For Kids
Please come visit us on First Friday August 6, 5 – 8 p.m. or Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Or contact an artist directly. You can check out featured artist Marsha Marcuson’s great paintings in her show “People Watching” and then the wonderful collages of guest artist Claudia Smith during the months of August/September at Avenue West Gallery.
Featured Artist: Marsha Marcuson
Marsha has been a longtime contributing member of Avenue West Gallery. Her paintings and designs cover a wide range of subjects and styles, but her main focus is always on color and movement. Her amazing painting of foliage, flowers and landscapes have a special “life” to them because of the way they demonstrate variety, flexibility and movement. Her style ranges from representational to impressionistic and some abstraction and she especially enjoys working with oils and acrylics because of the way they create texture and allow layering. Marsha recently said: “I never think of “making a statement” with my work, but rather to express a mood or to just to enjoy the colors and shapes.”
Guest Artist: Claudia Smith
Claudia Smith is a multi-media artist and former art teacher that we welcome to the gallery this next two months. Not only is she a painter with a unique style, she has past experience in interior design and mural painting, and is a published cartoonist, illustrator and author. One can see these influences in her current work. (Claudia and her sister wrote a children’s book “Johnny’s Pockets” which is quite entertaining!)
Over the years, Claudia’s paintings have won numerous awards in juried shows, and are in many private collections. Her interwoven-layered style, with its sweeping strokes, mirrors the energy and spirituality that she craves to capture. The love and drive of these feelings often spill over into an accompanying poem.
For the past few years, she has especially enjoyed incorporating “found materials” into her art. She states: “These objects offer endless mixed-media possibilities and dimensional effects that intrigue me.” She calls them: “Geo-Collages.” As a Rockwood South Hill resident “Snow Bird,” Claudia spends six months of the year in Spokane, WA, and six months in Scottsdale, AZ.
