Venturing ‘Inside & Out’ at River Gallery

Contributed Photos”I try to go for timeless pieces that you can’t decide when they were made,” potter Mark Chatterly says. “One hundred years from now, if you looked at them they could look new, but also old. Almost primal.”

Artist Ruth Koh grew up in the hills of West Virginia which, as she points out, is redundant.

“I don’t think there is a single flat spot in the whole state, so I spent a lot of time looking into the deep, dark woods and now I live in the woods [around Knoxville]. I love it. It’s what I paint,” she says.

“As kids, there were small caves that we explored and we drank out of the streams that came down off the mountains. We weren’t wild children, but we played in the woods a lot. It would take two or three hours to climb a mountain, but we did it.”

And yes, it’s one reason why she paints nature scenes of trees and woods.