Category Archives: Art

Photographer Aaron Farrington

Photo of mushroom
 

When tracked down, Aaron Farrington was on a camping trip in the woods of Grayson Highlands State Park. We met soon afterwards in his basement studio in the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville. A photographer of many talents and technologies, his subjects include newts, frogs and mushrooms, smoke stacks spewing pollution, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Dave Matthews music videos, documentaries, and vintage wet plate portraits.     Farrington remembers growing up in Harrisonburg, Va. where, at fifteen, he was given his mother’s Pentax 35 mm camera and he started taking pictures. Around the same time, … Continue reading Photographer Aaron Farrington

Photographer Russell Hart

Black and white photo of box with receipts and and old pair of shoes in it
 

As I Found It: My Mother’s House     Sometimes I envy my baby-boomer friends for having lost their parents quickly. Mine left this life piecemeal. It took my father two painful years to die from cancer, and soon after, without her husband to moor her, my mother began her decade-long descent into dementia. When she could no longer live alone it fell to me to empty her house, a rambling, creaky Victorian on Boston’s South Shore that she had inhabited for over forty years. Paperwork piled high on her desk told a sad tale. … Continue reading Photographer Russell Hart

The Photography of Margo Hamilton and Ron Evans

Photo of black hand holding sheet music
 

    Margo Hamilton and Ron Evans share a studio and a passion for photography. At their studio at the McGuffey Arts Center in Charlottesville, Va. a variety of some twenty-five cameras are strung decoratively on one wall. Their work includes fine photography as well as portraits of family, children and silhouettes. The two photographers met in 2009, Evans having moved to Charlottesville from Dallas, Texas where he had lived for thirty-five years. Hamilton had been living in Charlottesville for close to a decade. A native of Little Rock, Ark., Evans remembers playing with his … Continue reading The Photography of Margo Hamilton and Ron Evans

New Photography by William C. Crawford

Photo of dried seed pods
 

  There is beauty (and aspects of interest) in most everyday things. I am not a technically gifted photographer, however, I like to tease out unusual visual presentations of mundane things. Through my photography I seek to elevate the easily overlooked to pleasing “eye candy.” I don’t rely on Photo Shop or other sexy photographic software. I do employ extreme camera settings for color saturation on my old Nikons. I often also use creative framing, severe shooting angles, and I enjoy a frenetic obsession with my over/under button (exposure compensation). I happily emulate the pioneer … Continue reading New Photography by William C. Crawford

The Art of Kathleen Markowitz


 

“I didn’t initially like abstract art,” admits artist Kathleen Markowitz, her vibrant paintings offering bursts of primary colors, suffused surfaces that suggest rather than depict nature and its mysterious forces. She remembers her early exposure to art and how, over time, her taste would evolve. “My aunt was a fine arts painter in New York City. As a young girl we spent much time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Velazquez was our favorite artist. One day we stumbled on a contemporary artists exhibit. I saw my first Pollock. It emotionally took me somewhere fresh … Continue reading The Art of Kathleen Markowitz

The Photography of Kimberly Flynn

Photo of calla lily with reflections of light
 

  I began photographing at sixteen when I got my first paycheck from the local movie theater to purchase a 35 mm film camera, a Canon EOS Rebel G. The camera then never left my side the rest of high school. I was compelled to document everything from nature to the people in my life. As life progressed, photography may have taken a backseat, but I always found my way back to it. My book, Abstracted Distractions: teetering between here and gone showcases images from the past twenty years. My work explores images of nature … Continue reading The Photography of Kimberly Flynn

Conceptual Art by Peter Allen


 

  Having been interested in both visual art and writing/poetry since I was able to pick up a pencil or paint brush, it seemed natural to eventually want to combine the two somehow. In the 1980s, I began exhibiting work with a visual art piece and a companion poem together. Then in the 1990s I started stenciling words together with the visual elements. In the last twenty years or so I have endeavored to combine entire poems with a visual element, sometimes two or more poems are meant to work with a single image.   … Continue reading Conceptual Art by Peter Allen

Dante-Inspired Works by Tom Duff

Illustration of man surround by woods
 

From an early age I enjoyed drawing, and in later years took up oil painting and etching as well. Eventually I decided to go into art full time, which I have continued to do, putting on paper images that simply come to mind, but also illustrating scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy and other literary works. In my mid-fifties I happened to pick up a copy of the Inferno, the first of the three sections of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (the others being Purgatorio and Paradiso) and found myself mesmerized by the poetry and the vividly … Continue reading Dante-Inspired Works by Tom Duff

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!

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