Gather: handmade shoppe & Co., which celebrated the first anniversary at its Kirkwood location last month, presented some works of artist Alyssa Oakley in a show called “We Are Together.” The exhibition featured three oil paintings in a monochromatic color scheme.
“It’s my most recent series that I’m working on,” Oakley said. “They are inspired by the mothers in my life and specifically my ancestors. The series starts with my mother at age 19 on a body of water and some fear or, maybe, anticipation in her eyes.”
The other two pieces include a depiction of her mother in the midst of a conversation and a portrait of Oakley and her mother together in a canoe floating in the water.
The role of mother is both genetically powerful and the basis for a strong connection between mother and child that lasts a lifetime, Oakley said.
“Not only is it a bloodline or a lineage, but also the bond,” Oakley said. “No matter how present your mother was in your life or is in your life, no matter how present your child is, you still have a very strong bond, which is symbolized by the boat.”
Recent photographs by Roger Pfingston decorated the walls of gallery406 during this First Friday, a monthly cultural and social event showcase from the Bloomington Entertainment and Arts District. His shots represented both landscapes in the natural world and some of the unnatural imagery that appears within nature.
“It represents my move into color photography,” Pfingston said. “I’m 75, and I did mostly black and white work a lot of my life. I started doing digital about 2002, moved into color work. Landscape has been my primary interest, but I’ll photograph anything that catches my eye.”
Pfingston said he began photographing while working for his high school’s newspaper and yearbook.
“Since early on, it appealed to me as a form of creative expression,” Pfingston said. “Photography became a passion, really. It’s been a passion for me for 50 years or more. I’ve never stopped taking photographs.”
This show, “Quotidian Pleasures,” focused largely on ordinary sights around his home locale, Pfingston said.
The Blueline Gallery welcomed Besty Stirratt, director of the Grunwald Gallery, to show some paintings that previously displayed at other galleries across the country.
“Really the work had a lot to do with nature and the natural world,” Stirratt said. “A lot of looking at cellular things and also going up to organisms like flowers and plants — going back and forth from the microscopic to macroscopic.”
Stirratt said appeal of nature as an inspiration lies in the unknown.
“It’s terrifying and it’s also exciting to me,” Stirratt said. “No matter how much, we learn we can’t ever know. That mystery really pulls me and keeps me fascinated.”
These works were the launching point for newer inspiration, Stirratt said. Her recent paintings deal with similar themes but incorporate different aesthetic elements.
“They’ve gotten a lot more ethereal, the newer work is a lot more about light and the way light and dark interact,” Stirratt said. “They still deal with the idea of mystery, but they don’t look the same. They have different manifestations.”
