Dorothy McGeorge and Judith Richey created the recent buzz at The Old Schoolhouse Gallery in the East Mountains. Visitors were captivated with Richey’s unique pottery featuring peaceful scenes cut in to the sides of ceramic mugs and bowls, broken tree branches for teapot handles and intricate, petite pieces with slots for tiny spoons.
Judith Richey has been a clay artist for over forty years. Her goal has been to create pieces that people will enjoy and use often. Richey works both in stoneware and in porcelain and incorporate slab forms and hand built and carved addition into her work. As an avid gardener, she has recently created a series of items for garden ornamentation. Her sculptural pieces called “garden beads” are composed of individual elements stacked together in interesting arrangements. Why clay? Richey says, “Clay is a wonderful medium, perfect in every way for many uses and forms of expression. It is also one of the most enduring art forms in any culture. It lets my spirit sing.”
Dorothy McDonough McGeorge’s work is often of structures that reflect the character of a place such as the open plains of the Midwest, the urban cityscapes of Montreal, Quebec, or the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
McGeorge chooses to organize her picture plane into segments to compel the viewer to share the whole of the image through its parts. The idea of perfect proportions found in nature, supported by mathematical principles, have had a direct influence on her work. McGeorge earned her Masters of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Nebraska in 1993. At the University, she worked closely with James Eisentrager, who believed strongly in the gestalt principle that we perceive visual data in organized or configured terms and Dynamic Symmetry, a term presented in the 1920s by art theorist Jay Hambidge.
Present in McGeorge’s artwork, the same principles can be seen not only in the work of the impressionists and the post impressionists, but in contemporary, and sometimes abstract work of artists like Richard Diebenkorn and Willem de Kooning.
Oil and Clay will hang through the end of August at The Old Schoolhouse Gallery, 12504 North Hwy.14, San Antonito, NM, 505.281.1250, http://www.theoldschoolhousegallery.com
