A dozen cylinders by artist George Snyder take their place over the staircase at the Capitol Conference Center on Lee Street.

Reprinted from the March 28, 2008 Charleston Gazette

By Bob Schwarz
For the Gazette

When George Snyder graduated from South Charleston High and enrolled at Marshall University, he thought he might become a lawyer. He took a few art classes and changed his mind.

Now 56, Snyder has supported himself as a full-time artist for nearly 30 years. A dozen galleries from Boston to Los Angeles and from Cleveland to San Antonio sell his work.

He lives in Florida with the former Jennifer Walker, a Charleston native and his wife of 25 years. Jennifer is a working artist in her own right and also her husband’s business manager. Read the rest of this entry »

“Studio Window,” Grace Martin Taylor, c. 1933, property of the Kanawha County Public Library

Reprinted from the March 30, 2008 Sunday Gazette-Mail

By Bob Schwarz

Lucie Mellert just knew the Kanawha County Public Library had one of her mother’s white-line color woodblock prints. After Grace Martin Taylor died in 1995, Mellert, the artist’s daughter, kept telling the library people that they had the piece somewhere. The library people couldn’t turn it up.

But early last year, the library people found the print and other artwork and hung them in a hallway on the closed-to-the-public fifth floor, said Alan Engelbert, the library’s new director, who had not arrived when the discoveries were made. Read the rest of this entry »

Artworks by Jamie Miller. Click all works to enlarge.

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SOUR: Anything else that’s good on display or late?
SWEET: Yeah, Jamie Miller’s one-person show at Taylor Books was impressive. She’s really coming along and making it to the next level. She has progressively improved. Advanced and refined herself, her technique, her imagery. Jamie Miller deserves the “Most Improved” artist of the year, “(of course, that is meant as a compliment!)

In the works at Taylor’s, childlike imagery meets the horrors and trauma of life in this realm. Miller captures the interesting dance of innocence encountering tragedy, and both extremes of that experience informing the other. Neither tragedy nor innocence escapes transformation, neither eradicates the other entirely. Like looking at the aftermath of a cartoon-deadly tornado. Nice effect.
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Sour: “Next, we take up a lot of so called weird or semi-hard to see art. Stay tuned.”

Artworks below by Jamie Miller. Click to enlarge.