The Exchange Gallery

Every month VAE highlights the work of four or five exemplary VAE artists in its Exchange Gallery. This highly visible retail space in the front windows of VAE's City Market Gallery is excellent exposure for artists and a favorite shopping spot of patrons. Artists are juried into the space annually. For more information contact Rachel Berry at 919.828.7834 ex 6854, or rberry@visualartexchange.org.

Click here to learn how to apply for your own featured artist exhibition!

May 2009 Exchange Gallery Artists:

• Peg Bachenheimer
• N. Lee Ball
• Lolette S. Guthrie
• Scott Renk
• Suzanne Thomas

Peg Bachenheimer

I love the process of making a painting: building up and moving down through layers of texture and color until a feeling or experience is expressed. Some of my paintings are about places, remembered and re-imagined; others are abstract. I want my paintings to convey a rich, vibrantly colored, visual and tactile experience connected to feelings evoked by the mystery and beauty of life and the passage of time. My process involves discovery: I don't know all of what will emerge as I paint, and so, I see painting as an act of faith.

Lately, I've been working in the encaustic medium in which beeswax, resin, and pigment are heated to 200 degrees and then applied to a wood panel. Each layer of wax is fused with the heat of a propane torch or heat gun, binding it to the previous layer. It's possible to build up many layers of wax, oil paint, paper and other collage materials and also to scrape back and incise the surface. You can create something and then watch as it changes or disappears when heat is applied. Colors, shapes, and lines from previous layers reappear when wax is scraped away, so the history of the piece can be rediscovered. This ancient and durable medium has a mystery, luminosity and organic quality.

N. Lee Ball

Lolette Guthrie

I was raised in a household filled with art. My father was a fine artist and commercial illustrator, and my earliest memories are of standing beside him at his easel watching him work and asking questions. He often asked for my advice, seemed to take whatever I had to say seriously and urged me to explore my own artistic interests, however, he actively discouraged me from pursuing art as a career. I majored in psychology and art history in college instead, and worked for many years as an elementary school teacher but I never stopped drawing and painting. Eventually, I returned to school to study art. I concentrated in drawing and painting, and received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1984. A fascination with human psychology and the process of learning, and a lifelong love of the natural world have been driving forces in my life and in my art.

I have been a classroom teacher, an after-school art teacher and an environmental educator, but above all, I have always been a painter. For me, the creative process is similar in all of these endeavors. I loved discovering how to successfully reach a particular child by building up knowledge layer upon layer through constant evaluation, experimentation and revision. As an artist, I create images by building up layer upon layer of medium, constantly evaluating and revising until I am satisfied that what I have created is true. It is almost a form of meditation. I love the concentrated stillness of making marks on a page or canvas and I love playing with those marks to create interesting layers, texture, and visual energy. Sometimes, my work is pure abstraction; more often it is representational. Always, however, I strive to create exciting and thought provoking visual metaphors and to explore the unique beauty of the natural world. I currently divide my time between painting landscapes in oils and pastels, and producing commission portraits. In my portraits, I try to capture the person behind the image. My landscapes, which I paint either en plein air or from photographs that I take myself, are explorations of the many and varied faces of nature: the changing colors; the changes in terrain, water flow, times of day, seasons and weather; the changing effects of light and atmosphere. Through my work I encourage viewers to be open to the incredible beauty and diversity of the world around them.

Scott Renk

Suzanne Thomas

At some point I came across an art book titled "Intuitive Light by internationally renowned pastelist and oil painter Albert Handell. His pastel landscape paintings were magnificent! His brilliant use of color and values and his thoughtful renderings truly made my heart sing. I was in love with pastels again! I have since taken two workshops with Mr. Handell, and though I still have much to learn, his work has definitely influenced my approach to painting with pastels. Most of his work is done on location, so through his workshops I was introduced to painting en plein air. At first fearful of working outside the comfort of my studio and at a leisurely pace from photographs, I began to appreciate the intimacy one gains with one's subject matter, striving to capture the nuances of light, shadow and color that can be revealed only to the plein air painter. Additionally, this process has greatly enhanced my studio work when painting from a photograph.

Since moving to North Carolina, the beauty and variety of the mountain to sea landscapes has been my primary subject matter. For this exhibit I have selected pieces representing the central piedmont landscapes of our beautiful state.

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