"Home"

Home - A group show

Mark Flowers 

Elizabeth Bauman

Bill Skrips

Holly Ballard Martz

Anne Goodrich

Laura Mack

Lissa Hersheb

Jenny Gray 

Carolyn Garcia

Bonnie Hull

David George Andersen

Bob Schlegel

Anne Furr

Darcie Leighty

Jan Gassner

Dave Nichols

Sandra Nichols

Thomas Rude

Kate Speckman

Chris Giffin 

Kim Hamblin

Kristin Kuhns

Anna Magruder

Emily Stuart

Katherine Mead

If your childhood home could hear you, what would you say? It might have been an apartment in the big city, a farm down a country road, or rambling house with many kids and pets — there's a place from your past that will stay with you forever. Home is a group show that asks creative people like you to create a piece that salutes your childhood home or memory of living there.  Did you have an epic backyard adventure? Do you have a lingering question about what went on in the basement, or maybe reveal a long-kept secret.  

If walls could talk.

Please join us for our annual February show that supports our artists while highlighting a non-profit in our community.  This year, we would like to tip our hats to Habitat for Humanity and all that they do for those in need. 

We asked our artists to create without restraint but keep in mind all that it means to have a home.  Enjoy.

Anna Magruder

Home is Where the Hen Is

10"x10", oil on wood

$350  SOLD

Chickens for me represent "home" because my mother has collected hens since I was a child. My childhood home remains filled to the brim with chickens of all shapes and sizes. Hens are very nurturing, guarding their chicks under their wings for protection. My dad raised chickens as a teenager and shares a love for the animal. The house in this image is loosely based on the one my mom grew up in. Chickens will always remind me of my parents and the nurturing home provided me. -Anna

Bill Skrips

The House
$650

I recently sold the house I grew up in. Amazing by today’s standards, my parents had lived there since 1948. It was their only house, barring a vacation shack they purchased for next to nothing in the 1960s.  When they passed away, there was never a question in my mind that I’d sell the place. Being an only child, there was no one else to question this.

The place always seemed cold to me and felt like it belonged to someone else.  Being a kid, I wasn't so sure what you were supposed to get back from a house, but that warm, fuzzy feeling others talked about when mentioning the place in which they grew up was a feeling foreign to me.

Three years ago, I moved back into the house with my folks. I married late in life and spent 16 decent years with Cara, but one day the bottom of the marriage just fell out.

Moving back certainly wasn’t a choice, but more like a practical decision. It made more sense to do this rather than rent a room or run up a hotel bill. For four months I roomed with them and they enjoyed my company (or so it seemed).  And I felt the chill of the house once again.

About a year later, my folks took ill and died-this was mostly due to old age. I had to empty their house so it could be sold. My Dad being a packrat (in today’s parlance, he’d be called a hoarder), there was a lot of stuff to go through. Being someone who uses found objects in his work, I had to steel myself to get rid of a lot of this stuff. My Dad had all manner of rusty tools and odd bits. There were decisions to be made and made quickly: I couldn’t keep the massive collection that he had stockpiled his entire life. As I now lived 50 miles away, getting to the house was becoming an increasing hardship and I simply could not stretch this task out for much longer.

Cold and empty, the house eventually (after about 11 months of steady labor) went on the market. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I was there. During what most people would consider a highly emotional time, I easily turned my back on the place and handed my keys over to the realtor.

Jenny Gray
"Dream Home"

$175 SOLD

While I was growing-up I used to dream of living in a cookie-cutter tract house. I dreamt of neighbors, pets, a yard and best of all I would have my own room where friends could spend the night. When I say I grew-up on a sail boat in Southern California people always respond "wow! how interesting, cool or exciting" that must have been, but as a 13 year-old it sucked.

Anne Furr

"Honey Creek"
$800

Honey Creek Farm was my childhood home. Nestled amongst rolling Wisconsin hills, fields of corn and lots of animals, it was Mother Earth, Tom Sawyer and Alice in Wonderland all mixed together. Daily life on the farm was caring for and feeding the dairy cows, the chickens and pigs. We also spent our days planting, watering, harvesting and preserving the food crops for our dinner table. Work time often blended into play time. In the summer we ran in the corn fields, made forts in the hay bales, built tree houses in the woods, and swam in Honey creek. Winter would find us ice skating on the pond, sledding down the hillsides, and making snow caves with the mountains of snow that fell during those beautiful, icy months. It is always with me and part of me is always on the farm.
Anne Furr 

Mark Flowers

"Calendar"

12.5” x 18” Mixed Media

$ 475

I saw this work about marking time. When we live in homes they represent segments of our lives or personal calendars. We only see them as such after we move away. I have recently moved from a house of 16 years. I still see that house almost every day. The time in which I lived there is now packaged in a way become a memory of time. As a calendar that is out of date but still hanging on your wall.

