Greetings MCAL Members! Hard to believe that it is October already! The weather is beginning to change, the leaves are beginning to turn colors and whispers of the holidays can even be heard if you listen close enough. I personally love this season as it presents us as artists so many moments of inspiration. From a beautifully colored tree to a tender moment with family members inspiration is all around us. Keep your eyes open and your sketchbooks near for your next opportunity. A new thing I would like to try as a group is an art challenge! Each month I will present a theme. MCAL Members will make art according to that theme, submit them to me via email and we will feature those pieces digitally online.
Octobers Theme: “Fall in Medina” (Send 1 submission to me at vincent@studiodraco.com with the header “MCAL Challenge”. Be sure to include in the email, Artists Name, Title of Piece, Medium, Website or other pertinent info. Please send .jpg or .png file formats please. One piece per member will be posted. No artwork sales will be conducted thru the MCAL website.)
In other news, I would like to thank Carol Kessel for organizing the two fall workshops for the Art League this year. The first which was a wonderful event was Hydrostone with Bill Peck in September. He expanded his talk from last year at our General Meeting and showed us all the nuances of working with hydrostone as a surface for colored pencils. Members who attended crafted some absolutely beautiful work. As I write this message, we are eagerly awaiting the October Workshop which will feature Mary Urbas, who will be teaching us about how to improve the business aspect of our artwork. Thanks again Carol for bringing us great educational opportunities.
Our exhibitions continue to excel and provide opportunities for all of our members to show (and maybe even sell) work. In no particular order, we are grateful to have local businesses such as Cool Beans and Marie’s Cafe support the work we do. The current exhibit at Cool Beans feature’s artwork of the theme “Show Me Some Water”, and Marie’s Cafe features the artwork of Karen Martin. Please stop by and see the exhibits if you have time. As you all know, we lost a couple of venues last year. The Board is hard at work discussing this topic and looking for new venues to show our work. If anyone has suggestions or would like to Chair a new venue, please see Kathy or I. We have one in the works and hopefully will get some ideas for more here soon.
I want to congratulate all of our members who are creating great work and showing it out in the public. Our website has several news articles congratulating members who are winning awards and having wonderful shows over the last few months. For example, Barbera Zimmerman won “Best of Category” at the CVAC Juried show and the PerSisters, which comprises of many MCAL artists have a show at the Medina County Library. Keep up the wonderful work everyone! If you visit the shows, put it on Instagram or facebook. Don’t forget to mention MCAL.
I also wanted to touch base on the technology initiatives that I mentioned last month. I am happy to say that we are beginning to look at solutions for collecting Art in the Park applications online, and I am developing an Online Gallery for Members to submit artwork for display. More info will be forthcoming on those and other initiatives we are working on in the near future.
Finally, sometimes our business meetings run longer than expected, particularly at our first meeting of the year. Our apologies to our new visitors and guests for such a long meeting. To help with this in the future, perhaps the guests that are just coming to hear the speaker could come about 30 to 40 mins. later. We love having guests and we want them to feel most welcome to our meetings.
Until next month, get out there and make some art for yourself and/or our New Challenge!
Vince Matheney and Kathy Stokes-Shafer
Co-Presidents, Medina County Art League