If you go
› What: “Double Take” exhibition by North Georgia Sky Painters Society› When: Through Feb. 26.› Where: Exum Gallery, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 805 W. Seventh St› Gallery hours: 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday.› Admission: Free.› Information: 266-8195
Having grown up on a farm in North Alabama, Janice Kennedy often is drawn back to her memories when she works on a painting.
"That's where my roots are, in the farmland," she says.
So naturally, "it was a foregone conclusion" that she'd do something about "farmland and rural areas and nature" for a new exhibition at the Exum Gallery.
The exhibit by the North Georgia Sky Painters group, is titled "Double Take" and challenged the five members to create a painting - a still life, landscape, whatever - then take an element of that painting and either zoom in for a closer look or zoom out for a wider view.
"Viewers can think of it as a sort of adult 'I Spy' game that tests their powers of observation," says a news release.
Kennedy did her paintings in reverse. She first started with a close-up look at a red barn on "the back 40," she says, then zoomed out, placing the barn far in the distance beneath a cloud-filled sky and surrounded by a tree-ringed field.
"I did the barn first; it was something that was pleasing to me and it was such a joy to paint," says Kennedy, who started painting after she retired from TVA 12 years ago.
Carol Hobbs, founder of North Georgia Sky Painters, painted an homage to painter Maurice Grosser, who was born in Huntsville, Ala., in 1903 and died in 1986. He was mostly noted for his landscapes, but he also did some portraits and still lifes.
One of those still lifes features a purple cabbage sliced in half; Hobbs used that painting as inspiration for hers, which includes purple cabbages halves but has them sitting on a brightly colored blanket with multiple geometric patterns woven throughout. A small Oriental-decorated bowl sits in the foreground.
"I sort of slightly imitated his composition and added the wild colors to it and the Asian piece there," she says. She titled the painting "Bohemian Nod to Grosser."
Her detailed work takes one of the geometric patterns - a diamond - and examines it more closely.
"I am drawn to rich colors and that detail had a lot of color that I could just go with," she says.
On a trip to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Sherry Hullender came upon a small pond with blooming cherry trees and a small red bridge like ones you see in Japanese gardens.
"I just loved the scene," says Hullender, who's an accountant in her day job.
Her first painting, an oil on canvas titled "The Pond," takes a wide view of the scene and is rich in blue with the white and purple of the cherry blossoms and the red of the bridge standing in contrast. Her "double take" painting is an up-close view of the bridge arching over the pond.
"Water really fascinates me, the reflections you see in the water," she says.
Contact Shawn Ryan at sryan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327.