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Catch an affordable rising art starReflections Gallery has a humble storefront on Lee Highway that’s in contrast to the beautiful, provocative art inside, which ranges from the traditional to the wild and edgy.Now, curator Summer Fisher is making it possible for even low-income art lovers to live with some piece they love. She has anointed one wall of the gallery as the “Affordable Art Wall.”“Reflections has a core of about 150 artists who regularly show here and I asked them to contribute a piece to the wall; most agreed,” Fisher says. “Pieces are $100 or less.”
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If you go› What: “Trees and Skies” exhibition, through Jan. 5, 2016.› Where: Reflections Gallery, 6922 Lee Highway› Hours: 10 a.m-6 p.m. Monday-Friday.› Information: www.reflectionsgallerytn.com or 892-3072.
Autumn is a fleeting season when life ruthlessly clears the stage for a new year that’s still a blank canvas. Jewel-colored leaves begin to fall, becoming detritus that waits to turn to compost and then into new life.
The last exhibition of the year for Reflections Gallery offers several views of that harsh-yet-beautiful change. Titled “Trees and Skies,” it is packed with paintings and sculpture.
Sandra Washburn uses a different metal – genuine gold leaf – to simulate a burst of sunlight over a weather-beaten stone wall in her painting, “Awake the Dawn.”
A Martian living through his first Earth autumn might be perplexed by a season in which dying leaves display such a lively explosion of vibrant colors. Jeanne Brice’s painting collage plays with that contradiction. Several artists highlight fall’s jewel-like ruby, amber, topaz and smoky diamond foliage; Brice, however, uses actual jewelry to create leaves in “Autumn Adornment.”
Her tree is drawn in textured gel, then Washburn cut each leaf from tissue paper or “deli paper, the kind sandwiches are wrapped in, because when its painted with colors, it’s translucent, like tree leaves,” Brice explains.
“I took crystals and fake gemstones from broken earrings, all of them in autumn color tones, and hung them on the tree to give sparkle to the leaves,” she says. “I spotted some flashy, cheap, red, orange and gold earrings in a drug store that I broke up and scattered around the base of the trunk as dead leaves.”
Wood sculptor Steve Pickett fashioned a large, goblet-esque bowl shaped like a circular forest grove with leafy, wind-tossed treetops for the cup. The wood is carved so delicately, the trees seem captured in mid-movement.
Loren Howard’s “Colony Cube” looks as if a thunderstorm has been captured – and is now exploding from – a bronze lockbox. Howard says she first poured molten bronze into an abandoned ant colony, then sculpted the results.
Contact Lynda Edwards at 423-757-6391 or ledwards@timesfreepress.com.