If you enjoy trees, flowers, still-lifes and humour then you’ll love this opening

By David F. Rooney

Patrons attending Friday evening’s art exhibition opening at the Revelstoke Art Gallery will enter a magical space where trees, flowers, food and humour rule the late spring evening.

There are three shows on exhibit — Trees by local painter Kristi Marcoffio, Hidden Works by Kamloops artist Kelly C. Perry and the visual potpourri that is The Golden Girls’ Annual Show.

While separately conceived and created these three displays are unconsciously yet brilliantly bound together by their subjects and the media of paint on canvas and paper.

Kristi Marcoffio’s work occupies the main gallery and is a lovely collection of works large and small that focus, for the most part, on the trees that make our landscape so enchanting. An energetic and creative self-taught painter, Kristi is gaining admirers for her employment of vivid colours and attention to detail. She deserves to win more hearts and minds through her showing of this large body of work.

This opening’s out-of-town artist is Kelly C. Perry, a professional artist from Kamloops who immigrated to Ontario from Holland as a young child in 1950.

Kelly’s show, Hidden Works, is a lively yet spiritually peaceful reflection on life, death and rebirth in the garden she so obviously loves.

“For those who would ask, art has become so much a part of me, maybe one should say art is my soul mate,” she says in the artist’s statement for this exhibition. “In past exhibitions of Hidden Works people returned once they realized I had not painted pretty flowers but the canvas went much deeper than that and they would venture back and say, ‘Yes, that is really you.’”

Besides showing her work, Kelly is offering an Artist Talk on Saturday, June 14, at the Visual Arts Centre at 11 am. She is also conducting a workshop on Saturday, July 5, 10 am until 4 pm. For more information about that please contact the Revelstoke Visual Arts Centre at 250-814-0261 or send and e-mail to info@revelstokevisualarts.com.

As for the Golden Girls’ Annual Show, this dynamic exhibition demonstrates the distance that The Golden Girls have travelled over the years since they began as a group of older, slightly anxious novice watercolourists under the tutelage of Betty Olynyk.

Where their first paintings were tentative, these are, by turns bold, sometimes sly and even humourous.

These three exhibitions open on Friday, June 13, at the Revelstoke Art Gallery located at 320 Wilson Street behind the Days Inn. All members of the public are welcome to the opening from 6 pm until 9 pm. Admission is by donation. 

Here are some images from the three shows that I think you’ll appreciate: