More than a dozen Chattanooga watercolorists featured in statewide exhibit

There’s a sense of “otherwhere-ness” to Sandy Boone’s watercolor “Bottomland” that makes it seem like she captured a location that, despite being surreal, could still exist on some fantastical plane.

A veteran Chattanooga watercolorist, Boone says a trip to Louisiana inspired her to paint the abstract landscape of murky water dotted with a stand of lurid golden trees.

“I saw all that water down there, all the lowlands and swamps and everything,” she says. “I took a lot of photos, and when I came back, I knew I wanted to paint water. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t know what it was going to turn into, and it just turned into a bottomland, where the alluvial floods in the spring go into the lowlands.”

Boone is one of more than a dozen Chattanooga-area artists whose work was selected to appear in the Tennessee Watercolor Society’s Biennial Exhibition, a juried show which begins Friday and runs through June 24 at The Emporium in Knoxville. The exhibition will feature 16 award categories that have yet to be determined by famed international watercolorist and exhibition juror John Salminen.

He whittled down an initial pool of about 200 submitted works to select the final crop of 55 paintings for the exhibition. The Watercolor Society divides the state into five regions centered roughly around its largest cities, and with 15 paintings that made the cut, the Chattanooga region is the most well-represented in the biennial show.

“The art scene is very active in Chattanooga,” says Helen Burton, a publicist for the Watercolor Society and local watercolorist whose painting “He’s Just My Bill” was one of those selected by Salminen.

“Many of these artists are at local galleries like In-Town or the Main Street galleries,” she continues. “They’re active participants in the arts scene. Chattanooga very definitely has a vibrant art scene.”

Following its stint in Knoxville, the exhibition will start traveling, albeit in a slightly trimmed-down version. Of the 55 works that were selected for inclusion, Salminen has selected 30 of them to travel around Tennessee.

Through December, the pared-down exhibition will embark on a circuit tour of the state featuring month-long stays in six locations, including a stint at Chattanooga’s Association for Visual Arts Gallery in October.

“If you go on tour, you share yourself with people across the state,” Burton says. “One of the guiding principles of our organization is to try and reach as many people as possible.”

Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepresss.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.