Venetian Laundry Day

Venetian Laundry
by Jane McElvany Coonce

Venetian Laundry is an original watercolor by Jane McElvany Coonce.  It is in the all-media member show for July at the gallery.  Jane took a group of art students to Italy to paint for 2 weeks this spring.  They painted in a lot of the small hill towns of Umbria.  Apparently, Italians don't own dryers, and everyone hangs their laundry out of their windows.   This painting captures  the essence of Italian laundry day!

In watercolor, the artist has to save the white of the paper for the highlights.  So any of the clothing that was to remain white would not have any paint on it until the subtle shadows of the cloth were put in.

There are many interesting pieces of art to see at the gallery in July, but you only have until Friday, July 25 to see the artwork because we change the show on Saturday morning.

We keep a photographic record of all works from each of the monthly shows, so if you ever see anything on the blog from a previous month, don't hesitate to contact the gallery.

Changing weather produces changes in art - featured artist Elisabeth Hudgins

"Fall Six" by Elisabeth Hudgins

Each fall, my art making does change! I go back to my "first love" medium....watercolor. My schedule does not change much, but what I am inspired by does....

When fall sets in and the nights are cooler, the leaves start changing color and they become my inspiration. As they fall to the ground, I really start looking at them closely. I gather them up and set about making my "Leaf Impressions", actually making watercolor monoprints on paper with the leaves. . My Leaf Impression Paintings are all about the leaves...In this process, I am actually applying paint on the leaf, and laying the leaf on the paper. Sometimes, I will use a watercolor technique and work "wet into wet", and other times I will use a collage technique. The hardest part is for waiting for the painting to dry, so I can pull up the leaves off the paper and see what happened! But I love that elemnt of surprise. Then I will go back and overpaint, enhancing what I want to emphasize in the painting. To see a slide show of my process, please visit: http://www.elisabethhudgins.com/artlifeblog.html 

Several of my Leaf Impression paintings are in the Gallery Underground during the month of October... One, "Sycamore" features the largest sycamore leaf I have ever seen... a good 12"

"Sycamore" by Elisabeth Hudgins