The Unionville High School Art Show has been raising money for the UHS PTO for 40 years, and it’s still going strong. While the financial numbers for this year aren’t in yet, 30 percent of the money raised through the sale of professional and student art goes toward the PTO.
A former chairperson, local artist Lele Galer, said more adult artists participated this year with a good mix of 2-D and 3-D art.
Carol Apicella, this year’s co-chairperson, said the show, which ran Nov. 20 and 21, included 62 professional artists, which she said is “up significantly” from past years, and about a third of them were new to the event.
“We tried to find a lot of new faces to bring in, a lot of new and unique faces to our show and join our familiar favorites,” she said, adding that the result was “a greater vitality to the art. It was more diverse.”
And it was that diversity of art that gave the show more vitality, she said.
Alluding to Galer’s point about 3-D art, Apicella said more ceramic artists were included than in previous years.
“We wanted to find artists that weren’t like everybody else,” she added.
Some of the artists that Apicella said stood out included Lynette Shelley, who works with ink and acrylic, and Teresa Haag, whose work is strong on cityscapes, unlike the many rurally influenced work by others.
“We’re in a very painterly area, the Brandywine Valley tradition, beautiful landscapes and barns. It’s beautiful stuff, but we wanted to find more eclectic artists,” Apicella said.
Another of those artists was Kirsten Fischler, who paints wood pieces she’s taken from construction site dumpsters.
“It’s reclaimed wood, post-construction waste,” Fischler said.
Some of work includes gluing smaller pieces of wood onto larger pieces to give a more dimensional feel, a sense of life to the wood.
She said wood is linked to the primal side of human beings, which, she said, “is needed more now that we live in a computerized society.”
“Humans have a long history with wood; it’s a living thing,” Fischler added.
Proceeds from the sale of art benefit educational enrichment programs sponsored by the PTO. Apicella said the money goes to buy a variety of items from microscopes for the science department to drying screens for the arts.
(Top photo: Cityscapes by teresa Haag.)
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