Katherine Mead

"Small Step, Giant Leap"

12" x 15”, Acrylic, Prisma Pencil, Pins, Over Paper on Board

$250

When thinking of home I’m apt to draw on more than the architecture itself. I was raised in the Southern California sunshine and was rarely indoors. I was outside playing, biking, going to the beach or reading and daydreaming underneath a tree caressed by warm breezes. Our house was a modest mid-century ranch on a street of similar one story structures. The art that covered our walls was of a very specific and practical nature. My father was a transportation engineer for North American Rockwell during the heyday of the space program. We were immersed in every detail of the world which NASA created — the Apollo missions, the funding of the space program and eventually the shuttle and the fate of the infamous “Spruce Goose” built by Howard Hughes.

My father was in charge of overseeing the safe transport of his company’s contributions to various Apollo Missions. They were usually responsible for a fuel section of the rocket. He would be gone for six weeks at a time while he accompanied his precious cargo on a barge South through the Panama Canal bound for Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral.) My father has been through the Panama Canal seventeen times. The night of the historic Moonwalk by Neil Armstrong was especially auspicious for our family. The television, a massive piece of furniture in those days, was relocated to our living room for a  Super Bowl-like viewing with family and friends. We watched in awe, amazement and with the satisfaction that our family had a small part in this giant endeavor. When I was later able to meet Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong I was aware of the importance of their accomplishment, even as a young girl. Now that the space race is over and the space program mothballed, these memories take on an even more significant place in my heart. Rest in peace Neil Armstrong – I think of you every time I gaze up at the vast, inky sky to wish upon a star. 

Laura Mack

"Dreaming of Ranch Houses"

$200

I put off making this painting. We were prompted to use our childhood home as a springboard and I do not like to go back that far. But I did it. The result is the most personally overt work I have done in a long time.

To start, I looked at old letters and a journal. I was looking for a picture of the house, but I found an image of myself where I look very happy. I wish the image was a good reflection of my childhood, but the rummaged, written words tell the truth. I felt miserable most of the time. Misguided. Depressed. Unsure of myself. Desperate to feel loved. 

Some thoughts…My house had a porch, a basement, 2 floors and an attic with dormer windows. It was red…In high school, I was suicidal… From 10-14, I used legos to design layouts of houses I might live in someday. My houses were limited to the size and shape of the flat, green, lego surface, so the layouts inevitably looked like ranch houses. We did not live in a ranch house… When I was about 6, I tried kissing my Dad good night for a week or so. I stopped again. Unlike my sister and brothers, there was never a connection for me… My senior year in high school, I got luggage for Christmas. It was a good gift. I used it when I moved across the country at 18.

I live far away from that home now. And this painting shows the process from the bottom up: getting out of my misery. Finding my own path. Finding connections like art (the Mondrian reference is intentional) and the big, interesting world beyond my hometown. The found image of me as a child is included because the happiness she shows is really true now. I feel happy. I feel home. I feel loved.

And by the way, I live in a ranch house.

-Laura Mack

Holly Ballard Martz
"Blueprint for a Happy Home"

$495

My childhood home was full of love and creativity; leaded glass windows, industrial pendant lights, a hanging basket chair, a graphic patterned shag rug hung above the fireplace, a kitchen coated in magenta, mustard yellow, and orange, my parents’ bedroom ceiling clad in cedar shingles.

Most importantly, though, my childhood home was a safe haven.

“Home is Where the Heart Is”

Kim Hamblin

Cut paper assemblage

$95  SOLD

Love is the foundation of any home, not matter where you live.

