Carolyn Swift, 66, is the visual art version of living [well, making] large. Her collages — a melange of materials, and techniques — can measure as wide as 60″. And across all that surface is a feast of marks, color, texture, raised elements that explore collage beyond its humble cut-and-paste foundations. It has been “a […]
Northern Michigan is painter Randi Ford’s subject, from Sleeping Bear Dunes to Pictured Rocks. Her work is inspired by these natural places — so much so that the 34-year-old artist moved to Benzie County last summer so she could live and practice where she find artistic and spiritual nourishment. You may already know her work: […]
Judith Shepelak’s road toward a full-time studio practice came after she’d worked as a paralegal, then a graphic designer, then a landscape designer. In between she raised her children. For the last two decades, her creative focus has been on ideas and subjects that interest her instead of a client; and she executes them all […]
Artist Carrie Betlyn-Eder, 68, first visited Leelanau County in 1968, as a child with her siblings and parents. She watched the moon walk from a house in Leland, and got a taste for the place [“It just got under my skin”]. In 2022, Carrie and her husband, Mickey, relocated from St. Paul, Minnesota. Carrie, a […]
Leelanau County artist Margo Burian, 61, has carved a niche for herself in the cultural landscape. Her atmospheric paintings of the the locality’s land, sky, water, and historic farmsteads are known and coveted by a wide range of fans and collectors. She began her professional life as a commercial illustrator, and has traveled from depicting […]
The outdoors comes indoors to the Lobby Gallery at the Glen Arbor Arts Center. By The Side Of The Road is a series of abstract, mixed media landscapes out of the imagination of painter Alice Moss, 67. Moss has been watching, and walking, and thinking about the roadside and woodlands of Leelanau County since the […]
Matt Schlomer, 51, is finishing his 11th year of teaching at Interlochen Academy of Art. He is a conductor, and he is a teacher of saxophone — and, he is the founder of Sound Garden, an out-of-the-box approach to bringing musical performance to people wherever they happen to be. It’s a way of planting musical […]
Nancy Crisp, 81, taught visual art to all ages, and abilities, in public school and private institutions, from the 1960s until 2003. Her own visual art education began in junior high, guided by a teacher who grounded her in the fundamentals. Now, her painting practice unfolds in a home studio she shares with her husband, […]
“I’ve always built things. I’ve been a maker since I was a little kid,” said Leelanau County artist Larry Fox, 69. And the things he has built — sculptural constructions in Poplar and Baltic Birch — have found their way into homes and corporate settings across the US. A veteran of the art fair circuit, […]
Benzie County artist Jessica Kovan’s mixed media work is now on display in the GAAC’s Lobby Gallery. The Birds Are Watching, Kovan said, “asks viewers to pay attention from the vantage point of local bird species.” Kovan combines the personal with the political in this series of mixed media, avian vignettes created on cardboard. She took on the subject of local birds “in hopes of establishing a sense of interconnectedness between all beings.”