Artists from across the country will be exhibiting at the Lawrence Art Guild’s Art in the Park on September 24th and 25th, with the majority of artists being local or regional artists. Many of these regional artists – from ceramic artists and jewelers to painters and printmakers celebrate the midwest.
Printmaker Neal Julian’s pieces illustrate the exquisite beauty which can be found on a suburban street or city sidewalk. His piece Overlook, features Overlook Park at Clinton Lake just outside of Lawrence and two people under the night sky. The building is immediately recognizable – but the night sky itself startles the viewer in its spectacular array of stars – a reminder to us that the place we are in is lovely.
Watercolorist Steven Dragan and animal painter Chris Bohannon include iconic Kansas City landmarks within their works. Bohannon describes her KC Metro series as “Fantastical works depicting Kansas City as a pet’s playground.” As viewers cavort with the pups in the Country Club Plaza’s JC Nichols Fountain, or play with cats among shuttlecocks on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art they are invited again into those familiar spaces. Steven Dragan speaks about his art as a connection between people and the places they occupy as “Each place has its own meaning and story. I let the place speak for itself by capturing precise lines through the loose lens of watercolor…The people who also love these places recognize it. My art is about that connection..”
Heather Duris is a painter whose work ranges between abstracts and semi-abstracts. Her semi-abstracts of Kansas, with their Kansas iconography and yellows, greens and blues, evoke the wide open spaces of the plains. To view a Heather Duris painting and then travel across Kansas, one can more fully feel the broad sky and open space of the prairie.
The watercolor landscapes of Roura Young beg the viewer to look and then look again more closely at the beauty of the prairie. Her recent works have been a series of prairie plant watercolors, exploring plant growth patterns, how they intertwine and move upwards from earth to sky. She also studies the forms of the land, the swoop of the Eastern Kansas hills, or the repeating patterns of the Flint Hills. Woodworker Bryan Young is also drawn to the lines of the Flint Hills and the silhouette of the Flint Hills can often be found on his boxes.
To hold an echo of the landscape is a reminder of our place. To hold Becky Meneely’s pottery, is to literally hold the Kansas earth within your hands. She has said that using regionally sourced clay, along with muted colors and simple illustrations is to evoke the “quiet beauty of the Midwest.” Several other Art in the Park ceramic artists have work inspired by their environment. Sherri Hanna has said, “Echoes from the Heartland reverberate through my work. I seek inspiration from my heritage and regional sources…”
At the Lawrence Art Guild’s Art in the Park visitors are invited to view their own environment through the unique lens of an artist’s vision.
Is the first artist Neal Jordan or Neal Julian? — the name under the artwork does not match the name in the article.
Hi Olli! Yes, the artist’s name should be Neal Julian. We have made the correction. Thanks for catching that!