By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Rachel Miller, student at BGSU, is considering becoming a teacher.
Jean Gidich-Holbrook has been an art teacher for more than 30 years.
Both are skilled artists.
They were among the award winners at the 15th Northwest Ohio Community Art Show.
Miller won the BG Noon Kiwanis Youth Art Award for her charcoal drawing “Untitled Self Portrait.” Gidich-Holbrook took the first prize in 2-D for her pen and ink and graphite drawing “We are Here.”
The awards were handed out Friday at the exhibit’s opening reception in the Bryan Gallery in the BGSU Fine Arts Building.
Other honorees were:
- Best of Show, Alyssa Radtke, “Infestation of Fixation.”
- First Place 3-D, Audrey Aronson, “Obscuration.”
- Second Place 2-D, Randy Bennett, “For a Tootsie Roll.”
- Second Place 3-D, Haylie Bowlby, “Release me.”
- The Toledo Federation of Art Societies Award, Delaney MeSun Shin, “Low Tide.”
- Honorable Mentions: Bethany Buchanan, Michelle Arnold Paine, Kelsey McGovern (Escue), Rachel Miller, Codey Moser, John A. Jones, Tom Muir, Joshua Klein, Margo Morr, Camden Courtney, and Andrew Swartzlander.
The show features 108 works by 41 artists from five Northwest Ohio counties.
They all pay attention to what is happening around them as well as what’s happening within themselves,” , said juror Laura Makar, a 2013 BFA graduate from BGSU. “Each artist has their own story to share. … I was impressed and in awe of everything I saw,” she said.
Makar urged viewers to spend time with each of the pieces because each had something important to say.
In the end, she said, she judged the works on how “it connects to the viewer” as well as its sense of concept and form.
She said that Radtke with her multimedia sculpture, “just blew me away with the scale and the details in her work.”
The sculpture is of a head that’s been opened up to reveal innards of glass beads and other material spilling out and sticking to the neck like insects.
Radtke graduated from BGSU in April. At last summer’s NowOH, she won second place in 3-D.
Makar praised Aronson’s ring for being delicate yet “there’s a sense of power that grabs your attention.”
In April at the opening of the MFA Exhibit, Aronson said that in her two years at BGSU “my work shifted to be more personal and introspective since I got here. … It addresses issues of vulnerability and self-protection.”
In talking about Gidich-Holbrook’s drawing, the juror said she felt like she knew the person in the portrait. Makar also noted the use of iconography. The figure is shown with an eagle perched on her arm between her body and the neck of her guitar.
The subject, Gidich-Holbrook said, is singer-songwriter Miko Marks, whom she met in Nevada, though Marks comes from Flint, Michigan.
This is part of a series of portraits of Americans posed with native animals. “I kind of grab them off the street,” she said. “I draw people representative of things in my life.”
Gidich-Holbrook, who teaches at Genoa Area High School, said she originally went to Ohio State to study zoology, but switched to art by the end of her sophomore year, ending up with minors in zoology and art history and a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
She worked as a fine artist for a couple years before deciding to teach just as she was starting a family. She expected teaching would be temporary. That was 33 years ago.
But, Gidich-Holbrook said, she didn’t put her art career on pause. She continued to develop as an artist. “Even if I’d been in the studio for 30 years, I wouldn’t be the artist I am today,” she said. “I’m teaching drawing and painting and ceramics every day. I get to go into the studio every day and work with fresh young minds. That’s why I always credit them.”
It was a student who gave her the pen that launched this new phase of her career.
A senior about to graduate was cleaning out his locker and found the pen. He gave it to Gidich-Holbrook. He told her: “I know you paint, but I’d love to see what you could do with this.”
She threw it in her desk drawer where she discovered it the next fall.
That was about four years ago, she said. “I started drawing and haven’t stopped. I wore out that pen.”
She has an “active line” that’s better suited to drawing. While a painting may have taken her months to finish, the award-winning drawing took her a month.
Miller said she’s been drawing since she was little. She attended Lial Elementary School in Whitehouse where she had “a really great art teacher.”
She went on to Notre Dame High School in Toledo.
She’s just completed her first year at BGSU where she’s studying studio art and Spanish. She’s thought about being an art teacher. But she’d consider other fields that combine those two disciplines.
Her work both painting and drawing are very realistic. That takes time, she said. “I guess I’m a bit of perfectionist.”
“The craftsmanship really blew me away,” Makar said.
Looking at Miller’s image staring off to the side, she wondered what the young woman was contemplating.
Miller said she’s shown her work in a number of exhibits. She was a gold medalist in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
She enjoyed exhibiting in the NowOH “It’s really great that people can come from community and show their work.”
That was the original vision 16 years ago, gallery director Jacqueline Nathan said. The idea for a community exhibit to showcase community artists was conceived in an arts administration class. The next year NowOH was launched.
Nathan said it was a joy to host “this inclusive show” in the gallery. “Every year we have a better show.”
***
NowOH continues through July 15. Gallery hours are Thursdays 1-4 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. and Friday through Sunday from 1-4 p.m. Parking in Lot N is free weekdays after 7 p.m. and on weekends.
