NEW AT THE COOLEY GALLERY THIS WEEK!

Come Join Us This Saturday May 11, 2013 for our 1st Annual Invitational Youth Art Exhibit.  The Opening is from 5-8 pm and will be on display until May 24th.

Featured Artists For May 2013

Jack Troy

"After first firing a small anagama a few of us built at Juniata College in
1978, there was no going back; no resisting the unquantifiable magnetism. There has been only a persistent, ravenous, curiosity about how to understand and apply what we began to learn by striking that first match: how to yield to humbling beauty that doesn’t give itself up easily or to everyone.

Wood-firing is an amalgamation of chainsaws, airplane travel, alluring books, cremating botanical corpses, waking up in new places, transmogrifying earthflesh, hiring log-trucks, laying bricks – skews, wedges, arches, soaps and splits - by the thousands, wearing shirts holding smokesmell, divine and
calamitous kiln-openings, splitting wedges, museum visits, pots revealing fiery origins, axes and splitting mauls, aesthetic theories both elegant and fatuous, and being hypnotized by flames – surging, eddying, then vanishing. You can’t
look the adventure in the eye; you just try to keep pace with
it.

The beauty of anagama-fired work sometimes contradicts
and displaces culturally acquired aesthetic values; all to the good. In the long run, my preference for firing an anagama lies in the simple, reductive process offering, on a good day, a happy ratio between challenges and rewards.  Local trees provide the fuel, delivered by a friend. The participants know one another, work together for a common purpose, and learn the vanity of
claiming to be fully responsible for the work we make. That we take nothing for granted and count our blessings when we are less than cursed comes with the territory."

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Catherine Thomas

Catherine Thomas, born in Washington, DC and raised in Northern Virginia, was introduced to art by her mother, an artist and teacher. Catherine’s style of painting is influenced by her mother, Lillian D. August, an impressionist, and also by American and French Tonalist painters, George Inness and Jean Baptiste Corot.

Tonalism has been described as a movement emphasizing atmosphere and shadow by using a color’s middle values as opposed to stronger contrast. American Tonalism evolved from the French movement in the middle and late 1800’s. George Inness once said that "The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion."

When producing a painting Catherine strives to convey the feeling of the scene rather than focusing on details. She utilizes color and soft edges to capture emotional memories of places. Her favorite subjects include landscapes, seascapes and country villages painted in either oil or acrylic.

FOHA and The Cooley Gallery

A percentage of the proceeds from any dog bowl purchase will be donated to FOHA through the month of May, 2013.   These bowls will be displayed at the First Friday event on Friday, May 3, 2013.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, THE COOLEY GALLERY 2012

12 S. King Street. Leesburg, VA 20175
703.779.4639
Gallery Hours
Wednesday 12-5pm
Thursday through Saturday 11-6pm
Sunday 12-4pm