OCEAN CITY — “Food for the Soul,” a group show of works from the artist’s palette that tempt the viewer’s taste palette, will be on display through May at the Ocean City Center for the Arts. The public is invited to the free opening reception on First Friday, May 6, from 5-7 p.m. to meet the artists and enjoy complimentary refreshments from Touch of Italy.
The Ocean City Hotel-Motel-Restaurant Association (OCHMRA) has added a new twist to the Food for the Soul show. Nine local restaurants invited artists to come in, sample their cuisine and then create a piece of art based on their experience. What these artists created will be on display during the show, and the OCHMRA is providing cash prizes to the artists.
The participating restaurants are Sello’s, Dunes Manor: The Victorian Rooms, Longboard Cafe, Touch of Italy, Culture, The Shark, the Ocean City Fish Company, BJ’s on the Water and The Hobbit.
Also opening on First Friday in the Thaler Gallery is “The Language of Color in the Landscape” by two artists who specialize in interpreting the panorama of the area — Debra Howard and Angela Herbert-Hodges.
Howard grew up in Miami and studied at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota before opening an illustration studio in San Francisco. She is an award winning plein-air artist whose work reflects the subtle rhythms and beauty of the Chesapeake Bay area and her hometown of Crisfield.
Herbert-Hodges is an artist, Cordon Bleu chef and Olympic fencer. Born in a small village in England, she has lived in London, Paris, Spain and Zimbabwe before putting down roots on the Eastern Shore. Herbert-Hodges uses collage and mixed media to create her abstracted, highly textured landscapes.
Fiber artist Hannibal Lee occupies Studio E in May with vivid interpretations of Vincent Van Gogh’s artwork in fabric. Trained in the Brandywine tradition by Carolyn Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s sister, he had created a new medium combining textiles, mixed media and natural artifacts into 3D “translations.”
The Spotlight Gallery hosts works by a trio of painters. Mary Murphy grew up on a farm in Ohio where she loved being outdoors and now paints plein air since her arrival on the Eastern Shore. Betty Latourney works in watercolors and oils and participates in several local plein air events. Suzanne Wilson, a Salisbury University graduate and local high school math teacher, paints realistic landscapes with an impressionistic flair.
Multi-media artist and Art League staff member Debbi Dean-Colley is the artisan in residence for May. Mostly self-taught, she experiments with different media to create unique and creative objects of art.