A Must-See Opportunity:
Susan Fecho and Paula Patterson: The Feathered Trail Exhibition
Barton’s Susan Fecho, Professor of Art and Dean of the School of Visual, Performing, and Communication Arts, will exhibit works alongside the works of the late Paula Patterson in A Feathered Trail Exhibition, opening with a 6-9 p.m. reception party on Friday, October 18, at the Andrejev Galleries in Louisburg. The exhibition will continue until December 4. Andrejev Galleries is located at 105 South Main Street in Louisburg.
(Artist Notes from Andrejev Galleries in Louisburg.)
About Susan Fecho —
Fecho’s work engages with its immediate beauty and invites deeper reflection. Traveling through coal country with a camera from her Tennessee homeplace north through Pennsylvania, the artist collects and selects raw and meaningful images for her personal diaristic style developed in the studio with intaglio printing, collagraph and montage. Fecho controls the dance between bold graphic shapes and delicate informative detail, the abstract and the specific. Upon closer inspection, one finds that the artist’s narrative reveals aspects of the lasting environmental damage that a century of mining has left behind. She will exhibit 12 recent works that pictorially and abstractly comment on the aftermath of mining.
As a creative exhibiting artist and book illustrator, Fecho also defines what it means to be a fully engaged art professional. After earning her Master of Fine Arts degree from East Carolina University in 1988, she broadened her experience with residencies in the United States and abroad. In addition to her teaching and administrative responsibilities at Barton, she currently operates Fecho Designs Art Studio and Gallery in Tarboro. Fecho’s work also is featured at the Rocky Mount Imperial Centre Galleries.
About Paula Patterson —
With a remarkable empathy with animals, especially birds and barnyard fowl, the late Patterson’s artistic interest not only brought her notoriety as an exhibiting watercolorist but occasional work as an illustrator for the London Zoo. Her inspired country walks in the English countryside with a sketch pad and a naturalist’s vision, Patterson’s skill as a draughtsman would translate into remarkable studio watercolors. Annotated here from her comments, she wrote, “Always working from life, the wonders of nature draw me into its living way … my search to see more clearly the growing, changing structures of earth’s living process … animals, fish, birds and plants …” Her paintings are indeed romantic in the true meaning, dreamy in pictorial montage composition and rich in biological detail. A realistic rendering and an exact representation of species was important to her; some paintings are even comical animal narratives, and, in some, we are voyeurs into their secret lives … not unlike those childhood story books with magical illustrations.
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