New Art Exhibit Opens at CAC Today

The presents recent works, including drawings, paintings, photographs, and mixed media pieces, by members of the North Georgia Artists Association in the June and July exhibition at the Cultural Arts Center in historic downtown Douglasville. With a wide variety of themes, materials and techniques used by individual artists within the group, View Points offers a diverse range of work, from stylized figurative paintings to realistic still lives and plein air landscapes. The exhibition opens today and will be on view through July 27. With pianist and singer Amy Wilson performing, the reception will be held today from 6 until 8 p.m. This event is free and open to the general public.

The North Georgia Artists Association was created in 2010 by painter Don Maier and other regional painters, photographers, and sculptors who wanted to exhibit together and share in exhibition opportunities. The mission of the group is to provide the artists within the association with more exposure in high level art venues and a shared system of contacts and networking. The NGAA currently consists of about 25 members and new members are added based upon artistic merit. The NGAA has held group shows in museums, corporations, art associations and colleges -- and they plan to begin to exhibit in out-of-state and offshore venues.

More than fifty works from fifteen of the group’s member artists will be displayed in the NGAA summer exhibition at the Cultural Arts Center. In Felix Berrora’s Dialogo Familiar, an impressive enamel, wood and Masonite mixed media piece, three stylized figures, cut in silhouette from Masonite, wrap around each other in an intimate, familial embrace. Their subtle smiles and vivid colors invoke the feelings of joy, celebration, and security felt in the arms of loved ones. Judy Surowiec is represented by several wonderful impressionistic landscape paintings including in Four Angels, a quiet scene of a boat and country dock rendered in colorful linear brushstrokes with playful swirling skies. In The Thicket, a mixed media painting by Tom Kells with a more somber approach to plein air painting, the gray limbs of barren, winter trees twist and tangle against a stark, dark sky, producing an isolated, abstracted dreamscape. Don Maier’s The Catch is a large oil painting of a majestic eagle in mid-flight carrying a freshly caught fish between its talons. In the background, Maier produces a sky with semi-expressionistic, quick brushstrokes in warm blues and yellows that create a sense of energy and movement that match the grace and power of the painting’s subject. Nikki Davidson’s realistic still life in oil, Three’s a Pear, is composed of three fresh green pears painted in the academic style sitting on top of a wooden table with a shadowy, solid background. In the Garden, an elegant pastel drawing by Junko Ono Rothwell, a female figure, also rendered in a more classical style, sits beside a flowering plant; the dignity and depth of the drawing is enhanced by the simplicity of Rothwell’s composition and the richness of the pastel colors. Photographer Mike Nalley explores the aesthetics of abandoned spaces by capturing the juxtaposition of decay and beauty; his digital photograph, Cabbage Patch, an angled shot of an old cement and brick stairwell covered in debris and illuminated by sunlight pouring in from the stairwell’s window door. The NGAA exhibition at the Cultural Arts Center provides a broad survey of the many great talents of the members of the North Georgia Artist’s Association and highlights the distinct style and ability of each exhibiting artist.

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