Save the dates for SIGNS & WONDERS coming to artCentral in the spring of 2022, April 1 through May 14!
For four years my artist husband David and I have been conceiving and preparing for our collaborative, multimedia exhibition to fill the galleries of artCentral. Paradise, our big, old house, is chock-full with the creations we have been making and saving to share with you. The upstairs hallway is overflowing. Our studio easels are full and the walls, too. The front and back stairways have artwork marching beside us every time we go up and down. There is art temporarily displayed in the kitchen. The foyer and the dining room are serving as staging galleries. In the front salon and the music salon art is even filling up corners. Art! Art! Art! Art everywhere and yet we keep making and dreaming of making still more!
SIGNS & WONDERS first came to life on our Sunday outings—our drives on the winding blacktops carrying us and our puppies to George Washington Carver Monument Park near Diamond, Missouri, and our weekly trips across Center Creek on the back road taking us to brunch and a meet up with friends at the Joplin puppy playground.
Since our courting days David and I have shared the inclination to “ooh and ah” at sights that catch our eyes and tweak our fancies. Even following the same paths again and again we always find wonders to delight us—a quartet of Scottish highlander, hearty hairy coos keeping company with a donkey named Charlie; a gaggle of wild turkeys strolling about in a farmer’s front yard; sunbeams gleefully summer dancing in an urban brook; lapis lazuli shadows stretching lean over a river’s snow-covered, tree-lined banks; story-telling clouds bouncing or floating or rushing or resting still and serene over us in a plethora of shapes and sizes; a vine-covered fence post that began life as a cedar tree.
Those times we make mini-detours again and again we are pleased to have our senses entertained by the newness of the unexpected—an enormous black and white swine with blunted nose peering through swaying emerald-tinted grass behind a hog wire fence; spring and summer wildflowers showing off their beauty; naked winter old growth standing staunchly sensuous and unapologetic in bareness; a nursery of young black vultures lined up on a white fence railing with a raucous murder of ebony crows circling overhead; a longhorn posing roadside and offering a repertoire of amusing expressions as though for a photo-op; a pasture of horses dressed in masks and spats looking ready for a neighbor’s costume party.
With our comings and goings we are frequently entertained by the directional signs we encounter placed on poles to help and guide us in our travels. The very noire arrow, pointed up with a wiggly tail flowing down over a reflective yellow backdrop, was the first road sign I decided to paint and call “Wiggle Bottom”, a reminder of the squirming Aussie riding in my lap as we made our way up a curving, twisting tarmac trail.
All these signs and wonders seem to be love notes left by a grand heart filled with benevolence—reassuring us we live in a world of beauty and goodness, telling us to pause and slow down. We do. We slow down. We stop. As David gathers an appealing stick or stone or rusted scrap of bric-a-brac for his sculpture, I start snapping my camera’s shutter—collecting images, capturing moments, making sweet memories to put into my painted photo tableau.
Mark your calendar for SIGNS & WONDERS in April and May 2022, but please do not wait until then to visit Hyde House. Though artCentral will be closed September 4 and 5, 2021, in observance of Labor Day, you still have time to visit Debbie and Richard Reeds’ exquisite METAMORPHOSIS Exhibition of paintings and pottery on view through September 18, 2021, at Hyde House, 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage. Schmidt CPAs and Advisors are the gracious underwriters for the Exhibition. Admission is free. The public is invited.
The Missouri Arts Council has certified artCentral as an ArtSafe Space with CDC protocols observed by all who visit Hyde House. Masks are to be worn and social distancing is to be practiced as we all do our best to keep one another safe and healthy.
For more information call (417) 358-4404. Weekend Gallery Hour are Fridays and Saturdays, 12:00-5:00 p.m.
