptor. An Army brat born in Korea, Edwards spent a significant amount of time in Huntsville throughout the years and has a studio there that he shares with several other ceramic artists. He switches between clean voluminous forms with small feet and layered, multi-fired glaze surfaces, and sculptures that reference the fictional worlds he enjoys between making art. The surfaces of his work are influenced by 2D abstract art and a variety of Asian ceramic traditions. He has a bachelor’s degree from University of Alabama in Huntsville and a master’s degree from the University of Alabama. He also teaches at his studio, Sullivan Pottery, and at The Huntsville Museum of Art.
  “My objects tease many visual sources real, artificed (styles & pop culture), and imagined (fiction),” said Edwards. “Their strength comes from how provocatively and/or subtly I can juxtapose or blend the reference material together. While I intend for the more obvious origins of the parts to elicit amusement from their recognition, it is more important to me for the viewer to derive wonder, revulsion, confusion, hopefully more amusement and a sense of ‘I would never have thought to put those things together in that manner, but I’m glad you did.’ These dichotomies are also present even if I am more focused on formal elements instead of a narrative – maybe even more subtly so.”
• Dennis Johnson was born in Omaha, Neb., and took courses at the Josclyn Museum of Art as a child with Isabelle Threlkeld, a pioneer in children’s art education. He later studied with Larry Edwards at Athens College and received a B.A. degree in art in 1964. Then, he attended the University of Alabama, studied with Mel Price, Howard Goodson and Al Sella, and received his M.A. degree in 1966. Johnson taught art at Athens College (now Athens State University), from 1965-99. He is an associate professor of art emeritus at Athens State University.
  “What art has always done, since the very beginning, is to make that which is not seen, seen,” said Johnson. “And perhaps that which is not real by only imagined real at least in image. An existential reality that comes into existence in the world outside myself as it comes into existence in my mind.”
• Fay Littrell uses her paintings to express the progression of her recovery from trauma and dissociation to resilience and wholeness. Always creative, she pursued art education at 14 years old with private instruction at Athens College. Following high school, she studied art at Queens College in Charlotte, N.C., and through the Institute of European Studies across Europe and Russia. In 1968, she graduated from the University of Alabama with a bachelor of fine arts in painting and commercial design. In 1998, she graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) with a master of fine arts in painting and illustration.
  Much of her work at SCAD was conceptual, illustrating complex concepts such as fear, chaos, control, solitude, bullying, and mentoring. In creating visual images of such concepts, she was able to pull real experiences and emotions from her unconscious. Littrell taught art for a year at the University of Alaska, Matanuska, and then returned home to North Alabama, where she continues to paint her story.
• Paxton Mobley was born in Shreveport, La., and moved to Athens at the age of four. From a very young age, Paxton showed signs of an active imagination and a growing creative ability, and spent his early years exploring the woods and making art. At the age of 13, after his father purchased a Salvador Dali print, Paxton became fascinated with Surrealism and how these past artists and their works gave some justification for his own unique imagination.
  He graduated from Queens University in 1991 with a double major in studio art and art history. By this time, Paxton’s oil paintings had grown to portray all the characteristics of the great Surrealist movement of the 1930s, but as the years passed his work began to slowly take on a meaning of its own. While still being mainly inspired by dreams, Paxton’s works and his core beliefs changed and morphed into a whole new style of art. It was during this time that he wrote a unique creative writing called “10th Dimensional Theology” that changed all his theories and concepts on the make-up of dreams. This new writing led to his creation of Midrealism in 1992, an artistic belief system which differs from Surrealism in its theories on how dreams are formed and used as artistic inspiration.
• Doris Welch is a Fulbright scholar and will be showcasing her acrylic paintings. “Nature and God are two profound sources of inspiration that deeply influence my artistic practice,” Welch said.