Welcome to Beattyville

Redbud Time

     Cheryle Walton  is the Artist of the week this week.  A Florida transplant-a long time ago- she is a regionally aclaimed artist with showings at the Kentucky Professors Exhibit, Morehead Art Guild, Imaginarium Gallery, Appalachian Artisan Center, and LEEAD art show.  She is also a founding member of the Beattyville Arts Guild. 
      A wife and mother mother of two college age sons, she taught art for 12 years at the Oneida Baptist Institute.  An artist with training from Eastern Kentucky University in painting, print making, ceramics, and drawing, she has worked in mixed media for the last three decades and has developed an interest in using her diverse skills to create art from trash.  Part of a growing trend of artists who use materials at hand to inspire and challenge the audience while cleaning up the environment, she has expanded her own artistic endeavers to include teaching classes in Recyclable Art.   
      Working for a local newspater, the Beattyville Enterprise, she was inspired to start a new series of paintings as she was cleaning up the newspaper office after a fire destroyed it in August 2009.  She calls the series “Coal Dust”.
     The technique is a mixed media project which uses acrylic and watercolor.  It calls for painting the picture in acrylic in flat colors which are outlined in black.  The entire painting is then covered in black watercolor and the colors are brought back  out of the black with brushes and rags.  The beautiful images coming out of the “coal dust” speaks of where and how people of the coal fields of Appalachia live. 
     She has completed three paintings in the series; “Yellow House”, “Redbud Time”, and “Owsley Outback”.  Two of the paintings can be seen at the PEP Gallery in Beattyville, but ”Yellow House” has been juried into and will be on exhibit in the Mountain Vision 2010  art exhibition which will be open from April 05-June 25 at the Mary B Martin School of the Arts, Reece Museum on the East Tennessee State University Campus in Johnson City Tennessee.