By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The NOW OH art exhibit is a venue where a tenured art professor and an electrician who has recently started making art can show their work together.
Concord: The 16th Annual Northwest Ohio Community Exhibit opened Friday night with a reception and awards ceremony. The show is open to artists in Wood and Lucas and 10 other Northwest Ohio counties.
It continues until Aug. 4. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. and Sunday from 1-4 p.m. with free parking daily after 6 p.m. and on weekends in Lot N
Artists could submit one piece, and all were exhibited.
The democratic nature of the exhibit is important to Melissa Ladd, who served as judge and curator for this year’s exhibit. She strives to make art accessible to everyone.
“I’m not the one who picks the pieces,” she said. “It’s the artists that create the show. I’m just the one who puts the pieces together and finds those common threads.”
And Ladd decided on the awards. “It was a difficult decision because there are a lot of pieces in this show that I stood in front of for a lot of moments.”
In the end the overall beauty and craftsmanship of Debra Buchanan’s charcoal drawing of three girls, “A Piece of the Way Home,” won her over and received the Best of Show honors.
Other winners are:
The BGSU School of Art Award: Jeff Anderson, “Pretty Little Starlings All in a Row,” oil painting.
First Place 2D: Lisa Procyk, “NYC + Parsons + Fashion Design,” digital print.
Second Place 2D: Bridget Andrews, “Red Moon Transformation – Redbud,” acrylic painting.
First Place, 3D: Kaitlyn Balkcom, “Sea Turtle,” glass.
Second Place, 3D: Bob Coffield, “Mother Nature,” steel sculpture.
Youth Art Award: Bella Mendoza, “Sunset Escape,” drawing.
Honorable mentions: Gabrielle Davis, Randy Bennett, Jennifer Nofzieger, Julie Haught, Nancy Honaker, and Bart Woodstrup.
The Bowling Green Arts Council Popular Choice Award, which was voted on by those attending the opening reception, went to:
First place – Donald Rowland for his painting “First Tooth’; second place – Elizabeth Reger for her colored pencil drawing “All Love”; and in a tie for third place – Travon Watson for “Safari From Above” and Nathan Masternak for “Sunshine on Wheels.”
Buchanan said her Best of Show drawing started as a photograph, that she took more than 40 years ago.
She recalled that she was getting in her car to head back to Columbus where she was a student at the Columbus School of Art and Design. Buchanan saw these girls in the Ironwood neighborhood of East Toledo and took the photo with her father’s 1950s vintage Leica. She printed it. She loved the image but thought it needed something more.
Years later, she turned it into a drawing. She kept the three girls in the foreground –”Norman Rockwell couldn’t pose this any better than the girls did for themselves.” The artist added the fence and a lush lawn behind it. She changed the sidewalk beneath the girls’ bare feet into a dirt road. These added layers of meaning.
“Art is my therapy,” Buchanan said. “Sometimes I can say things visually that I can’t verbalize.”
She started drawing seriously at 12. Using her babysitting money, she’d go to the Woodville Mall and buy every Jon Gnagy instructional book she could and then “practice, practice, practice those exercises.” At 14, she’d mastered a photo realistic technique.
When she graduated from college, “I had obligations that took time away from being a full-time artist.” From the time she was 16 she had worked at a variety of jobs, while continuing to create art and display it.
Then 12 years ago, she lost her job. “I had to fall back on what I know.”
She taught classes at the Art Supply Depo and started working with glass artist Gail Christofferson doing design work and illustrations for glass murals. She’s now collaborating with Christofferson on the sculpture being erected in BG City Park.
Buchanan exhibits widely – her work will be included in the Allied Artists of America 110th Annual Exhibition. Buchanan’s work is for sale at the Collector’s Corner shop in the Toledo Museum of Art.
When she revisited the photo of the three girls, she put a call out through Facebook to see if anyone could identify them.
While she never could identify the girl in the middle, she learned that the other two are twins, one of whom has died, and the other lives in Chicago. She was able to give the mother a print of the original photo.
The NOW OH exhibit is in its way also a neighborhood.
Buchanan said when she dropped her photo off, there was a teenager who was also delivering her work. It reminded her of her own first exhibit when she was 17.
She appreciates her work being included among “so many fabulous pieces.”
Some pieces are in styles far removed what she creates. She pointed out Anderson’s “Pretty Little Starlings All in a Row.”
“I love that painting.”
“This is a great venue,” Ladd said. “A university gallery creates some space to create that community.”
That community includes long-time art faculty members Tom Muir and M.M. Dupay as well as Travon Watson, an electrician by trade, who four years ago started to create sculptural pieces with mixed material and light.
His “Safari From Above,” he said, uses the leftover material from a previous project. So far, he’s completed eight artworks and is starting to exhibit them locally. He and his family also operate Toytime that publishes his books for children and Mystique Body Glamour.
His family was on hand to help him celebrate being in the NOW OH show. That included his daughter Nia who is exploring art herself, including making a box for a public art project.
Ladd was impressed with the exhibit’s Young Artist winner, Bella Mendoza. The 17-year-old execute the difficult technique of pointillism, where the image is constructed by a series of dots. She also displayed a knowledge of color technique.
The painting changes, Ladd said, as the viewer looks at it closely and then move further back.
