Upcoming Regional Exhibit

 2014 Dogwood Regional Fine Art Exhibit

I will be having work in the 2014 Dogwood Regional Fine Art Exhibit , housed in the historic Emporium Center at 100 Gay Street, Knoxville, TN this April. Opening Reception is April 1st Fri.

People 29, 30, 31  charcoal and pastel pencil on plywood   78"H x 48"W x 24"D

 I'm really pleased to finally be a participant IN this exhibit. For the past five years, I've been the chairperson FOR this exhibit, and have as such been unable to have work in it. (The 1st year I was co-chair with Chris McAdoo). The two new chair-people replacing me are Kelly Hider  and Dale Mackey, who I am so excited to have running this exhibit. Kelly Hider is a past award winner in the exhibit (2013)

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Juror: "Julie Levin Caro is an art historian and curator specializing in African American art and material culture as well as American and European modernism and garden history. She has served at numerous museums since 1992 including the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, TX, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA, and the Colby Museum of Art in Waterville, ME. One of her most recent curatorial projects was displayed at the Colby College Museum of Art in the spring of 2010 and was entitled “Freedom of Expression: Politics and Aesthetics in African American Art.” She boasts an extensive list of publications and scholarly presentations, and has been awarded numerous awards and fellowships. Ms. Levin Caro received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.
Ms. Levin Caro is also a professor and has lectured at a number of academic conferences as well as museums. She recently lectured at an international symposium in Berlin, Germany, and is presently a professor at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. Moreover, she actively publishes on numerous African American artists and designed landscapes. She is currently working on a book project: “The Imaginary Studio: The Self-fashioning of Artistic and Social Identity in the Studios of Thomas Cole, Allan Rohan Crite and Winold Reiss.”

Upcoming Exhibit at LaGrange Museum of Art

LaGrange National XXVIII

LaGrange Art Museum and the Lamar Dodd Art Center of LaGrange College

LaGrange, GA
February 21, 2014 - April 18, 2014

This is a large biennial that is housed in two venues- the 2 and 3D art at the  LaGrange Museum of Art, (website loads slow) and the photography and craft at Lamar-Dodd Art Center at LaGrange College. My plywood people drawing installation will be housed in the museum.

People # 45, 46, & 47  charcoal on birch plywood

Upcoming Exhibit at Salisbury University, Salisbury Maryland

Palette 

Salisbury University Art Galleries/Downtown

January 29 – February 21

Tasting event: Third Friday, February 21, 2014. 5 -7 p.m.

Public reception: Third Friday, February 21, 2014 7-8 p.m.

Downtown Campus
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"It’s often at the dinner table that we discuss the most difficult topics of our time. Food is a neutral vehicle spawning intense debates surrounding gender, race, culture, and other current political topics.

As another form of muse, food has been the passion of internationally renowned artists throughout the ages who have used it to celebrate life within their paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos.

In Palette, Salisbury University Art Galleries exhibits artworks by artists who use food as subject, material or content. From carefully contrived still-life paintings, to slow time based videos of ice sculptures melting, we invited artists to show us that our stomachs are not the limit."

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My paintings that will be in the exhibit are:

Flying Mangoes of the Baroque Palace Ceiling    40" x 60"

Polished Key Limes   oil on canvas    48" x 48"

Donuts Behaving Badly:Drunks   oil on canvas   28" x 56"

 There will be an exhibit catalog published also. I love exhibit catalogs!!

Painting Process: The Loss of Virginity

I have had a request to show process shots of one of my paintings, so OK, Terrell Thornhill- here they are.

The Loss of Virginity

oil on canvas

36" x 48"

The whole thing was done in 3-4 layers of  working over a white background. I have no idea why these 1st 2 working images came out so lousy.

Step one- background and roughed in tiles. My black is a combo of Windsor Newton prussian blue and WN blue-black

don't know why this image is soooo bad. 1st rough in of one of the models

middle working- pomegranate is done, melon needs refinement, nagaimo needs refinement and creepy root hair

done

New Work at Atelier Gallery, Charleston SC

Three new Produce Portrait paintings are available at Atelier Gallery, 153 King Street, Charleston, NC.

