Landscapes, children’s art at Jones House

A colorful landscape exhibit and a Home School children’s art show are on display in the Watauga Arts

Council galleries at the Jones House Community & Cultural Center in downtown Boone during January.

In the Mazie Jones Gallery, Teresa Cerda’s show, titled “Landscape and Colors,” is on display. This exhibit is the result of the artist’s observation of certain forms, colors and languages which have stayed in her mind. It is primarily a work on colors and geometry.

“When I work, I reunite colors and materials on the surface of the wood to which I am applying them, but I do so with particular places in mind, mainly landscapes and cities that have been transcendental to me,” she said. “This exhibit is part of a larger search for an artistic language in which the paining is the object that shapes a particular and emotional reading of the landscape. This series of paintings are called landscape, but they are illusions which aim to please the troubled eye.”

“Landscape and Colors” was done on plywood, using a variety of paints and pigments to give texture, depth and color to each landscape. She uses coat upon coat of paint and materials to obtain the quality of color she wants, even in a simple composition. For example, numerous colors are used to suggest the line of the horizon.

To create the transparency needed for the essence of the sky, a field of flower, water, the city, the country or the mountains, Cerda chooses to use gold and silver leaf, pigments, varnishes, beeswax, acrylics and other materials. Her work is not conceived in a figurative way, but in one that includes certain aspects of a figurative approach mixed with geometrical elements and textures that approach abstraction, as well.

Cerda was born in Santiago, Chile and moved to Madrid, Spain in 1990. She has been living in Boone since 2005 with her husband, who is an Appalachian State University professor. With a degree in stage design for theater and cinema, she worked as the director of framing and decoration workshops at Fundacion de Arte y Autores Contemporaneos. She founded her own painting and framing studio in Madrid in 2000, and during that period worked with different institutions mounting exhibitions and doing framing, restoration and decoration.

In the Open Door Gallery, the High Country Home Schoolers (HCCHS) are exhibiting their art. The work is in a variety of mediums, including acrylic, watercolor, pastel, scratchboard, quilting and mixed media.

Many of the pieces were created at home, while others were completed during art classes, some of which are conducted at the Thoughtful Thursday home school program at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church. Art teachers are Tara Belk, Holly Soukup and Rebecca Burnett.

HCCHS is a large group, committed to the vision of helping parents discipline their children through spiritual, moral and academic training grounded in scripture. It is the group’s privilege and duty to equip and encourage the family to continue, mature and succeed in their home school journey. HCCHS offers support meetings and information on fieldtrips, as well as many other events and activities.

Classes for homeschoolers in HCCHS include the Blue Ridge Teaching Cooperative, which has numerous classes for middle and high school students in a variety of subjects including math, science, English and Latin; Thoughtful Thursdays, which serve children grades kindergarten through 12th with classes, such as art, Latin, Spanish, drama, knitting, music, recorder, guitar, voice, Tae Kwon Do and ballet; Classical conversations, which offers enriching classes in the classical method and guides children and parents in their day-to-day schooling program; and various classes at the Watauga campus of Caldwell Community College and Appalachian State University.

Both exhibits are on display from Tuesday, Jan. 6, until Friday, Jan. 30, from noon to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays. The Watauga Arts Council galleries are also open Thursdays from 7:30 to 11 p.m. during the acoustic jams at the Jones House.

The gallery reception to welcome these exhibits is Friday, Jan. 9 from 6:30-8 p.m. and is held in conjunction with downtown Boone’s First Friday Art Crawl.

Free food and beverage will be served and the public is invited and encouraged to attend.

The Watauga Arts Council galleries are sponsored in part by Cheap Joe’s Art Stuff and Grassroots Funds of the North Carolina Arts Council. The WAC’s offices and galleries are located in downtown Boone at the Jones House Community & Cultural Center, owned by the town of Boone.