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CommunityBrushes with creativity
Workshops rekindle local residents’ interest in art
Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2006
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff Photo by Gary Smith
Artist and teacher Carolyn Grossé Gawarecki offers suggestions to Phyllis Reed of Solomons, while Judy Hinson of Fort Washington paints in the foreground. The painters were taking part in the Painting with Watercolors Workshop put on by the Charles County Arts Alliance.
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The two-story home is located on a La Plata country road, and seems quite normal on the outside. But stepping inside, the most noticeable thing in the house is the carousel horse standing in what might have once been a dining room or sitting room. Now it is where artists come to work and paint the carousel horse.
And that room isn’t the only one where artists can be seen with brushes and paint. Upstairs, Carney has a spacious studio with long tables all around the room, windows that let in natural light and open to a forest view and floors that are made of plywood and adorned with drops of paint from any number of messy artists.
Last Saturday, the room was packed to overflowing with women of all ages who were learning from well-known watercolor artist and teacher Carolyn Grossé Gawarecki. The women were participating in a class sponsored by the Charles County Arts Alliance and hosted by Carney, whose home is the site for Corner Studio Artworks.
Many of the participants, like White Plains resident Karla Costello, are frequent visitors to the studio. Costello said she attends an open studio that is held there from 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesdays, during which artists of any experience level can come to the studio with their own supplies and paint with the other artists.
‘‘Betty graciously opens her home and lets everybody come paint,” Costello said of the Wednesday open studio, as well as classes like this one.
Connie Miller works with the alliance and sets up workshops, and more often than not attends them herself. She said setting up the classes is sometimes hard because it can be difficult to find watercolor teachers. Also, the alliance is looking for teachers in other media.
Past workshops have included acrylics, portrait painting, oriental painting and conte drawing.
‘‘We want to try to get some more,” Miller said.
Saturday’s class was designed to focus on working with shadows in watercolor. Participants brought a personal photograph, usually of a landscape, and were taught to look for the shadows in the image.
In each workshop she teaches, Gawarecki focuses on one subject rather than trying to teach the entire medium in a single day.
‘‘We talk about what colors to use, how the shadows fall across the landscape, what shapes to put in and what to leave out,” Gawarecki said. Gawarecki has been teaching art for about 45 years, she said, because she loves the people. She traveled from Falls Church, Va., to teach the class in La Plata.
‘‘Sometimes I learn from the students ... I like the interaction of working with people,” she said.
Sue Belmore is a teacher, as well, with classes at T.C. Martin Elementary School, but on Saturday she was a student. She said attending the workshop helps her with the continuing education that is required of teachers, but she also wanted to brush up on her watercolor knowledge.
‘‘I use watercolors at the school,” Belmore said. ‘‘I need pointers to help with the kids.”
At the workshop, she was working on a painting that she was going to give away as a gift to her cousin.
‘‘I have to at least get it started. I can finish it over the holidays,” she said.
Betty Musial of Newburg was working quickly on her painting, and was basically finished by the end of the class time. Musial said she regularly attends the Wednesday open studio, and goes to every special class she can. Musial has been an artist for 25 or 30 years, she said, working with pastels, oils, acrylics and now watercolors.
Therese Thiedeman is the administrator of the arts alliance, and while she tends to be most interested in performing arts herself, she decided it was time to work in the visual arts, so she attended the class.
She brought along her daughter, Mary, who is an art student at the College of Southern Maryland. Mary said she normally paints with acrylics or draws with charcoal.
‘‘I carry a sketch book around. I want to be able to see something, capture it and then fill in the detail,” Mary said. Using charcoal is mostly between the artist and the pencil, but with painting, ‘‘there’s a lot of theory,” she said.
Therese said she was amazed by painting. ‘‘It starts out as something vague and then it becomes something.”
Jill Smithson of La Plata is another open studio regular and said that she had painted when she was a girl, but had let it fall to the wayside when she grew up.
‘‘I was doing life things, working, raising children,” she said. ‘‘Then Santa Claus brought me some supplies, and that got me started again, picking it up.” Smithson said she read about the open studio in the newspaper and decided to start attending. On Saturday she brought a photo that she had taken at a local park and was reproducing it onto her watercolor paper. ‘‘This is stretching me, and I’m learning a lot.”
Saturday was the second trip to the Corner Studio for Mary Ann Wilmoth of La Plata. She said she came to the workshop specifically to be taught by Gawarecki. Gawarecki has a long history of painting and teaching. She was the founder and first president of the Potomac Valley Watercolorists and a signature member of numerous artists’ organizations. She has written articles on painting that have appeared in magazines, and her paintings have been published in books.
‘‘I heard she was wonderful,” Wilmoth said. ‘‘And she is. But don’t tell her. She’ll get a big head and she won’t come back.”
Wilmoth said she has become a painter in the absence of her first love: quilting. An injured wrist made quilting impossible. ‘‘This is easier,” she said of painting. ‘‘It doesn’t take as much work. And nobody knows when it’s wrong.”
Bronwyn Smalley of Waldorf has attended workshops at the studio before and also takes classes at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Va. She said she paints often, but worries about displaying her art. ‘‘You get so involved in studying that you get afraid to put yourself out there,” Smalley said. But going to the workshops ‘‘is a nice, nurturing environment.”
Judy Hinson of Fort Washington usually paints with another group, and as her children grew up found she wanted to find more and more time to paint. She said she started painting in oils in her 20s, and would finish a painting each time she was on maternity leave with her children. ‘‘I have four kids and four oil paintings,” she said.
‘‘I love it, and Betty’s studio is so nice and bright. The atmosphere is perfect,” Hinson said.
Carol Corbett of La Plata paints quite often, working with two other painting groups as well as the open studios. ‘‘I always wanted to do it, and after I retired I started into it.”
That situation was echoed by Waldorf resident Sandy Rohde, who started painting when she turned 60.
‘‘I always wanted to do it, but I was always working 80 hours a week. I didn’t know I even liked it. I always like art, but didn’t know I had any talent,” Rohde said.
Sue Davis was taking her first-ever painting class on Saturday. She saw the workshop advertised in the newspaper; through a business acquaintance, she found out more about Carney.
‘‘I’ve always been busy,” Davis said. ‘‘I never could take a class in school because I took music. Now I’m a builder and I work. I told my husband I’ve wanted to do it since I was 10.”
‘A dream come true’
Carney’s studio was a longtime dream for her, but she never realized it could be such a success. She said when her husband was alive, she would tell him she wanted the studio.
‘‘My husband said I could have it when he was gone. He didn’t want to be bothered with it,” she said. And she took him at his word. ‘‘He died, and I was in mourning for a while. Then I went through the process of looking for an architect. And then, all of a sudden, it was here.”
Carney was an art teacher for years, but said she is glad to host the workshops in her studios because it gives her a chance to be a student. ‘‘It’s just been a wonderful thing. I’m amazed at how many people are interested.”
Now, her daughter, Jennifer Pinto, is working on helping the artists who are part of the studio to have their art on a virtual store.
‘‘All of the artists are interested in that,” Carney said. ‘‘It’s just a dream come true.”
E-mail Carrie Lovejoy at clovejoy@somdnews.com.
