September 2011

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts in Hillsborough, NC, Features Works by Chris Graebner,
Lolette Guthrie & Pringle Teetor

The Hillsborough Gallery of Arts in Hillsborough, NC, will present the exhibit, Explorations, featuring paintings by Chris Graebner & Lolette Guthrie and blown glass by Pringle Teetor, on view from Sept. 30 through Oct. 23, 2011. A reception will be held on Sept. 30, from 6-9pm.
About her creative explorations, painter Chris Graebner says, “for the past year, I’ve been exploring different media and different tools for expressing my ideas. I stumbled on cold wax technique and liked the way it mixed with oil paint and added translucency to the color. But I’ve found that cold wax works better with a palette knife than a brush, which means working bigger and looser than I’m used to. This summer I’ve begun doing some scratch-board work, a technique I learned about in botanical art classes but had never done.” Graebner says she likes to take everyday things and approach them from a different angle.

“I work mostly from photographs that I’ve taken either locally or while travelling,” says Graebner, adding. “I work with them in Photoshop until I have the composition I want and then use that as the basis for my painting.” Graebner says she didn’t start out to become an artist: “I started out to be a writer and then a scientist, but I kept coming back to art; I just couldn’t help myself!”

For Lolette Guthrie, who paints both abstract and representational canvases, painting is about creating exciting, thought-provoking visual metaphors that celebrate the world’s beauty and diversity. “The driving forces in my art and my life are a love of nature and a love of teaching,” she says, adding, “I find that making art and teaching both require constant experimentation, evaluation, and revision, and an ability to take a leap of faith. When I begin a painting, I generally have an idea of where I’m going, but the painting invariably takes on a life of its own, and I find myself reacting to what’s on the canvas rather that what’s in my mind.”

As to why she feels compelled to paint, Guthrie says, “the concentrated stillness of making and manipulating marks on a canvas is a form of meditation. It nourishes my soul; I need to paint to feel whole.”

Pringle Teetor calls herself an accidental glass blower. On a whim, she tried glassblowing and was instantly hooked by the molten glass on the pipe and the energy and constant motion needed to create a finished piece. “The properties of hand-worked glass are at any time hot, cold, fluid, soft, brittle or hard,” she says.

“This metamorphosis can take place instantly. You use your hand to form a piece, but you can’t touch it,” explains Teetor. “In seconds of heat, the piece on your pipe can be a work of art or a mess worthy only of the scrap bucket. There is no going back if you miss your limit. It can be physically challenging and exhausting, a silently choreographed dance of heat and motion.”

Teetor says the melding of color, light, shape and composition provides an endless outlet for her creative spirit. She sums up her work saying, “to capture the emotion and dance of light and color in a solid object is to enlighten.”

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts is owned and operated by 22 local artists and features painting, metal sculpture, photography, blown glass, kiln-formed glass, jewelry, turned wood, handcrafted furniture, pottery, quilts and fiber arts.

For further information check our NC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at 919/732-5001 or visit (www.hillsboroughgallery.com).

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