Artistic license set loose at the All About Art exhibit

Art lovers will have a heyday this weekend when the All About Art Club hosts its annual art show and sale in the Yemassee Craft Center Art Room. Original oils, acrylics, ceramics, watercolors, pastels, photography and more will be on display, all from the eyes and hands of Sun City’s vast corps of talented artists.

Among the many artists preparing to hang their work are three who depict their vision in different media.

Pat Everson, who has worked in different formats, from oil to acrylic paints, now focuses on PanPastels, a palette-style method of creating paintings with chalk.

Denis Reshetar works on a very large scale, building wooden frames in various shapes around which he stretches canvas he then paints.

Mary Ann Putzier works in watercolor and porcelain, learning each time she prepares to teach a new class.

“Teaching always gets me going because if I am going to teach floral painting, then I have to paint fresh ones. I can’t bring up old paintings as examples,” Putzier said in her well-lighted studio. Among the classes she has taught at the community’s art room are “Saving your Whites” and making a watercolor canvas. Next year, she expects to teach how to paint reflections and possibly portraits, her favorite subject.

“Portraits are the most satisfying. Not only to capture the likeness but the personality,” she said.

Her mother and grandmother were quite artistic, Putzier said, and she and her eight siblings were raised on drawing.

“All of us have some kind of artistic skills, especially the girls,” she said. It taught her to see, to observe. “If you can’t see it, you can’t draw it and you can’t paint it. Of course, once you see it, you can take liberties like Picasso and others. They weren’t copyists. They took the truth and bent it.”

Reshetar thinks in the summer and then creates in the fall and winter.

“I usually have thoughts on paper — the shapes I want to do and the designs I want to paint on them,” he said. He builds his own wooden frames, sometimes taking one completely apart after the design fails to come together.

“It usually takes me a week of 10-12 hours when I get going,” he said. “I like big stuff, different shapes. Big or narrow, horizontal or vertical. And usually difficult to put into a house.”

He said he repainted one square vision four or five times until he finally started all over from scratch, scrapping the canvas and rebuilding the canvas frame into a different shape.

“I usually spend as much time making the frame as doing the painting,” he said. Originally a ceramicist and sculptor in college, Reshetar has taken some of those skills and reapplied them to both his frames and his painting technique.

One painting has a 3D effect as one side seems to pull away from the wall. A few paintings Reshetar has hanging in his home were created by what he calls the “lost wax” technique, a process used in making molds. Across the surface of the painting — a blending of colors that graduate to more intense hues from the center out — he adds the finishing touch, a deliberate splash or dripline of black paint.

“When it has dried enough that the edges are hard, I take it outside and hose it off,” he said. What remains behind is an outline of the splash, the painting’s colors popping back out.

Everson began attending the Silvermine Guild of Art in Connecticut when she was 12 and studied art through high school. An argument she no longer recalls with an art instructor turned her against her training and she earned a degree in psychology in college.

“Art was always with me. I couldn’t get away from it,” Everson said. “Even in the two 10-year stretches I abandoned it, it was always behind me, nagging me.”

Now concentrating on the use of pastels, she finds that keeping up with the ever-evolving techniques and resources is just a small part of being an artist.

“You have to keep current,” she said. Originally an oil painter, Everson acquired adult asthma and found that being in the presence of the chemicals used was unhealthy. She had to change her medium and moved to acrylic and has taught the subject to Sun City students.

That, too, became a problem with her asthma and now she has moved to pastels, a medium that uses no chemicals with which to create. In the process of researching these tools, Everson discovered a whole new concept in the use of PanPastels, a set of colored chalk discs that have low dust issues, one of the challenges of using chalk.

Rather than create the painting with pastel sticks, Everson is able to apply the chalk with sponge-tipped applicators. The different shaped heads allow for various results on the paper and stick pastels may still be used to provide an opaque sharp line, if desired.

It’s all part of Everson’s pursuit of perfection through practice.

“Once you learn to paint well, you learn to create well. I’ve become progressively more intent on pursuing art and you can’t just stick with the old ways,” she said. “You have to keep up with new products. You can have thoughts in your head but you technically have to be able to put those thoughts down on paper or canvas.”