Kentucky Artists

Public Radio

Artists Talk With LVA: October 27, 2022

Brook White, Jr. & Dave Caudill discuss the Stephen Powell Memorial in Danville. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com Thursday at 10 am to hear Artists Talk with LVA.

Brook Forrest White Jr. discovered his passion for hot glass under the tutelage of Stephen Rolfe Powell at Centre College. Brook has worked with artists and visited glass centers around the world. He has garnered many honors including a 1998 Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship, the Owensboro Mayor’s Award of Excellence in 2001, the 2003 Centre College Distinguished Young Alumnus Award and inclusion in the 2005 Leadership Kentucky class. In 2004 the Kentucky Arts Council commissioned him to create that year’s Governor’s Awards in the Arts. His glass is in galleries across the country and in the collections of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Huntington Museum of Art and the Asheville Art Museum. His blown-glass art installations are featured in many private collections and public buildings throughout the Midwest.

His studio, Flame Run, is locate in downtown Louisville, Kentucky.

Dave Caudill creates artworks for public, corporate and private collections. His larger public works are found at Louisiana’s Rip Van Winkle Gardens, East Tennessee’s Horizon Center park, the University of Kentucky’s Singletary Center for the Arts and the University of Louisville School of Music. Corporate collections include Brown-Forman Corporation and Fire King International. Individual collectors across America have acquired his work.

He is also one of the few sculptors in the world who have created an environmental undersea sculpture. Caudill’s artwork was placed on the seabed near Nassau, The Bahamas.

Stephen Rolfe Powell (1951-2019) was hired by Centre College in 1983 to teach ceramics and sculpture. By 1985, thanks in part to Corning Glass in Harrodsburg, Philips Lighting in Danville, and Corhart in Louisville, he had built a glass studio and founded Centre's glass program. Powell designed and completed a new, state-of-the-art glass studio, which Centre College opened as part of their new Visual Arts Center in January 1998.

Powell was honored with Kentucky's Teacher of the Year award in 1999 and 2000. In 2004 he was presented with the Acorn Award by the Kentucky Council on Post-secondary Education.

Public Radio

Artists Talk With LVA: July 14 2022

Multi-disciplinary artist Colleen Toutant Merrill’s work examines the simultaneously personal and social history of textiles. Her adorned, embellished, and sometimes garish composite forms scrutinize the beauty and tension of our most interdependent relationships

She has exhibited her work here in Kentucky in  Lexington & Louisville but also in New York, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, and at the International Textile Biennial in Haact, Belgium. Merrill has received grants from the Kentucky Federation for Women and the Great Meadows Foundation. She has been awarded fellowships for the Byrdcliffe Artist Residency in New York, and the Pentaculum Textiles Residency at the Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in Tennessee. 

Merrill is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Bluegrass Community & Technical College and a part-time Instructor in Fiber & Material Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Her latest body of work, Day In & Day Out, opens at  WheelHouse Art  Saturday, July 16, 3:00 - 5:00 pm. The exhibition continues through September 3, 2022.

Painting

Vignette: Macel Hamilton

Macel Hamilton, “Love”, oil, 11in x 14in, 2021, NFS

By profession, Macel Hamilton has been a Registered Nurse for 34  years, but seven years ago she started teaching herself to draw, and within a year she was painting. A native of Beaver, located in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, her simple portrait work captures a rural sensibility. Whether through technique - Hamilton favors natural lighting and has a knack for capturing it - or subject - each portrait is of a family member or close friend - the artist expresses the prosaic existence of the Appalachian region.

“My main goal with my art is to improve and learn. I really enjoy my art when I feel like I am learning and improving.”

Macel Hamilton, “Uncle”, oil, 11in x 14in, 2021, NFS

Not that the inspiration is the cliche of rural unsophistication. In “Husband”, Hamilton paints a spouse who was a professional studio musician for over 50 years with Capitol Records, working with many famous musicians in the 1960s, and an “Uncle” who was an Old Regular Baptist preacher in Eastern Kentucky. The focused energy present just before he begins a sermon is palpable.

Hamilton’s gift for rendering people with such unsparing realism doesn’t prevent her from capturing their humanity, it elevates it. There is empathy in the exploration of every hair and wrinkle in the flesh, and great warmth injected into the details. With “Love’, the deep connection between a middle-aged man and his aging father acknowledges the complicated emotions in familial relationships while hinting at the pain of witnessing the passing of generations. In 2021 “Love” was exhibited for six months in the Kentucky Capitol as a part of the Team Kentucky Gallery.  

SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE IMAGES

Macel Hamilton, “Husband”, oil, 16in x 20in, 2020, NFS

Macel Hamilton, “Old Rusted Lock”, watercolor on paper, 16in x 20in, NFS

Macel Hamilton, “Uncle”, oil, 11in x 14in, 2021, NFS

Macel Hamilton, “Life Is Good”, acrylic, 16in x 20in, 2019, NFS

Written by Keith Waits

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