 Still Lifes, or Vanitas, which is the genre these works most closely fit in with, were originally domestic images containing items symbolic of life and death. The items in mine act out narratives in keeping with human behavior and cultural social structures.

Bokchoy Flipped   oil on canvas   30” x 30”

A Ruinous Weekend  oil on canvas  20” x 30”

Undocumented    oil on canvas    24” x 36”

Commissioned Work for FirstBank

Portal Into Twentieth Century Banking   

commissioned for and owned by FirstBank for their new Green Hills, Nashville location through The Arts Company Gallery.

49.5"W x 77"H x 3.5"D  

Archival stamp ink on rag paper, pigment prints on rag paper and cut rag paper, thread, wood, task board, plexiglass, glass orbs, pigment prints on mylar, leather, enamel paint re-purposed typewriter parts, specimen pins.

Archival prints of original bank ledger sheets from 1916-1947 form a stitched, grid base for the construction of images referencing the function and philosophy of banking from the early 20th century into the beginning of the contemporary era. The roots and growth of the bank, symbolized by the banks tree logo, flow over the tellers desks, ledgers, and state map sections. The original bank location and the new Green Hills location are marked with glass optical orbs in the map section of the western part of the state. The mechanisms and tools of the record keeping of banking are represented by the vintage typewriter parts that appear over the old, handwritten ledgers. The ink found on the ledgers changes by the year, most dramatically in some samples from the 1930 ledger, one of the most traumatic banking years in US history, where pages would fluctuate from full strength ink, to watered down ink, to pencil, then back again to full strength ink, demonstrating the thrift and persistence that enabled the bank to weather even the toughest of times.

detail

detail

detail

There is a really nice collection of art in this new bank. Some of the other artists represented are Andy Saftel, Norman Lerner, Phil Savage to name a few. The commissioned work was from both myself and   Carrie McGee.

Installation

Carrie McGee makes transparent resin sculptural work that is either wall hung or suspended. The imagery in them is from both chemical reactions and photography. 

They are wire hung with some really cool hardware she gets from Japan. This piece fits into the banks rotunda.

The buildings architect,Carin Jeffords of Vaughan Associates Architects, and The Arts Company director Anne Brown look on as Carrie describes the process of getting photographs she had taken of the buildings steel beams in the early stages of construction into the resin.

Both McGee's and my work are just installed, along with some really slick new high tech bank machinery. My piece was an easy install- just a simple oak French cleat hanging bar with 3 screws, and it was good!

New Arts in the Airport exhibit

The latest  Arts in the Airport is up at McGhee Tyson Airport. It will be there for the next 6 months. This program is coordinated by The Arts & Culture Alliance of Greater Knoxville and the Metropolitan Knoxville Airport Authority. This latest exhibit was juried by Jeffery Morton, professor at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA. He selected 43 pieces, both 2D and 3D, from the 523 works submitted. All work is behind security, so you need to be a ticketed passenger to see it.
Morton's exhibit statement:  “In our frenetic fast-paced world of smart phones, on-the-go coffee stops, and continental travel, it seems appropriate to house a collection of artworks in a busy space such as the airport. Art has an ability to capture us in time, and perhaps now more than any other we need to stop, look, and listen. Whatever we feel about traveling to and from places, the art in the Knoxville airport was chosen to give the passerby an opportunity to share the same question asked by these artists: how do I balance a life of speed with a life of pause. It seems that the art and artists in this collection answer the question by looking closely at the world with wonder and delight.”

I've got 2 of my Contemporary Mythology Invention altar series there.

Leaving the 19^th Century : graphite, cut Italian rag paper, paint, and hand built wooden altar   10”W x 16”H x 3”D

Saint Anne Says Not Now:  graphite, cut Italian rag paper, acrylic orbs, rhinestones, metal, ceramic, and hand built wooden altar