Join us as Julie Fawn Boisseau-Craig, a contemporary glass artist, talks about her experience as a full-time artist. Photos of her art will show the evolution of her work from being strictly a glass artist to one who combines clay, metal and/or wood with her glass. Today, her work directly responds to the contradictions of life using her wide range of skills with a mix of materials to create unique art.  

Julie works in glass and porcelain primarily but utilizes metals and wood as necessary to create her sculptural pieces. She designs and creates many functional and wearable works at Wild Pony Studio, her personal studio in Rockford, Tennessee and does hot shop glass works at the Jackson County Green Energy Park in Dillsboro, North Carolina. She has shown nationally and participated in many workshops and demonstrations. Her work directly responds to the contradictions of life.

Julie received her Masters of Fine Arts Degree in December of 2012, after which, she taught at Western Carolina University and Southwestern Community College in North Carolina. Julie is currently the President of the East Chapter of Tennessee Craft and Vice President for the Art Market Gallery in downtown Knoxville. Julie now concentrates on her studio work, art shows and teaching workshops.

Email: talimah@aol.com

Website: www.wildponystudio.com

Lidwina Bekman – The Ocean

Lidwina Bekman paints transparent watercolor with a main subject of ocean life. She creates surrealist representations of fish, crustaceans, coral and more. Lidwina will present an overview of her last 30 plus years as a watercolorist.

Lidwina has shown her work in many solo exhibitions in the United States, the Bahamas, and Europe. Solo exhibitions include the prestigious Pulchri Studio in The Hague, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands, Brickell Square Gallery in Miami, the World Trade Center in New Orleans, and invitations from the Netherlands Government and other locations and galleries.

She has won numerous awards including the coveted National Watercolor Society 1st place award and many other 1st place awards in cities around the United States. She was chosen for a group exhibit with 5 five major U.S. artists in Houston, Texas. In 1998, Liduine was the featured artist for the City of Houston Bayou City Art Festival.

Lidwina has been featured in published articles in the Pulchri quarterly magazine (the Netherlands), the Palm Beach Daily News (Palm Beach, Florida), the Seafood Leader (US), the Artist’s Magazine (US), the Oklahoma City Newspaper (US), the Houston Post (US) and was featured on television in Houston (Channel 8) and local television in Naples, Fl. Her work is in many of the major collections in the US, amongst which the Jean Jacques Cousteau (of the Cousteau Foundation), the City of Houston, hotel chains including Hilton, Marriott and Wyndham. Company collections include IBM, Exxon, various banks, designers, hospitals and many others.

Email: liduine@liduinebekman.com

Website: liduinebekman.com

NOTE: This meeting will be held online via Zoom.  A Zoom invite will be sent out to all current members prior to the meeting on February 16. You may join the Zoom call from your home OR join us at the Yacht Club to watch it there.

Reflecting light and the world around us, glass provides a window to the world and inspires reflection in our souls.

Fusing glass offers wonderful possibilities for creating functional pieces, such as plates and bowls, as well as artwork, by using color and form.  This presentation will introduce you to Fused Glass Art. What is it? How is it made? How is fused glass different from Blown Glass and Stained Glass? KC will introduce you to the process and show examples of different styles of art glass.

About the Artist: KC Babb has been working with glass for over 15 years, focusing primarily on Fused Glass. KC started her fused glass journey primarily making plates and bowls, but more recently has been making clocks and a few landscapes.

Email: babb.kc@gmail.com

Emotion in Your Art – Digging Deep

Sometimes great rendering in art is not enough. You need to make an emotional connection with your viewers. 

This presentation will explore how to make that connection, first inside yourself, then adding it to your work so others can explore it with you. 

About the Artist: A devoted watercolorist for over 40 years and a great lover of people and portraiture, Kate Aubrey began drawing while sprawled on the living room floor at age six. Since then, she has graduated to easels, studying with such notable artists as Charles Reid, John Salminen, Stephen Quiller, Ted Nuttall, Don Andrews, Jeannie McGuire, and Lian Quan Zhen.

Life has taken her to six states across the USA from Anchorage, Alaska where she picked up her first watercolor brush to the deep, rich artist’s culture of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. While in Alaska, she worked as one of the first women in the oil field at Prudhoe Bay, painting in her spare time. It all shows up in her work.

Arriving in Tennessee’s Knoxville area in 2014 to settle (she fervently hopes) for good, Kate teaches watercolor workshops inside and outside of Tennessee. She is a past Vice President of the Knoxville Watercolor Society, as well as a member of the Arts Alliance of Knoxville, the Art Guild of Tellico Village, and the Oak Ridge Art Center. Farther afield, she is a member of the National Watercolor Society with signature memberships in the Northwest Watercolor Society, the Southern Watercolor Society, the Watercolor Society of Alabama, and the Tennessee Watercolor Society. She is also a Master Artist at the Cape Cod Art Center in Massachusetts.

Her work has earned many awards in multiple national and international exhibitions and has appeared in “Watercolor Artist Magazine”, “American Art Collector Magazine”, Artist’s Magazine’s “The Best of Watercolor” (Splash 21 and Splash 22), and the “American Watercolor Weekly” e-zine.

When she is not teaching, she and her very large standard poodle can be found in her studio concentrating on her figure and floral paintings with a dash of still life or Apples thrown in. Although, truth be told, the poodle prefers bones….

Kate’s Website: https://www.kateaubrey.com/

Pet Portraits

Jennifer will share her story as an artist and her passion for painting Animals.

Information about the Artist

Jennifer Gennari is a classically trained artist. She graduated in 2005 from Ringling College of Art and Design and in 2008 left for Italy to study at the Florence Academy of Art where she spent three years abroad studying classical realism under Daniel Graves.

Jennifer has been painting animals since 2014 and is driven by a deeply rooted passion to elevate and legitimize the life we have with them. Jennifer is one of the first contemporary artists to focus entirely on animal painting, and the first to spotlight the Alla Prima method centered on capturing animals with the life, drama, and integrity of a traditional human portrait. There is a breath of individual emotion and personality inside each portrait as if their soul was captured within the paint. Her work is the definition of Labor of Love.

Jennifer has also written a book on drawing the human figure, has hosted an online class through Craftsy that instructs beginners on the techniques used in creating a traditional portrait in charcoal, and is presently teaching an ever growing class on animal portraiture through Drawing America.  

Jennifer’s work has been used in television shows and movies, and has received multiple awards and honors.

Artist Website: www.jennifergennari.com

NOTE: This meeting will be held online via Zoom.  A Zoom invite will be sent out to all current members prior to the meeting on November 18.