Art Relish

The Downtown ArtsWalk takes place on the first Thursday of each month from 5-8 p.m.

“First Thursdays ArtsWalk has grown with new programs and additional venues so that art lovers can view the arts, tour the historic districts of Downtown and enjoy various discounts at Downtown restaurants. First Thursdays ArtsWalk is a self-guided tour of galleries, with no beginning or ending point, you are free to move at your own pace. We even put together some sample itineraries for you.

With its growth, First Thursdays ArtsWalk has become more than just an gallery tour. It is an event where singles can meet, businesspeople can unwind, and couples can enjoy the beauty of Downtown’s landscape. And all these are accomplished while taking in the culture that the arts offer. To put it simply, no two trips could ever be the same.”

Complete details including participating galleries, events, directions and parking information can be found at the Downtown First Thursdays site.

Greg Benson, Kim Shockley Karelson, and Jill Schultz Mcgannon are the featured artists in the up and coming exhibition “3 Points of View: Landscapes” presented by the Madison Artists Guild. Each painter has created large landscape paintings from his or her distinct point of view.

In spite of making his home in Georgia, Greg Benson never quite shed his Pennsylvania upbringing and many of his most recent paintings fuse childhood memories with the still intact scenery of Lower Millford Township P.A. Kim Shockley Karelson is a fourth generation Shockley, a family that has lived in the Madison area for over 140 years. She enjoys painting the southern landscape from small vignettes to large vistas. Jill Schultz Mcgannon paints small plein air paintings on location and larger pieces in her studio. Her favorite destinations for plein air painting include the Georgia coast, the mountains of North Carolina, and the Italian countryside .

This exhibition is the second of quarterly exhibitions in 2012 sponsored by the Madison Artists Guild at Town 220. “3 Points of View: Landscapes” opens May 3rd from 6-8 p.m., kicking off the Madison Tour of Homes and running through July 28th, 2012.

The Madison Artists Guild is a non profit organization founded in 1985 to educate and encourage artistic endeavor in it’s members and the community.

Through July 28.

Town 220 Restaurant and Gallery
220 W. Washington St.
Madison, GA 30605

Sarah Emerson‘s paintings present viewers with highly stylized versions of nature by taking patterns already visible in the natural world and painting them in pastel hues and pop, paint by number repetition. Inspired by themes ranging from battlefields, war propaganda, literature, and idyllic gardens, she uses the landscape for impression, abstraction, symbolism, and sentiment. Emerson manipulates scale and spatial relationships, twisting her subjects into flat emblems and shifting planes. The result is often visually enchanting compositions that combine candy-like colors with macabre narratives that leave the viewer with a sense of both wonder and melancholy.

For “Underland,” Emerson’s second solo exhibition at whitespace gallery, she focuses on creating a series of underworld reflections of the natural landscape. Each painting depicts a fantastical analogical study of an actual place combined with the myths and remnants of the real events associated with that location. Once on canvas the place is removed from reality; it becomes an image reflection or vague memory filtered, abstracted, and compressed into geometric shapes. For Emerson, the artificial underworld in her paintings becomes a story of its own, an apocryphal place mimicking and appropriating a reality of paradise and innocence lost. Each painting is a parallel plane with repeating symbols and “memento mori” motifs dressed up to camouflage a gaping darkness lurking beneath the surface.

Sarah Emerson graduated from the Atlanta College of Art and went on to complete a Master’s Degree at Goldsmiths College in London, England. Over the last twelve years she has exhibited her paintings in galleries throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, including White Columns in New York, Cosmic Gallery in Paris, and Real Art Ways in Connecticut. Her paintings were featured on the cover of New American Paintings in 2003 and 2007; and her current work will be included in the upcoming Southern edition of New American Paintings 2012. In 2010, Emerson exhibited her work in “Catastrophe,” the Quebec City Biennial curated by Sylvie Fortin. Other recent projects include murals for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s Day Job: Georgia group show and the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs’ Elevate/Art Above Underground Atlanta public art project. Her work was also included in Atlanta Art Now’s inaugural publication, Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape.

Through May 12.

There will be an artist talk at the gallery on May 3.

Whitespace
814 Edgewood Ave.
Atlanta, Ga.