Visalia Senior Center hosts art exhibits

Residents of Visalia may not realize the Visalia Senior Center is host to talented oil and watercolor painters. There are also photographers, ceramicists and tole painters. One such artist, Bill Dillberg, loves to travel with his wife, Jan, and take photos as they go. Their most recent trip was to Ireland, starting and ending in Dublin with stops in Kilkenny, Cork, Killarney, and Galway. His goal in retirement is to travel and take photographs.
The photographic result of their trip is currently on exhibit at the Visalia Senior Center. The photographs depict the essence of Ireland from the quaint villages, pubs and cottages, as well as castles. The seniors love the color photographs of the sights from Ireland. In fact, four women from the oil painting class taught by Debbie Navarro asked to paint Bill’s images.

Pauline Hesse says she fell in love with a photo of an older gentleman with his donkey, dog and a goat by the side of the oil painting reproduction. “He is so neat to look at, he looks like a leprechaun,” she said.

Marlene Singleton chose to paint Dillberg’s photo of an Irish cottage because she’d love to go to Ireland. “It’s so beautiful and I love to paint flowers.” She plans to paint another photograph, a street scene in Kinsale.
The Visalia Senior Center shows works in the activity room at the Visalia Senior Center. Art by the watercolor class is also currently on display. The exhibits are ongoing, and rotate every six weeks. The oil class will show in September. Oil instructor Debbie Navarro and her students will also show their works at Taste the Arts in October.

The Visalia Parks and Recreation Department offers several art classes for seniors. The watercolor class will start Sept. 18 and oil painting starts Sept. 4. Other art classes offered at the Senior Center include ceramics, tole painting, digital photography, photo editing, basic and advanced drawing, in addition to fitness and dance classes. The fall/winter brochure comes out soon and will be mailed to Visalia homes.

Also on display at the Senior Center are historic images of Visalia provided by historian Terry Ommen. The images provide memories in retrospection for seniors as the photos reflect history a lot of them remember. There are scenes of the 1945 flood, opening of the Fox Theatre in 1930, the Palace Hotel, which was located to Court and Main Streets and several more line the hall.

Stop by the Senior Center’s Open House from 4-7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25 to tour the facility and see all of the great art works. This event connects seniors, families and caregivers with community programs, classes and resources available for older adults.

The concept of displaying visual art and poetry is not new to Don Seybold and Jeff Smith. They have exhibited together once before and have outdone themselves with their current exhibit in the Northwest Gallery in the Tippecanoe Arts Federation.Many times in this small gallery, artists have achieved a complete visual overkill by hanging far too many works much too close together.

Seybold’s poems on white paper are the perfect buffer separating Smith’s paintings. They become a visual palate-cleaning element that helps refresh the eye before continuing inspection of the abstract paintings. Due to my less-than-adequate knowledge of poetry, the focus of this review will be the recent paintings of Smith.It is such a delight to see the creative evolution of an artist. Over the past several years, Smith’s surface complexity, coloration and mark making skills have truly expanded.

The majority of the work has a searching energy of layering and over-painting that completes the artist’s intent to create a balanced composition, which contains both line and coloration. The artist has presented the viewer with several approaches to abstraction.

A few of the paintings, such as “Impact,” echo the artist’s early work. The breaking up of space by lines or geometric shapes has been a constant for Smith. These paintings present a feeling of all that is urban: a mix of shapes, lines and color that take on the visual sense of tall buildings clustered together.

As well done as these pieces are, it was even more interesting to see Smith’s approach to color field painting, which consists of large fields of solid color, usually rectangles of squares floating above a solid background.

Of great interest to me were the three pieces, “Street Poster #1,” “Street Poster #2,” and “Mist,” that contained absolutely no representational subject matter. Perhaps these paintings were the artist’s answer to Seybold’s poems.

Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/.