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this month’s Featured Art Exhibit:

GARRY CHILDS: I form all of my work on the potter’s wheel from ter­ra-cot­ta clay. I apply glazes to the pots when they have reached a state pot­ters call “leather-hard,” when the Clay has stiff­ened up enough to han­dle but is not com­plete­ly dry. Then I carve through the glaze into the still damp clay to achieve the var­i­ous pat­terns seen on the work.

Recent­ly I’ve begun mix­ing and pro­cess­ing clay in small batch­es. This allows me to be able to tweak the mix to achieve the ide­al con­sis­ten­cy for the par­tic­u­lar pieces I am mak­ing at the time. The shape and form of my pots is always my pri­ma­ry inter­est. Col­or, pat­tern and tex­ture are used to enhance and empha­size.

I have always tried to use the Fea­tured Artist shows at HGA as a means of intro­duc­ing some new work and there will be some of that. There will be some “Fat Pots” with smooth, soft sur­faces. There will be more of my bells avail­able and I will also be tak­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to bring in more of my larg­er pieces than I usu­al­ly have on dis­play at the gallery.

PAT MERRIMAN: For this Fea­tured Show, I chose to hon­or my native state by fea­tur­ing four North Car­oli­na land­scapes. The one of Yates Mill, out­side Raleigh, is the third iter­a­tion of the mill I have done over the years. Also includ­ed are Look­ing Glass Falls in Bre­vard, NC, an acrylic on pan­el; Min­go Falls, aka Big Bear Falls in Chero­kee locat­ed on the Qual­la Bound­ry, which is a land trust of the East­ern Band of Chero­kee and Pis­gah Falls Park, Blue Ridge Park­way as seen from Crag­gy Dome Over­look, a favorite place to hike for vis­i­tors. 

There are also six paint­ings depict­ing images evoked by Mary Oliver’s poet­ry in which I’ve used numer­ous acrylic medi­ums, col­lage images and lay­er­ing tech­niques. Final­ly, hon­or­ing the theme of Vari­a­tions, I have fun paint­ings of Antarc­tic Pen­guins, an acrylic on pan­el and float­ing Jel­ly Fish, an acrylic and gold leaf on pan­el. 

NANCY SMITH: One of my favorite places inspir­ing my art­works for this show is Shack­le­ford Bank, North Car­oli­na, part of Cape Look­out Nation­al Seashore. The Banks,’ as it’s called by the locals, is home to 121 hors­es that roam wild among the dunes and along the shore. Though I have paint­ed these hors­es many times in the past, I chal­lenged myself anew to explore vari­a­tions of this area by com­bin­ing squares, rec­tan­gles, and/or cir­cles in each work. The results took me in delight­ful new direc­tions in each piece.