April 2013

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts in Hillsborough, NC, Features Works by Arianna Bara, Chris Graebner and Jude Lobe

The Hillsborough Gallery of Arts in Hillsborough, NC, will present Between Earth & Sky, featuring works by Arianna Bara, Chris Graebner and Jude Lobe, on view from Apr. 22 through May 26, 2013. A reception will be held on Apr. 26, from 6-9pm.

In this show, Arianna Bara’s pieces are inspired by time, time as it is reflected in and captured by stones and fossils. She works in silver, gold and copper.

Stones, with their layers of strata at times swirling delicately as lace and at other times are hard and geometric, remind Bara of the passage of time. Their names; Dragon Blood, Feather Ridge Plume, Red Creek, are so evocative, and imply that in some way things that are transitory can be captured forever in stone.

Some of Bara’s jewelry pieces contain fossils such as trilobites and ammonites, sea creatures that resided in the ancient oceans millions of years ago. Sometimes these fossils become transformed into pyrite so they have a shiny metallic surface. “It puts me in awe to realize that hundreds of millions of years separate those once living creatures from myself, and reminds me of how insignificant our human lives are in the history of this planet,” states Bara.

Chris Graebner works primarily in oil. Sky figures prominently in many of her landscapes. “While I was not the one who originally suggested the title for this show, when I heard the suggestion I immediately knew that it was a good fit for my current work. In these paintings the sky is not simply a background, it sets the mood and in some cases provides the action. And, in most of the paintings in this show, the viewer is looking upward.”

Last fall, Graebner started a series of sunrise paintings based on photographs taken by her husband during their summer on Lake Huron. “Sunrise and sunset paintings are all about the sky and once I started concentrating on it, I found it increasingly fascinating. Clouds, storms, sunlight through clouds, sunlight on clouds, sky and clouds reflected on water… . Then I decided to do some paintings where I removed the sky. There is a central image to carry your eye upward to where the sky should be – but the presence of the sky is only implied by the fact that you are looking up at the statue or steeple or cupola,” Graebner explains.

Jude Lobe is inspired by nature. It is the common thread throughout all of her work, whether painting in oil, cold wax & oil, working in enamels or her small sculptures.

“Nature is my muse. Early on I painted more representational renderings of the landscape, but more recently I am concentrating on evoking the emotion of the scene through brush strokes, color gazes, lines and using a rich palette suggested by the surroundings,” says Lobe. “My intention is for the painting to capture a fleeting moment, like the sun changing the landscape each second as it sets, offering a timeless remembrance we hold in our memory.”

“Many of my new works in this show are cold wax & oil paintings. In nature things change, evolve. Like a forest goes through an ecological succession, so do we as individuals evolve and are at present a compilation of bits and pieces of the experiences we traveled. This idea I want to translate in my art and cold wax & oil lends itself perfectly in expressing this idea,” says Lobe.

Lobe explains, “the cold wax & oil medium affords the opportunity to show a history of the painting by building up layers which somewhat obscures what lies beneath and by techniques of sgraffito (scratching the surface), using transparent glazes, and other techniques reveals bits of past layers. It then represents the history of the object, which becomes a compilation of bits and pieces of its past experiences.”

Come lose yourself for a moment Between Earth & Sky.

For further information check our NC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at 919/732-5001 or visit (www.hillsboroughgallery.com).

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