Lissa Herschleb

"Nature’s Teacher"
8” x 10” x 7/8”

Gouache on clayboard

$550  SOLD

I had looked out that multi-paned living room window many times with the big oak just beyond. I was quite young when sitting one day I gazed at the tree following a limb from one pane of glass to the next and the next. I liked the position of the branch in the first pane and as I looked at the branch framed in the next it was different but just as interesting. I became intrigued following the branch in each pane. Then I followed all the branches through the many panes and all were framed as interesting as the next. It was astounding to my young developing creative mind. I had just observed a major lesson in composition and to this day I still find that simple lesson engaging.

Bonnie Hull

"Snowmen at 6ll"

Mixed media

$200  SOLD

In 1949 my parents built a little dream house in the suburbs of Chicago.  I was party to the imagining and building of the house, and we moved in when the first of my three younger brothers was 6 months old.  The house played a big role in my childhood imagination, my development of my self as a “secret eye.”  The first winter we lived in the house I made a 4 person “snow family” out in front, and many photographs were taken.  I remember the process as frustrating and hard and cold, but the photos show me with my parents gaily standing with the snow family.  And why not…my Dad survived the war, came home to find a child had been born (me), started a business and moved to the suburbs.  The American Dream come true...  

I used the childhood method of multi-colored crayons, black crayon on top and an etched design, in this case on an acrylic gesso base….which replicated the frustration of 1950 in its inexactness.   

Carolyn Garcia
"Flame in the Cottonwood"

plexiglass, acrylic paint, colored pencil, and India ink.

$150  SOLD

I have always thought it was such a melancholy notion that you can never really return home, because your memories are suspended in a certain time period.  I wanted to try to capture the layered affect of memory and also wanted to somehow capture the beauty and fragility of recalled memories of home.  I grew up in Wyoming in a big red house across the street from a park filled with mature Cottonwood trees.  Beyond the park was an oil refinery which had a flame that burned at night.  Seeing the flame through the lace of Cottonwood branches was always a comfort to me, like a birthday candle or a nightlight.  On the rare occasion that I have returned home it is always been a shock to see what is missing or what has been added, though this never changes the original memory.

Chris Giffin
"1962:  Puget Sound"

Mixed media

$250

We lived on a bluff overlooking the sound…………………………..

the sea was always a big part of my life……………………………...

my grandmother had passed, we were attending the World’s Fair…..

my parents renovated 36 houses/buildings in there lifetime…………

our family lived in many of these homes during renovation…………

I know a lot about peeling paint and rust……………………………..

my parents motto “Enjoy” life, see the beauty……………………….

.

all of this has informed my body of work…………………………….

all of this has guided my path…………………………………………...

Darcie Leighty
"Stacking Boats III"

acrylic

10x10

$350

Sylvia G

Growing up we had many houses we called our “home” but none left the same emotional imprint, as did the days spent living on the sailboat.  It was only a couple of weeks out of the year but there was no escaping the creative insanity that bubbled up and consumed my family during that time. My responsible mother became silly and relaxed. My fun loving father got lost in his own story telling and behaved like a pirate for days. My sister needing personal space would retreat to the dinghy that waggled behind the boat as she read, sunbathed or sulked. And I became uncharacteristically calm, tucked into the folds of the waves, surrounded by the people I loved, on a boat I will always consider “home”.

David George Andersen

"Use Me"
Mixed media

$395  SOLD

My art is, and has always been, socially charged- a stream of consciousness narrative where I tell a story by combining loosely related ideas, components and language. The work can be both familiar and ambiguous. Humor often disguises  more serious undertones. Phrases, photographs, and objects are given new life and new meaning outside their original contexts. 

The art is composed of plywood, objects, paint, and photographic emulsion. First, a collaged photograph is created via computer, and a negative is produced using an inkjet printer.  Plywood is then assembled into a sculptural form integrating found objects. Paint and photographic emulsion are then applied. Final printing is done in a traditional ”black and white” darkroom. After exposure, the image is archivally processed using standard black and white chemistry.

My intent as an artist is to create work that provides viewers the opportunity to question, ponder and sometimes chuckle.

Dave (nic) Nichols
"House"

$350

this box is a house that holds

many childhood memories for me.

Elizabeth Bauman
"Outside My Window"

Acrylic on 9 x 12 inch panel.

$290

This painting depicts what I might have imagined outside my childhood bedroom window.  Also, my cat Amber scratching at my window and waiting to join me inside.

