You can certainly paint your summer bright by visiting the Artists Gallery of Sunriver during July. Featured artists are Marily Badger, Greg Cotton and Marietta Bajer who utilize unique and colorful techniques to produce some incredible pieces. Although visitors are welcome at the gallery any time (it is open seven days of the week, 9am-8pm during July and August), a really fun time to visit is the Second Saturday Artists Reception, July 12 from 4-7pm.
Plan to stay long enough to meet the artists and share some wine, beer, or soft drinks and tasty snacks.
Glass artist Marily Badger’s art is displayed directly in front of a large window specifically so that the sun can play with her brightly colored glass pieces. Badger’s process of working with a high tech material, dichroic glass, results in colorful art pieces that many times are also very useful. Although dichroic glass dates back to the 4th century AD, modern dichroic glass is the result of materials research carried out by NASA who developed it for use in dichroic filters.
Multiple ultra-thin layers of different metals (such as gold and silver) are vaporized by an electron beam in a vacuum chamber. The vapor then condenses on the surface of glass in the form of a crystal structure. When dichroic glass is fused with other glasses during a firing process, individual results can never be exactly predicted, so each piece of glass is unique. All of Badger’s pieces are unique. Whether you are drawn to her beautiful jewelry or her platters, dishes and vessels none of her art disappoints.
Artist Marietta Bejar has added works with her latest art passion, scratch board, to her presentation at the gallery. Bejar has been an accomplished and successful oil painter for many years. Her large scale canvases of animals and plants draw compliments (and sales) on a regular basis, but her artistic heart has been stolen by a technique that has been around for centuries.
Scratch board is both a medium and an illustrative technique. Sharp knives and carving tools are utilized to scratch a thin layer of white china clay that is coated with black India ink. Colored inks can then be applied to the scratched surfaces and then re-scratched for more texture. The techniques produce a highly detailed and evenly textured result. But as they say, a painting is worth a thousand words, and you must come to the gallery to view and enjoy the stunning effect that Bajer produces with the scratch board process.
Greg Cotton, one of the original founders of the gallery, likes to refer to his beautiful wood pieces as functional art. The former geometry teacher embraces mathematical discipline in his process, using multiple types of woods and patterns to create each unique piece. As colorful as each art piece is no colored stains are ever part of the process.
Cottong prefers to let the natural beauty of the wood shine through. He uses white maple, light brown cherry, dark brown South American walnut, gray brown walnut, purple heart, yellow heart, orange padauk, and dark mahogany. Cutting boards in multiple sizes provide the optimum presentation for precision patterns like convergence quilting pattern, geometric progression stripes, chevron, herringbone, and tumbling block patterns. The artist also turns favorite games (Cribbage, Chess, Chinese Checkers, Shut the Box to name a few) into works of art.
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