The Hillsborough Gallery of Arts presents “Intertwined,”botanical oil paintings by Chris Graebner, watermedia collage paintings by Nancy Smith and figurative needle-felted sculpture by Lynn Wartski. Intertwined will be in the gallery from July 28th through August 23rd.  

An opening reception will be held during Hillsborough’s Last Friday Art Walk on July 31st from 6-9pm. During the art walk Reishi Riot will play live music on the front patio. 

The show includes an artist talk with the artists in the gallery on Saturday, August 15th at 4pm. 

For painter Chris Graebner memories and paintings are completely intertwined. “When I see something that strikes me, I immediately reflect on how I could go about painting it.” While most of her work is in oils, she has worked in many other mediums and often mixes them. “Last February I saw the golden evening sky through the bare winter trees. The juxtaposition of the yellow sky and the gray trees was so striking that I immediately decided that I had to paint it.” That painting, One Golden Evening is a mixture of mediums. The support is a clayboard panel, allowing the painted surface to be scratched through in several areas, the background is acrylic and graphite and the trees are oil paint. Not only are Graebner’s life and art intertwined, so, increasingly are the mediums in her artwork.

“There is a space where pure imagination intertwines with complete awareness of what is. I seek to dwell there,” says artist Nancy Smith. How does the evening light different from that at midday? How does the sky interact with trees?  Color choices and painting tools help her find answers to these questions. “I make the choice to experiment with options of paint, brushes, brayers, or water spray and allow a conversation to develop between myself and the surface I’m working on.” As the work in this show demonstrates, setting and atmosphere have a large influence on Smith’s questions. She uses different mediums, watercolor and acrylic, on a variety of surfaces to describe her answers.

The very process of creating Lynn Wartski’s sculptures references the title Intertwined. In addition to the mechanics of needle felting, many of these sculptures combine, or intertwine, elements of different animals and plants into one new creation. Inspiration from nature, fantasy and mythology are all intertwined. “As is often true of my work,” says Wartski, “several of these new sculptures also combine elements or embellishments that I have fashioned from other materials and techniques taking them beyond needle felted figures into the realm of mixed media.” An example of these interconnections is a sculpture titled Primordial, which features a tortoise figure with botanical elements from the forest floor sprouting from its back. The piece weaves together animal and botanical characteristics and draws on creation stories which tell of a turtle rising up with the dry land on its back.