September 2011

The Caldwell Arts Council in Lenoir, NC, Offers Group Exhibit

The Caldwell Arts Council in Lenoir, NC, will present the exhibit, Town & Country, featuring works by Jean Cauthen (Mint Hill, NC), Diane Pike (Denver, NC), Chrys Riviere-Blalock (Shelby, NC) and Rudy Rudisill (Gastonia, NC), on view from Sept. 2-30, 2011. A reception will be held on Sept. 2, from 5-7:30pm, hosted by members of the Lenoir Woman’s Club.

Mint Hill artist Jean Cauthen will be exhibiting her landscape and still life paintings. She is strong in her use of color and light. Many of her landscapes reflect her travels, while the still life paintings are from overhead viewpoints, embedded with narratives. All of her landscape paintings are done “plein-air” - painted outdoors, on location.

Cauthen earned a BFA from East Carolina and MFA from James Madison University. She has taught at various colleges and universities, headed the art department at CCC&TI, served as curator at the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center in Virginia, and been a broadcast designer at WSET, courtroom artist and free lance illustrator. She has exhibited internationally, including the Broome Street Gallery in New York City. Cauthen currently teaches painting and Art History at UNCC.

Diane Pike’s paintings are a result of her pursuit to understand and express how light creates color and how those different notes of color convey light. Pike met Jean Cauthen at a plein air event shortly after moving to North Carolina from Colorado. They share a passion for painting outdoors and have different approaches to the subject matter.

Pike says, “Jean and I thought a show based on paintings we did plein air of the same subject but from two different viewpoints would be interesting. And so we have spent a good part of the last year painting for this show.”

Born in Iowa, Pike moved to Boulder, CO, in 1959. She lived in that area until December of 2008 when she relocated to Denver, NC. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Northern Colorado where she studied printmaking and graphic design which led to 10 years in Denver, CO, as a graphic designer/artist in the advertising field.

Shelby, NC, artist Chrys Riviere-Blalock studied in New York at Parsons-The New School for Design and earned an MA in art at Appalachian State University. She has lived in western North Carolina, teaching in small colleges for 25 years, and also taught summer 2007 in Provence, France. Riviere-Blalock is a 2011 recipient of the North Carolina Regional Artists Project Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Arts and Science Council.

Riviere-Blalock says “What I see is exhilarating... vast space, a robust and wondrously alive landscape that is simultaneously as delicate and fragile as each spring’s new leaf. These paintings are a visual response to the disappearing rural landscape. In the last few years cell towers, gigantic storage silos from multi-national corporations and housing developments have encroached on the farmland I have known and loved all my life in the foothills of North Carolina. Four years ago I began to realize a sense of urgency in the need to respond as a painter to the beauty and fragility of this area; this is when I began a series of paintings of the landscape that surrounds us.”

Rudy Rudisill of Gastonia, NC, uses sculpture to conjure a building lost and abandoned, excavating it from memory. The illusion of change arises via galvanized steel and copper brushed with acid, yielding a corrosive effect. The work is simultaneously contemporary and traditional, industrial and pastoral as Rudisill explores the relationship of physical elements to their symbolic implications. By bringing together various textures and architectonic forms, personal, cultural and historic elements bring together in and homage to the changing landscape. Each anthropomorphic piece carries with it a narrative and a particular relationship - sometimes familial, other times structural.

A working artist for over thirty years, Rudisill’s fabricated sheet metal sculpture has won international awards and can be found in public, corporate and private collections in North America, Europe, and Asia. He is a member of the International Sculpture Center, Tri State Sculptors Association, Piedmont Craftsmen, Inc., and American Crafts Council. He is presently the Exhibits Preparer/Artist at the Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Arts Council at 828/754-2486 or visit (www.caldwellarts.com).

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