Of Portraits and Art Class

By Frank Ruggiero

One of Boone’s most well-established artists meets with some of the area’s youngest at the Jones House Community Center this Friday.

As part of the First Friday Art Crawl, the Jones House is presenting work by Banister Pope and the students at Two Rivers Community School.

Banister Pope

In the downstairs Mazie Jones Gallery, Pope is creating what he calls an overwhelming cascade of portraiture, some larger-than-life, others not so much. The latter find themselves cluttered among old dressers and tables.

“You know how your mother and grandmother have too many pictures on their dresser?” Pope said. “That’s what I’m doing here.”

Pope hopes to have eight to nine dresser tops covered with approximately 150 framed photos. “I’ve been hording these little grandmothery frames for the past couple years, and there will be a flood of photos that will hopefully overwhelm somebody trying to see them all,” he said.

Visitors to the gallery may recognize some of the photo subjects, moments of whom Pope, an area resident since 1994, has captured over the course of 10 years – people who have caught his eye in Boone. While there are plenty of familiar faces, Pope hopes viewers will first react to the photo and the manner in which it was taken.

Pope’s method harkens back to a style of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, “when painters were interested in the clarity of dream imagery,” he said. Such paintings typically centered on mythological and poetry based themes, and Pope learned of this style in his 20s.

He found an equivalent in photography with the work of British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79). Using the collodion chemical process, which could oftentimes leave its mark through spots on the photograph, Cameron created an almost ethereal type of artwork, which Pope described as a “crossover realm” between paintings and photography.

“Although the technology had arrived for her to make sharp, focused prints, she stuck with that old technique,” Pope said. “It’s entertaining to me, and somehow perversely to me, I work a little below the technology that’s available. The realm I’m working in is in one of romanticism.”

Pope plans to welcome people to his realm with discounted artwork, the smaller pieces of which he plans to sell for an affordable price.

“The idea is I’m going to sell this work so ridiculously cheaply to plant seeds among the new collectors in this time of hardship,” he said. “I want to encourage people to begin collecting.”

For more information on Pope, visit www.banisterpope.com.

Two Rivers Community School

In the Open Door Gallery upstairs, visitors will be taken back to school for an exhibit of artwork from the students at Two Rivers Community School, a charter school teaching kindergarten through eighth grade in Watauga County.

Organized by art teacher Kelly Snider, the exhibit features a wide variety of student art – the best of the best, as students pick their favorite pieces for display.

Teachers at Two Rivers coordinate their lessons with Snider, who incorporates those themes into their art assignments.

The Chinese New Year dragon puppets colorfully crafted by first- and second-graders represent lessons learned on the global community, in which students were inspired by cultures spanning the globe. This also includes aboriginal style paintings and Chinese pottery. The young artists also made pottery at Appalachian State University’s Turchin Center for the Visual Arts.

Fourth-graders studied traditional artwork and are presenting baskets and corn-husk dolls, while others enjoyed a field trip to Doe Ridge Pottery in downtown Boone, where owner Bob Meier glazed their pottery for display.

While studying famous figures in American history, third-grade students crafted artistic representations, and others created emulations of famous artists, including Pablo Picasso and Faith Ringgold.
“We’ve experimented with a lot of materials this year,” Snider said, mentioning such crafty pieces as dried apples for an imaginative series of dolls.

More importantly, the children are allowed to suggest materials – suggestions take to heart by Snider, who incorporates many of them into that year’s curriculum.

“It offers challenges,” she said. “It’s good to try things that don’t always come immediately as an easy thing. Everybody has to work hard to present something that’s high quality.”

Snider said the exhibit represents Two Rivers’ entire student body of 149 children.

For more information on Two Rivers Community School, visit tworiverscommunityschool.net.

Gallery Reception

The Jones House will welcome the exhibits on Friday, March 6, with a reception from 6:30 to 8 p.m., held in conjunction with the First Friday Art Crawl.

Complimentary food and drink will be served, and the public is welcome to attend.

The exhibits will be on display through Friday, March 27, from noon to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays. The galleries also open Thursdays from 7:30 to 11 p.m. during the acoustic jams at the Jones House.

The Watauga Arts Council (WAC) 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 Center, owned by the town of Boone. For more information, visit www.watauga-arts.org or call (828) 264-1789.