Current Exhibit:
Hope Inside Change
September 10 – October 23, 2020
Artist interviews will be released over the next 2 weeks here and on our social sites.
Hope Inside Change Artwork Price Sheet
PLEASE CALL 610-376-1576 IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PURCHASING ARTWORK. LIST UP-TO-DATE AS OF 9-17-20
2 Ways to Experience Hope Inside Change
View work in person at the Yocum Institute Gallery. Masks are required when visiting and please follow posted social distancing guidelines.
Or visit YocumInstitute.org to enjoy the virtual portion of the exhibit featuring artist interviews and a digital presentation of each artist’s work. Each artist has a unique story to tell.
All of us have had our world turned upside down during the Covid-19 Pandemic. We’ve had to adjust, sometimes radically. Hope Inside Change is an exhibition that seeks to document change in the way artists produce and showcase their work. We believe that despite everything, the creative community has found heightened creativity and renewal inside the disruption.
Virtual Exhibit
Mary Marshall Palmer
Artist Statement: It is said that the only thing one can depend on is change. Change is inevitable. The challenge is to use the change to grow, to evolve. That is certainly the challenge of 2020 and with my art. I only began painting in watercolors in September of 2019. Because of my interior design background, I was required to take one fine arts class while attending Parsons School of Design and I chose watercolor. But that was in 1980 and I haven’t picked up a brush since then. Thanks to my local art instructor Fran Parzanese, my love for watercolors has been rekindled. And with the time afforded me by COVID-19, I was able to really delve deeply into the medium. I can honestly say that having watercolors as my creative outlet kept me sane during the two months of quarantine. I was able to relive former travels through my paintbrush and my paint. I was able to fantasize about being at the beach. I was able to find joy through my florals.
It is my hope that you, too, can travel, fantasize and feel joy while looking at my paintings. I know that my growth as an artist will continue as each piece is a lesson in and of itself. Many times, the piece starts one way and then takes an abrupt turn mid-painting and ends up as an entirely different final composition. But life is like that. You start your year with all kinds of intentions and then a pandemic occurs. You have to scrap Plan A and invent Plan B, all the while having hope and faith that good will prevail and your year will be blessed with growth and gratitude. I feel so much gratitude to be able to create and to be able to share my creativity with you.
All the proceeds of the sale of my art will go towards The Yocum Institute for Arts Education and Reading Area Community College. The Yocum Institute helps artistic dreams come alive while RACC helps students prepare for an unknown future, knowing there will be change but confident that they are ready for whatever life throws at them. That is hope. Hope inside change.
Many thanks to Fran Parzanese for her patience, to Cynthia Schumo Lynn for gifting me papers and paint to help my dreams come to life, to Christina and Katie Heller for always supporting their Mom’s endeavors and to my many friends who have given me verbal and moral support to continue my art.
Robert Godillot
Artist Statement: I always felt inspired by the metal work of the Mexican and Danish Modernist from the middle of the 20th Century. It is primarily the reasons that about two years ago I set out to teach myself silver smithing. Surprisingly, I had fairly good results. I soon discovered that I would always have the most fun (and make my best silver pieces) while playing around with the oddly shaped scraps I was left with after cutting intentional jewelry shapes out of sheet silver. I got addicted to making random little objects with my leftovers.
I eventually turned to using more common jeweler’s metals because it was getting expensive to make all my creative failures out of sterling silver. These metals were easier to work with for me too. I wanted to make bigger pieces than I could with the small quantities of silver I had available. Consequently, my work remains quite small, which I’m okay with for now.
I have absolutely experienced a creative burst (or outburst) since life became disrupted by the pandemic. I think I’m normally pretty stoic, but I feel like I have a surplus of emotions of EVERY kind at the moment and they do show up in the artwork. Art serves as an outlet that allows me to vent, but at the same time provides a satisfying distraction that lets me escape from the present for hours on end. For some reason it seems important to me to tie these sculptures to this specific place and time…..because it is what has fostered their creation. To this end I have titled some of the pieces with the words of the pandemic that cycle through my head, concepts that I see appearing in my work in a subconscious way.
Carol Siegel
Artist Statement: Formerly a creative executive with a company that produced quality craft products, I spent my career working with amazing artists both locally and around the country. When I retired, I finally had time to try my hand at my own art. I discovered clay, and have enjoyed creating figurative sculpture for a number of years.
When Covid forced us to stay home, and the Goggleworks ceramic studio closed for several months, I needed something creative to do besides baking another banana bread! While everyone was binge watching dramas, I started watching YouTube to learn some basics of abstract painting. After practicing on small boards, I took the leap and bought some larger canvases and a nice variety of oil paints, and I started to play. I refer to it as my therapy; I become immersed in each painting, able to escape for a time from the craziness that is 2020. I’ve discovered a love of color and texture, and the ability to create various moods and feelings using these new materials.
