All posts by Elizabeth Howard

Winners of Streetlight Art Search Announced by Elizabeth Howard


 

  The first place winner of Streetlight’s art contest is Robert Schultz of Salem, Va. Schultz’s work, Specimens of the Plague Year, documents a year in the pandemic with his thoughts, quotes from scholars, poets, and current news events, all illustrated with scanned images of plants and flowers from his wife’s garden. Images are selected from some thirty-seven illustrations in Schultz’s elegant photo journal, Specimens of the Plague Year. A sampling of Schultz’s nature images will be featured in Streetlight January 7-24th. His work will be exhibited at Chroma Gallery, Charlottesville, during February, Robert Schultz … Continue reading Winners of Streetlight Art Search Announced by Elizabeth Howard

Robin Harris Makes a Splash!

Photos of tomatoes splashing water
 

    Splish! Splash! There’s high drama in the clashes of two wine glasses, martini olives swirling, peppermints spinning in the Schnapps! Watermelon, cherries and tomatoes are sprayed fresh and ready to eat!     Artist Robin Harris loves to paint, focusing on fluidity and “gastronomic whimsy”—oversized, vibrant paintings playing with images of food and drink, dropping, spilling and splashing in all directions. Her high ceilinged studio delights the senses with paintings of fresh fruit and ice cream cones, newly poured Manhattans and a lemon    twist balancing on the lip of a margarita.   … Continue reading Robin Harris Makes a Splash!

Deconstructing My Process by Jury S. Judge

Photo of bird in front of sun-reflecting water
 

  Art creation is an organic process for me, where inspiration takes the lead and my hands merely follow. The traditional media in my repertoire includes pen, colored pencil, and acrylic paint. I am also fond of using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I explore the juxtaposition of traditional and digital mediums within my art because this combination is a versatile method of self-expression. I blend realism and surrealism to represent the beauty and strangeness of my subjects. I find inspiration in majestic natural wonders and in small, delicate objects such as wildflowers.     My … Continue reading Deconstructing My Process by Jury S. Judge

The Faces of Change by Michael O. Snyder

People standing in the water
 

    Michael Snyder has traveled the world, camera in hand, documenting the stories of those concerned with environmental change and sustainability and the spaces they inhabit. “I want to be very intentional about my work and do more than make more than pretty photos. My why underneath these images is to contribute to the conversations we need to be having about what it means to live well on this planet without destroying it,” says Snyder, an award winning photographer/filmmaker, and resident artist at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville.     Having learned photography from his … Continue reading The Faces of Change by Michael O. Snyder

New Works by Linda Laino


 

    In the quarantined Covid year of 2020, I returned to exploring the figure in my mixed media paintings. Even though it’s been years since I’ve used the human figure as a subject, I’ve always considered my paintings “figurative,” containing representations from the real world as they do. I seem to land somewhere between abstraction and representation where composition, layering and playing with the space steer me through the painting. I’ve never been interested in replicating what I can observe outside my window like a photograph. I don’t ever want viewers to forget they … Continue reading New Works by Linda Laino

Drawings by Guliz Multu


 

I cannot separate drawing from writing. Without drawing swallows, I cannot write spring. I am self-taught in art. I am always a student. I observe, I dream and I draw. I grew up and live in Ankara, Turkey. I’ve traveled Europe to see works by Botticelli, Rafael, Michelangelo, Donatello in Italy; Dalí, Velázquez, Picasso, Goya in Spain. I took a deep breath in Alta Mira Cave, Spain. I lost myself in the Louvre, and the Hermitage. I stared at Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Vermeer in the Rijks museum. Art is long, life is short. Cappadocia, … Continue reading Drawings by Guliz Multu

Rivers and Streams: Paintings by John Howard


 

    On a warm winter day when I was five or six, I knelt on a bench in Central Park and watched as water ran down behind a sheath of ice on the face of a granite boulder. Some ten years later in Ivy, Va., my sister had left her watercolors and paper on our sun porch. I had never painted before, but I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to paint the trees outside the window. Those two episodes, clearly remembered, framed the beginning of my painting life.           From … Continue reading Rivers and Streams: Paintings by John Howard

Getting Unhooked by Hilary Holladay

Photo of cracked plate
 

  There’s a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God that I’ve always loved. After revealing some painful family history, Nanny tells her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, “Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate.” The image conveys damage, resilience, and fragility all rolled into one. These days, we are all cracked plates. The pandemic dropped everybody on a very hard floor, as did the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign and its unsavory coda on January 6, 2021. Our public reckoning with racism, signified for many by the murder of George Floyd, has been another … Continue reading Getting Unhooked by Hilary Holladay

Nothing but Light: Works by David Summers

Painting of multiple small mirrors
 

    My attention often falls on things that just happen to be right where they are, set down here or there, together with this or that, thoughtlessly, as we say. These are gatherings of things I happen to have, that have caught my eye and been brought home, that friends and family have given me because they knew I would like them. They smile in anticipation of my delight. All of this is still life, occasions between plans, purposes, habits, and obligations, objects out of use, in the spaces between the times of our … Continue reading Nothing but Light: Works by David Summers

Finding Photographs by Brian Michael Barbeito

Close-up photo of snail
 

  Primarily a poet and writer, I came to photography by accident. I was on a summer nature walk in southern Ontario, Canada, when I got lost. It was incredibly hot and I had forgotten my water. My wife had given me a phone with a camera. Instead of rushing and panicking, which I knew would make things worse, I walked slower to preserve energy and remain calm. In these woods which I would come to know better in the future, there was plentiful wild red sumac at a colorful and vibrant intersection where two … Continue reading Finding Photographs by Brian Michael Barbeito