If you go
› What: “Diversions” by the Mountain Arts Guild.› When: Through Nov. 25.› Where: Exum Gallery, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 305 W. Seventh St.› Phone: 423-266-8195.
Join the MAGI
The Mountain Arts Guild meets at 10 a.m. every Thursday at Bachman Community Center, 2815 Anderson Pike, Signal Mountain. Newcomers are welcome. Bring a lunch and your medium of choice.
You can see the Mountain Arts Guild’s latest exhibition at Exum Gallery, but if you’re an artist, perhaps you’d rather join the group at work/play.
The group meets every Thursday at the Bachman Community Center on Signal Mountain to help hone their craft, and the spirit of camaraderie is as welcome as the brush strokes.
“What we do,” says member artist Mark Cobbe, “is somebody goes up before everybody gets together and sets out plastic banquet tables and people bring in projects they’re working on and spread out. There’s no class, per se, but if somebody wants some help, they’ll walk over and say, ‘I need some help.’
“It’s a very informal group. We paint a couple of hours and have lunch together and then everybody packs up and goes home.”
The result of their latest efforts is “Diversions,” which will be on view at Exum Gallery through Nov. 25.
Cobbe says there are oil paintings, acrylic paintings, watercolor paintings and photography. “And we have three art dolls, all handmade out of fabric,” he says.
Originally known as Mountain Arts Guild Inc., the group has kept its original acronym, MAGI, though it’s no longer incorporated. Membership isn’t limited to the mountain, says Cobbe, who lives in downtown Chattanooga.
Cobbe says he’s been doing watercolor “this time” for about eight years and has four paintings in the “Diversions” show. He has pursued art twice, at separate times, after his father and then his wife told him, “You need to do this.”
An Ohio native, Cobbe says his father first persuaded him to join the Western Ohio Watercolor Society. He had no paints at the time, but he gathered the requisite supplies and had a couple of paintings accepted into a juried show. But his daughter was young, only 3 or 4 at the time, he recalls, so he “finished up [a final] watercolor and put the paints away.”
“I had done some [previous] painting, but I was not serious serious,” he says. “It was just a painting for the parents at Christmas type of thing.”
The art interruption ended when his wife handed him a newspaper article about a watercolor workshop being offered at Alexian Village on Signal Mountain – the second time he heard, “You need to do this.”
“I was retired at the time,” he says, “and she wanted me out of the house.”
It was at the workshop that he learned about the Mountain Arts Guild.
“I enjoy the group immensely,” he says. “It’s a very friendly group, and we help each other all the time.”
“Most of us are not trained artists. Some of us have taken one or more workshops from professional artists. But we all have fun.”
Contact Lisa Denton at ldenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6281.