Start the New Year off right to celebrate our January 2022 Artists Jessie Camerer with her paintings and our newest gallery member, Samantha Furer,with her hand woven items including scarves and purses.
Jessie Camerer – Painting
My name is Jessie Camerer and I paint with the Columbia Artists and the Toledo Art Group. My medium of choice is watercolor. Everything seems to be centered around the Pandemic so while staying apart from family and friends for 2020 and most of 2021, my thoughts were of my birthplace, Scotland. Since I could not visit my homeland, I chose to reminisce about the lovely places I had traveled while visiting my family over there.
Painting these scenes in watercolor seemed to bring them closer so I hope you enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoyed painting them. There was a special feeling that I hope transferred to my artwork. It was a yearning of home and friends as well as pride in being from Scotland, the most beautiful country in the world.
My hope would be that everyone gets the opportunity to experience traveling to Scotland in the near future. Make Scotland your destination, drink in the beauty, get to know the friendly people and listen to the bagpipe music.
Happy painting to you all!
Samantha Furer- Fiber Arts
I have been drawn to the arts for as long as I can remember and after years of experimentation found my medium in fiber arts. My weaving journey began in early 2018 on a small frame loom, while today a floor loom is my loom of choice. I find the tactile nature of weaving to be a wonderfully grounding and meditative practice.
The process of beginning a piece with strings of yarn and ending with a tangible cloth that can be held and in my hands has captivated me so much that I have taken my handmade work even further to the source by creating some of my own yarns from my own well-loved Angora rabbits. In a humane and deeply respectful process I have taught myself to shear, card, and spin their wool into yarn to be woven all from my home studio. I also enjoy working with natural cellulose fibers and locally sourced wool from small family farms, most of which I purchase as roving and spin into yarn myself. I findan abundance of inspiration in the natural world and changing seasons.
There is such raw beauty in the many natural color variations of wool and cellulose fibers that I work primarily with un-dyed yarns and botanical dyes that I create myself. For me creating the yarn is as much a part of my creative process as the weaving itself.