I lived in the house depicted in this piece for more than 20 years and my parents still live there.  The home is my childhood, adolescence, and even some of my adulthood.  The cat, Amber who I also called Boo Boo Kitty for many years don’t ask me why, would visit me most nights wanting to be let in through that window.  We always thought he climbed the tree that sat near that side of the house, but he continued to visit me there long after the tree was removed.  How he got to the second floor was always a mystery.  Amber was one of those special pets and is synonymous with my memories of that house.

Elizabeth Bauman graduated from Willamette University with a degree in art.  She has been painting and making art for many years since in Keizer, Oregon, where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Emily Stuart
“THE ARTIST CONFERS WITH HER FUTURE SELF”

Mixed Media

$425

My remembered life began in a little brick bungalow in St. Louis, Missouri.  I started this piece with that part of my story, but the Muse took me in a new direction.  The piece became less about my story and more about the spirit of the children who once played with these toys.

Everything here, a cardboard doll house, cast metal furniture, plastic dolls, was once invested with the imagination and joy of the children who owned them..  Many years later these remnants came to me—yet for me these bits of metal, paper, and plastic are still alive with the energy of those children, of those bright and hopeful young lives.
I began with an old cardboard dollhouse and cut it down and rebuilt it into the essence of House--a roof, four walls, windows, floor, sofa and chair, lamp.  What started as something heavy with remembrance changed slowly into something lighter and more fun, more like the energy of those children.

Each thing here is old and (like me!) has history and represents the imagined brick bungalows those children lived in about the time I lived in the one in St. Louis.  For me, re-creating a tiny world like this one invokes a kind of magic, the mystery of the Muse, that leads me to places I haven't yet been.  

Holly Ballard Martz
"Blueprint for a Happy Home"

$495

My childhood home was full of love and creativity; leaded glass windows, industrial pendant lights, a hanging basket chair, a graphic patterned shag rug hung above the fireplace, a kitchen coated in magenta, mustard yellow, and orange, my parents’ bedroom ceiling clad in cedar shingles.

Most importantly, though, my childhood home was a safe haven.

Jan Gassner
"Look Outside"

Wood

$450 SOLD

The walls of my childhood home cacooned me in routine, safety, nurishment, comfort and rest. But look OUTSIDE!

There in the quiet streets of my neighborhood-the tree house, the large yard, the woods and the "dirt pile" where I played with my friends - THERE was "possibility"! Freedom,imagination, creativity, growth and belonging were outside.

Oh, the long uncomplicated hours of discovery - how quickly they fly by!

Kristin Kuhns

"Unconditional: fact & fiction"

16" h x 12" w

cotton, wood, carbon & acrylic

$350

No specific object or image, event or memory could conjure a sense of my childhood home.

Rather than draw from a narrow view or focus, I rely on textures, materials and methods to elicit some overlaying constancy of my life.  That constancy was centered upon a home, lived in by my family.

I've said to my mom, "The older I get the more real you become." 

Now that much time has passed I have come to realize just how much of my relationship with my home and my family were based on the innocence of a child's perspective. In the transition from innocence to knowledge the complexities and truths of that childhood home have created an alternate truth with an awareness of facts, once not considered.

Alan and Mary Lou Zeek

“Home”

wood, plastic, lamp parts

$225  SOLD

Houses are houses.  Homes are for safety, warmth, understanding, compassion, love, trust forgiveness, aging, in other words “family”.

As we travel through life, we find our locations or buildings may change, but the “home” remains the same.

We hope you view our piece and recognize those in the windows as representing family, yours and ours.  

We also hope that home is where the light burns brightest.

Robert Schlegel

"Home"

20” x 16” acrylic on panel

$1350

I found this place on February 15, 2012 while driving through small, rural towns in Iowa.  Toward Kalona on Hyw 1 then west on F62 to Parnell then to North English.  Not sure where this home actually was since we’d been driving through a lot of small towns in this frigid, snow covered country.  It was somewhere though.  Looks like a nice little home. 

Drove on to other little towns looking for an open post office.  Many of the towns share postal workers and are only open part of the day.  I was attempting to procure a cancellation seal on my sketches as I’ve been doing the last couple of years on visits to Iowa.  The name of the town and date provided documentation of these works.  This day,  travelled through Webster, Keswick and Thornburg where I completed a couple more of sketches of tree lines just north of Good Cheer. 

