Past Art Shows

[Jane Vance, artist]: Some people have asked me why are you in Blacksburg Virginia? Because it's quiet and it's wild. We all need to ask the question, "How much is wild in our lives?" Not just in our backyards, but in our heart. In the way we love, in the way we dare. I've gone all around the world to try to understand how folk traditions and parables marry to this work here in the old Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I'm right here inviting wild into my heart and into my art.

For decades and decades I have painted. I have refused circumstances and obstacles that would have kept me from painting. I believe paintings can be reverential, highly detailed and narrative. My paintings I hope never answer questions, never lecture, but they ask questions. How can you be a practitioner of compassion and tell the stories from the Himalayas, the old Buddhist cultures, and show that those stories are first cousins to the old Appalachian reverential heart stories of these Blue Ridge Mountains? My paintings ask those questions. I hope they bring hope and connection, and I hope they bring faith to people.

These paintings have been in a lot of places, in New York and solo shows on the East Coast. They've had their success but I would never be more pleased than I am for these paintings to come before medical students in Roanoke. These are the young people who are forming compassion in the next decades of this world. I feel like these paintings have the sincerity, the commitment, the detail, and the globalism that they all ready know. This will just be an homage to them.

[Gil Harrington, founder, save the next girl]: She wants her art to be part of the mix. She doesn't want it to be art partitioned away from life, she wants it to enrich the medical students experience as they become physicians because having an artistic side and inspiration will make them better healers and contribute more fully to our community.

[Jane Vance]: We are prepared to make this world peaceful, sweet, companionable, and wise and medical practitioners are the artists of the next century. 

[Kyle Edgell, artist]: I am a certified humor professional

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I will be receiving my certificate in April when I go to the Association for applied Therapeutic Conference that's an organization that's been for the last 25 years studying humor and laughter and doing the research behind it.

I feel my position in my community right now is to be the megaphone that goes out there and says "we have a need to laugh more" and this is a natural cure that our bodies can bring that will affect any disease for the good. 

People will all agree laughter is the best medicine it helped me through cancer. It helped me through the death of my husband and through other personal stories and I think laughter will give a community resilience and when you're laughing with people of it it's really hard to stay mad at them.

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I have been a caricature artists in Roanoke for 28 years. When I draw caricatures I'm in a circle of laughter and a circle of people having fun and there are many things that happen that maybe discover that my drawings were better when everybody was laughing. When people were relaxed they had more fun. When people felt safe they were more fun. Of course you have the smart alecks in the audience who want to contribute and those that simply want to watch but they also if I can convert them into being cheerleaders clapping and chanting is a great way to make people laugh and to affirm people and say attaboy.

Everybody knows and can't wait for that turnaround, for the reveal. It gives permission for people to laugh at themselves and to take themselves lightly. Once you do that it helps people bond with you.

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[Jennifer Fowler, artist]: My grandfather was a very hardworking dedicated man who dearly loved my grandmother. He was a very thankful man, very grateful for everything. He was proud of his country all the way through. He signed up to be in the military actually right before World War Two happened. He saw that it was coming on and told his family that it looked like they were gonna need his help, so he enlisted and he was in the service I believe two years before he was actually captured by the Japanese.

He was a POW for three and a half years and endured a lot of things that not many could have endured. My grandmother and other members of her family in the church were writing letters to all of the POWs and that was the only letter that my grandfather got his entire time as a POW, and he held on to it and when he returned back from being a POW he married her six months later so it was very special, that one letter.

During the time that I created these pieces I was a photo student at JMU and it was right around the time that he became ill and so the my last semester of school is also when he passed away. So this was kind of how I dealt with what I was going through and also I guess I removed myself from it but was working on it at the same time so that's how I was dealing with his death was by creating these images

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I took hundreds of images. I printed all of them but most of them I have used... for instance, all of these are copies of those that I have used to create the transfer images. The way in which I transferred those images onto the paper it was me rubbing onto it, so it's got my literal kind of thumbprint in there. So it's more of a connection than just taking a photo and printing it. This artwork to me represents all of my grandfather exactly what he stood for in his in his life.

I hope that when someone looks at these images that they can feel a connection with someone who is a veteran and realized that they are dear to someone else's heart.

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