july 8 — august 1
reception : july 18, 4 — 6
Join us for a reception Saturday, July 18. Come meet Richard and Lisa, walk through the work, and spend an evening with the two artists and the people who care about what they create. Wines selected by Peabody's Wine & Beer Merchants, with a tasting pairing chosen for this exhibition. Hors d'oeuvres from the gallery and our friends.
Earlier that morning, stop by Mountain Grounds — the specials menu is ours this month, and Richard and Lisa both brought hand made coffee sleeves to give away with the first cups poured.
Each sleeve is a raffle ticket for a handmade porcelain set by Lisa, drawn at the start of the reception.
Both artists work for the land, in different mediums. Oversmith is a North Carolina native who went to Michigan for art school and to London for a summer at the Royal College of Art, and then returned home to the mountains that gave him a new painting every morning. Stinson came from New Hampshire and stayed for the same reason : the surfaces the mountains offered were the ones her work needed. He paints the light sprawling over lush fields. She carries the texture of stone and water and time into glaze. The painter chases the moment. The potter holds the cycle. Both spend their days trying to see the landscape in its best light — which is what these mountains ask of everyone who arrives here, and what they pay back tenfold when you do.
Richard Oversmith paints alla prima, in oil on linen, in the light and the weather of whatever place he happens to be standing. He is unusual among plein-air painters in that he prefers autumn and winter, when the foliage isn't overwhelming and the underlying structure of the land shows. What comes off the canvas — a waterfall in the High Country, a farm at the end of the day, a Brittany harbor at low tide — is landscape made in the moment, in as few strokes as the eye needs to understand it.
He is a North Carolina native. He has painted here for thirty years since completing his education, with a six-month stretch in Brittany while his wife and daughter learned French, and trips through Italy, Cornwall, Bermuda, Belize, and New Zealand along the way. He talks about the Russian Impressionists more than the French — Fechin, Levitan, Timkov — because he admires the way their farming lives showed up on the canvas. The plein-air discipline is not a genre for him. It is a method of paying attention.
Oversmith is a Signature Member of the American Impressionist Society and has taken top honors at Plein Air Easton and the Olmsted Plein Air Paint-out in Atlanta. His work has been featured in American Art Collector, Plein Air Magazine, and Fine Art Connoisseur. He has been represented by the Art Cellar for over twenty years.
Lisa Stinson builds ceramic vessels and wall platters that live in two places at once. On the wall, her Texture Series Platters read as painting — layered glaze, multiple firings, surface built up in what she calls "evidence of time." Off the wall, they serve dinner. She has said that her relationship with her process is stronger than her relationship with the final result, and that she is always looking for new ways to expound upon what already exists. What that means in practice is a body of work made slowly, in cycles, under heat, with attention.
She came south from New Hampshire and built her studio into a hillside in Vilas, where she has been working for years. Before that: a BA in Psychology from Wells College — an origin that maps onto how she thinks about the work — then a BFA from Alfred University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is Professor and Coordinator of the Ceramic Area at Appalachian State University in Boone, and she leads international study abroad programs — Spain, Costa Rica, Japan — because she believes what happens to an artist when they see a different landscape is not incidental to what they make.
Stinson has been a resident artist at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her work has been exhibited at Blue Spiral Gallery, the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Arts, the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, Penland Gallery, Greenwich House Pottery, the Archie Bray Foundation, and the William King Museum, among many others. She has been represented by the Art Cellar for over twenty years.