EDITOR’S NOTE If you missed this preview of artist Harold Edwards’ new show at the Clay Center, here’s the story and a link to it featuring more art.

By Bob Schwarz
Gazette staff writer

While Harold Edwards was studying painting at West Virginia State College, he worked summers at Welding Inc. on Pennsylvania Avenue. “I was building things over there,” Edwards said. “I wondered how I could use that in my art.”

After college, the Duval High graduate returned to Lincoln County, where he worked as a traveling art teacher in the local schools. When that position disappeared, he taught English at Duval and later at Andrew Jackson Middle School in Kanawha County.

Nights and weekends, he squeezed in time to make the large and brightly colored constructs that visitors to The Art Store on Bridge Road have seen for years. Now his work comes to the Clay Center’s museum when “Evolution: an Installation by Harold Edwards” opens Saturday, Jan. 13 for a run through April 1…

Click here to read rest of story

“Masquerade” by J.P. Owens

J.P. Owens opens a solo show today at the Robert C. Byrd Federal Building, 300 Virginia St. E., in downtown Charleston. The exhibit features about 20 wood and linocut prints as well as 10 oil paintings. The biggest works range in size from 12 to 14 feet. The show is up through March 1 and can be viewed during the building’s operating hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Born in 1978, Owens grew up in Paradise, W.Va., where he says in an e-mail: “I learned valuable lessons I still see in myself and my work. Being surrounded by tree-decorated hills and living life away from social distractions enabled me to expore and discover my ability to draw and create.”

He graduated in 2003 from West Virginia State University, with a Bachelor of Art with honors in Fine Art Printmaking and minor in Art Education. The first area show of his work took place at Komax Business Systems in South Charleston last year, which led Sally Groves — who invites artists to show at the Federal Court Building — to put together an exhibit there.

“I love printmaking as much for the work involved as for the work created,” Owens says. “Until I graduated from college, art was always a talent and not a passion. Then, I discovered my innate ability to carve into linoleum and wood.”

In order to fill the large space at the Federal Building, he also began creating large paintings, he says. “I’m not much of an oil painter, more of a relief printmaker. But I’m definitely enjoying the experimentation and am pretty happy with how everything turned out. I would say 75 percent of the pieces were created within the last 12 to 18 months.”

Thumbnail samples of other works in show (click to enlarge):

“Horizon”

“The West”

By Bob Schwarz
Staff Writer

June Kilgore, an abstract painter and a vast regional influence on painters of all stripes, died Wednesday, Dec. 27, at Huntington Hospice House. She was 79 and had recently been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.Her roughly 5-foot-by-5-foot paintings are in many corporate and private collections as well as the Clay Center, the Huntington Museum of Art, the West Virginia State Museum and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C.

She was most famous as a teacher, a successor in Southern West Virginia to Grace Martin Taylor as the artist whom other artists sought out.

“She taught me how to manipulate space,” landscape painter Susan Poffenbarger once said. “I learned how to deal with the push-pull of objects which occupy the canvas.”

“What made her unique was that she believed in the creativity that each person had,” said Caryl Toth, the abstract painter who took her first class with Kilgore in 1970 and who continued to study with and seek counsel from Kilgore for the rest of Kilgore’s life.

“She helped each student to develop his or her own language. She wasn’t a here’s-how-to-do-it person. She didn’t have a formula. She didn’t want you to paint like her.”

Kilgore was nearly 40 years old and a grandmother when she went off to the Pratt Institute in New York in 1967 to study art. (more…)