I’m grateful for this time to explore both paint and clay, and will continue spending my days discovering the delicious possibilities of both.
Tammy Updegrove
Artist Statement: To create visual art for the purpose of making a positive impact. I love how art tells a story with no words. It can be understood throughout the world with no language barriers.
I started making “How To” videos to inspire others to experiment with art materials, recyclables, and nature for the purpose of self expression, fun, and “being in the moment” practices.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxc7TKc9kYPmtDiidK7fzoA
Kristen Woodward
Artist Statement: Woven throughout my artwork over the past ten or more years has been dichotomy in regard to the destructive and creative forces of animal welfare and environmental stewardship. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted our precarious relationship with wild and domesticated animals. Bats and pangolins float in dream space in my paintings, while human masks enter into the series entitled “Between the Devil and the Sea.”
The Farm Prize-pig painting represents a series of small works which depict children posing with livestock, expressing incompatible feelings of affection with the knowledge of eventual death and consumption. Hidden Valley apple is a painting of an heirloom fruit- with pink flesh inside. These small apple paintings at first present as straightforward studies of fruit, but they also serve as everyday reminders of environmental selectivity and choice.
The pandemic and shut-down has given me significantly more time to make art. For me, as for many others, it has been an extended time of gratefulness, frustration, curiosity and silent terror. I have become more mindful of my day-to-day activities and relationships. When I finally shut down Zoom, Canvas and my phone, nature is waiting.
Charles Fick
Artist Statement: Hello, I’m Charles Fick. I’m writing to tell you about my adventure in painting. I started painting back in 2010 – It’s now 2020. I painted up to 300-400 Paintings since 2010.
I’m a natural and I do it freehand. No measuring etc. It’s almost all abstract too. How I started to paint was that I was living with my uncle back in 2010 at that time. He’s an artist too. I’ve admired his work and I asked him if I could try a painting or two. He said that since I was living in his house I would need to learn to paint anyway.
He didn’t let me use his supplies. Instead he took me to A.C. Moore and spent up to $300 in supplies for me; paints, brushes, easels etc. So I started out with one painting and my uncle said that I have a deep sense of color and he influenced me to keep on painting. So I did and now since then, I’m a successful painter and a natural. No schooling either. “On My Own”!
Thanks,
Charles Fick
CHCH
Susan Grabert
Artist Interview Coming Soon
Artist Statement: A deep appreciation for the new and the old shines through the paintings of Susan Grabert. Her first big step into the art world began in 2004, when she began to illustrate her travels in watercolor sketchbooks. From there she continued on the artistic path with many years of classes and workshops working with different media.
Today this award-winning artist is best known for her oil paintings and a thematic counterpoint to her well traveled side–a love of vintage. Many subjects that she paints are from photographs taken while scouring local antique shows and flea markets. That love of antiques even extends to her framing, making use of recycled wood and vintage finds.
Amanda Condict
Artist Interview Coming Soon
My passion as an artist is drawing and painting the human form, working up images from life around me, especially people and their possessions. My artwork speaks of my everyday contact with people and positions them as central, as subjects in their own lives, as well as subjects in my artwork. My artwork is almost always about people; their relationships with the things they own, their relationships with each other and their relationships with me. I don’t approach figure drawing and portraiture from a traditional academic viewpoint, but as an exploration of personalities and their interactions, because for me, relationships are what feed my soul.
Artist Statement: Amanda Lee Condict is an illustrator and designer who has worked in graphic arts and publishing her whole life, first as a fashion illustrator for a department store, then as an art director of a monthly magazine and finally as the owner of a graphic design and illustration studio. She has illustrated for books, magazines and catalogs, created t-shirt and textile designs and done commissioned portraits. She has been called upon to draw dresses and dental appliances, batteries and babies, fairies and fuel filters, policemen and parrots; just about anything you can imagine.
Amanda is an adjunct instructor in the fashion department at Albright College; teaches drawing and painting at Yocum Institute; operates Vincent van BYO, a painting party studio; and paints murals, mostly as community projects with area schools. She was a forensic sketch artist on an episode of “The Dead Files,” and serves on several area arts boards including Berks Art Alliance, Clay on Main, on Berks Arts Council’s Roundtable, and as an administrator of the Sketching Workshop, an international organization of artists. She has shown her work at various local galleries, recently an exhibit of her watercolor paper dolls at Yocum Gallery in Wyomissing and graphite portraits in the faculty show at Albright College in Reading. She also curated and had artwork in “Reflections: Women Viewing Women,” at Clay on Main, a non-profit art center in Oley, “The Female Gaze” at the AFA Gallery in Scranton and Alvernia University in Reading.
Upcoming Exhibit:
