June 2013

The Bascom in Highlands, NC, Offers New Colorful Exhibition

The Bascom in Highlands, NC, will present Southern Lights, a colorful exhibition featuring works by Charlotte Foust, Martica Griffin, Krista Harris and Audrey Phillips, on view from June 22 through Sept. 1, 2013. A reception will be held on June 22, from 5-7pm.

A chance meeting of four artists at a painting workshop has resulted in the creative collaboration that produced this colorful exhibition. The artists have woven their various talents and styles together to form the selected compositions, based on their common Southern roots.

Inspired by the distinct sense of place that defines the South, these four talented artists explore color and mark-making in their abstract expressionist art. “I carry with me a sort of patchwork quilt of memories and experiences,” says Krista Harris. “Tastes, smells, snapshots of life and literature, whether real or imagined, make up my ‘South.’ That informs my work.”

Charlotte Foust explains her Southern inspiration: “I have a formal art education, but I always paint from a place that is intuitive, instinctive, raw and independent, and to me that is Southern.”

The artists, joined together by their common backgrounds and interests, have distinct styles, yet each person’s work has a connected thread of line and mark. The viewer will be rewarded by finding these connections in each painting. Each work will complement the others in the exhibition when viewed as a whole. Their mission, as Martica Griffin puts it, “is to make a piece that allows the viewer to feel they are elsewhere - somewhere that they’ve never been, somewhere they’d like to go, somewhere they’ve been but forgotten.”

The artworks by these artists are based on abstraction, making them open to the viewer’s interpretation and imagination. Charlotte Foust says, “Abstraction has a language of its own that speaks to the nature of being human - our spirit.” Krista Harris adds, “Abstract art is truly a universal language. It’s not as mysterious or elusive as some people think. I hope the viewer stands in front of the work and recalls their own Southern memories, and at the same time, has a new appreciation for abstract art.”

Come meet the artists as they demonstrate their painting techniques on The Bascom Terrace Saturday, June 22, from 11am to 2pm, and during the same time on Monday and Tuesday, June 24 and 25.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Center for Life Enrichment (CLE), Highlands, will host a lecture by Steve Aimone, whose workshop brought the four Southern Lights artists together. On Thursday, July 25, from 4-5pm, Aimone will speak on The Spiritual Language of Art: Understanding Nonobjective Painting, at the CLE Lecture Hall: $15 for CLE and Bascom members; $20 for non-members. For more information on this talk, go to their website at (www.clehighlands.com) or call CLE at 828/526-8811.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call The Bascom at 828/526-4949 or visit (www.thebascom.org).

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