AFTER HOURS: Old friends and budding artists
The Middle Georgia Art Association, on June 19, opened “Blue,” the new exhibition of paintings and photographs, and welcomed Jil Hulgan Pinkston’s art students from Magnolia Manor.
Pinkston, member of a family well known in Middle Georgia for its creative talents, is continuing a Hulgan family tradition by generously sharing her expertise with Magnolia Manor residents, who are drawing and painting with the abandon of those who no longer concern themselves with inhibitions that may have kept them away from artistic endeavors years ago.
Jean Gay’s still life portrayals of her favorite subjects are for sale, but she is holding on to the woods scenes -- “Cabin in the Woods” and “Paths of Life” -- her tranquil ventures into landscapes.
“Homage to Georgia O’Keefe,” by Sue McGraw, a tribute to the late artist that captured the sky on canvas as few artists can, depicts breathtaking ether blues, which are appropriate for an art show with a blue theme. McGraw has taken her paint box on the road to interpret her views of “Grandfather Mountain” and “Peaceful Lake,” one of the cool, mysterious lakes found tucked among the hills of north Georgia.
Josephine Jackson, like Pinkston’s other students represented in the gallery, is exploring still life, water and pastoral scenes with equanimity. For anyone who has muscled a vessel into harbor through a storm ravaged sea, “Rough Voyage” is a hair-raising reminder. The guarded tension in “Cougar” is as menacing as “Peaceful Voyage” is serene.
Pinkston has not limited her class to the pursuit of visual arts, for Marian Jones’ poetry speaks to the fears of the unknown and the angst of growing older in “Stroke” and “The Aging Process.”
REMEMBERING JOY
Pinkston’s sister, the late Joy Hulgan, was an avid Macon ambassador with encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s musical heritage and always on board to support the arts in her hometown. Many of her canvases were included in the MGAA show, reminders of a life cut short before she could record more of her stories of travel near and far, and the people and places she loved.
Her droll sense of humor and sardonic wit belied the intense allegiance she had to her friends. While many painters have propped up their easels on the front lawn of Mercer University’s law school to define the majesty of that august façade, Hulgan’s “Walter F. George School of Law: From Bond Street” is typical of her out-of-the-box perspective, this time from a higher elevation on Bond Street.
OH SO BLUE
Suzanne Lawler’s is a familiar face in our dens, delivering the news and covering special events on WMAZ in Macon. She is just as adept on the other side of the lens, a talent honed over the years of toting a camera to locations all over Middle Georgia.
“Spring Blue,” her award winning photograph of cherry blossoms in full bloom against an azure sky is the stuff of a child’s daydream, breathtaking in the brilliance of its colors. Photographers know that some of the most magical moments are missed if you don’t look up!
“After the Dance,” Gilbert Lee’s photograph of the hems and legs of a group of women pausing on the sidewalk to share details of the evening’s event, is a misty, provocative urban scene straight out of a 1950s movie; his “Looking Up” won honorable mention in the show.
Lee and Glenn Grossman are crowd pleasers in the galleries with their versatile subject matter, memorialized on film. Grossman’s “Tuesday Afternoon” is the sailor’s gleeful, work day escape to a sailboat, lifted by the wind under a suspension bridge. Another film artist in the gallery, Karen Sisk, plays with blue in her mystical “Cerulean Gondolas,” at rest at the pier, lined up for the next day’s tourists on Venice’s canals.
A DAWN WALK
Wade Taylor did not live to finish “Blue Trees,” the large unsigned canvas displayed in the front window of MGAA’s Ingleside Avenue gallery. For those who enjoy early morning walks through the woods, the range of palette cast on the forest by the sun as it rises from the east, is one of the pleasures of a new day. In Taylor’s painting, the relentless sun is dancing through the forest as it reluctantly surrenders its blue shawls.
Martha Tisdale, master gardener and prolific painter, contributed “Blue Grotto” for this collection. Tisdale is surrounded by her gardens -- which are constantly in bloom, one perennial display replaced by another as the seasons change -- so, her entry was a surprise, but held all the inscrutable secrets of the sea. This exhibition will close July 11, after which MGAA conducts an arts camp for the week of July 13.
Katherine Walden is a freelance writer and interior designer in Macon. Contact her at 478-742-2224 or kwaldenint@aol.com.
This story was originally published June 28, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "AFTER HOURS: Old friends and budding artists."