Marymount University invites the public to a free opening reception for B+W, an art exhibit featuring the works of Karen Coleman, Dana Jeri Maier, Matthew McLaughlin and Wayne Paige from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 9 at the Barry Gallery, 2807 North Glebe Road.
“The pieces in B+W are made without using any color, extracting the essence of the artists’s intention,” said Sarah Hardesty, an assistant professor of fine arts and the gallery’s new director. She follows Judy Bass, who retired.
“The artists in this exhibit all use drawing to accomplish great detail in their work,” Hardesty added. As examples, she noted Coleman’s delicate and deliberate botanical renderings; things and people stacked on top of and around one another with compositional complexity in Maier’s ink drawings; the subtle creases in bags indicating various suburban debris in the graphite on paper drawings of McLaughlin; and Paige’s surreal and heavily detailed and patterned landscapes.
Coleman, of Round Hill, teaches at the Brookside Gardens School of Botanical Art and Illustration in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists, the Botanical Art Society of the National Capital Region, and a Signature Member of the Colored Pencil Society of America.
Maier is a Washington, D.C.-based artist whose work is on the boundary between cartoon and fine art. She has exhibited widely throughout the area, including the Flashpoint Gallery, DC Arts Center and the Fridge Gallery.
McLaughlin, an artist and printmaker from Greenbelt, Maryland, explores the relationship human beings have with their surrounding environment, both natural and man-made, suburban and urban, and how people interact and observe the spaces they inhabit and alter for their own wants and needs.
Paige, of Washington, D.C., and Middleburg, works in pen and ink, creating imaginary landscapes of mountains, structures, waterways and forests populated by featureless beings that resemble clothespins. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country. Many of his works are in public and private collections.
The exhibition, curated by Bass and Trudi Van Dyke, will run through Oct. 14. The Barry Gallery, located in the Reinsch Library at Marymount, 2807 North Glebe Road, is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Admission is free. For more information on the gallery, go to marymount.edu/barrygallery.
Photo caption
“Two by Two” by Matthew McLaughlin, 2016