Finally arrived in Good Cheer and the big windows in the old building that housed the Post Office.  It was open.  Good luck.  I’d show the postmaster my sketchbook and ask if I could stamp it and I’d be off.  Not so fast.  Postmaster Mitch Christner denied the seal on the sketches in my sketchbook.    It is a cancellation stamp and if I didn’t have a stamp to cancel he would not stamp the sketch.  Against federal law to put the seal on anything but a stamp, “ says he.  “That so”, says I.   What about the cancellation seal with the names of 5 or 6 other towns where I’d had sketches marked.  “They’re breaking the law”, says Postmaster Christner.  I asked if he’d sell me a stamp.  He would and did.  I bought two 45-cent stamps and received 10 cents in change from the dollar I’d given him.  We satisfactory consummated a fiscally reasonable and accurate transaction from a very responsible federal postal official. You can never be overly accurate in Keokuc County. 

I affixed the aforementioned stamps on two sketches and Postmaster Christner did the honors.  The first one he cancelled just on the edge of the stamp.  He hit the border and I assume this was within the federal guidelines to validate the stamp cancellation.    On the second stamp however, he just plain missed the entire stamp.  Ouch.  Didn’t even hit the outside boarder and I’m quite sure that this would not count as a legal, valid cancellation mark with Good Cheer and todays date so affixed. Since it was hardly legal it must have been illegal.  Now I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the cancellation of the stamp because I did have my sketch with a seal with Good Cheer and todays date but I mean, Mitch told me that it was illegal to affix the seal to anything other than a stamp and then, I mean, he missed the friggin stamp.  

Maybe he felt bad that he’d coerced me to purchase the stamps.  Perhaps he thought I could remove the stamp and only the seal would be on the drawing.  Who knows, but Mitch (whom I thought was a most upstanding, moral and dedicated federal employee and was not going to be complicit in the violation of a federal law) actually broke the federal law by missing the stamp.  Undoubtedly this violation of federal law will go unreported by me.  I will turn the other cheek.  I will not hold him accountable for breeching the security of the Federal Postal System.  Postmaster Mitch is a good man and doesn’t deserve a conviction, especially on federal charges.  God bless him. 

"pre fab"sloycanvas, gel medium, pen & ink, acrylic & quilting threadh-7" X w- 5 ¼" X d-5 ¼"

the facade of my childhood home faced true north, but no one used the front entrance. instead family & visitors alike would enter from the back door off the sunny porch. "pre fab" is a poem of sorts, naming my childhood home's outer & inner walls & roof & ceiling while imagining being once again on my bed facing north. to my right, the east with its ancient pyramids. to my left the west of untrammeled mountains. behind me the thick canopies of the south. true north, the facade, is a front door no one ever finds. at least that's the way i dreamed it. nic says i have my right & my left confused, but he is looking at it from the outside. i am on the inside & looking out. 

Thomas Rude
"Just Passing"

5” x 7” linocut on kitkata paper, collaged mat

$150

Bending for home clutching the weight of the world’s books, the mutt a conjured spirit guide on the scent of a sweet wisp of hope along the rock hard concrete road, up and away from desperation: flying by merely scissoring my legs heroically in slow motion, Gus and my brother and Jimmy Sjoberg all gawking up, awed.

Kate Speckman
“Neighborhood”

Ceramic

$125

These homes signify the similarities found in a

neighborhood.

Eventually I Realized That I Was the Swan

Anne Goodrich

Mixed media

$85

My relationship to my childhood home is complicated.  I have many happy, pleasant memories, but their are also some things that happened there that have caused me pain.  In my early thirties, I spent a lot of time and energy addressing these memories and I began to have vivid dreams about my childhood home.  I dreamt that I tore through the ceiling to the attic finding Christmas decorations, bags of money,  and people cocooned in sleeping bags.   In one particular dream, I was trying to escape the home by navigating my way through a stream that flowed out of the house.  As I struggled to move forward I was met by a swan that stood tall and spread it's wings before me.  At the time I had the dream I felt that the swan was threatening me.  Then I took a class in dream analysis; one of the techniques for interpretation was to make art about the dream.  As I sculpted the swan I recognized that rather than threatening me it was simply showing me it's power and beauty.  Eventually, I realized that I was the swan and that whatever happened to me I am stronger and more beautiful because of it.