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Art and friendship combine on aninternational scale at the annual Artists and Friends Show this month at the Middle Street Gallery in Washington, Va.
From Russia via an underground communications network, from wartom Lebanon, from the visually inspiring cityscape of San Francisco on the West to the New Hampshire hills and Virginia’s valleys on the East come the works of the friends who are exhibiting in the gallery’s show of shows.
“This is one of the beauties of Middle Street,” said Laurie Marshall, a founding member of the nonprofit artists cooperative, the only one of its kind in rural Northern Virginia. “We can mount a show that’s juried by our own perceptions. We can be a show case for new artists in the area.”
The gallery runs regular shows of its members’ works as well as occasional special exhibits, like last month’s 7th Congressional District’s High School Art Competition. The look changes constantly, as landscapes replace abstracts replace portraits replace etchings replace sculpture replace weavings of fiber and reeds. But at no time is Middle Street so full of arresting, absorbing, entertaining, and emotionally gripping works as when the gallery artists open the walls to their friends.
The friends come from near and far.
There’s Alan Berkowitz, psychiatrist at Culpeper Hospital, who has been pursuing photography on a daily basis for the last two years. He makes his debut in Artists and Friends with haunting animal images, color photographs he printed combining a series of slides.
Page Smith, formerly a public relations writer for the hospital and now assistant life enhancement coordinator with the Fauquier County Parks and Recreation Department, is another first time exhibitor. She also takes photography into art with her “Shoescape,” combining the absence df perspective with the drama of light and shadow to present a new view of everyday objects.
Blacksmith Nol Putnam brings from his shop and showroom in The Plains two nature studies that belie the perception of iron as cold, hard, and immovable. Putnam’s sculptures prove instead iron’s versatility as a medium for creating vines, flowers, leaves and other objects of fragile delicacy.
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