Description

Several times throughout the year, we select a Chamber member to speak about their organization during the mixer. We also feature work from artists affiliated with the Washington County Arts Council around our F&M Trust Training Room. Refreshments are also provided monthly! Keep reading to discover what this month's mixer will have in store for you.

This month's featured Chamber member is the Barbara Ingram School for the Arts Foundation! Ally Sirbaugh, Executive Director, will be sharing about the BISFA Foundation during the mixer.

Founded in 2008, the Barbara Ingram School for the Arts (BISFA) Foundation advances exceptional arts’ education by providing resources and funding that support the Barbara Ingram School for the Arts public high school in Hagerstown, Maryland. Funds are provided for programs, such as master classes, artists in residency, student field trips and state-of-the-art instructional materials and technology. The Foundation also hosts a Summer Arts Academy for students in grades 5-12. To learn more or take a tour of the school, call the Barbara Ingram School for the Arts Foundation at (240) 347-4934, or visit www.barbaraingramfoundation.org.

Dr. Ira Laurie will have his artwork displayed at the mixer this month.

Artist Statement:

Landscape to Abstract by Ira Lourie

My entire photographic career, an avocation at best, has focused on capturing the beauty of Landscape with a secondary focus on Cityscapes. My mentor, Mike Sample, was a landscape and wildlife photographer from Montana who taught me the magic of light and color as found in nature. I had been taking pictures since I was 10 years old and got my first box camera, but under Mike’s tutelage I learned the essence of the beauty of nature, and especially of landscapes. Thus, my first gallery exhibition was titled "The Light and Color of Nature and the World of Man.”

As I have aged, while I love my photography, I have always been envious of artists who paint and can take a landscape view and portray it in a way that reflects their personal emotional response to the scene. I most often choose to photograph a scene because of an emotional response it evokes in me. As a photographer, when I have an emotional response to a scene I am viewing, I have to rely on the glass of my lens and the nature of the film or digital sensor that records the image to reflect that response, and they often let me down.

In addition, over my octogenarian lifespan, visual art has become more and more abstract impressionistic, and many artists now choose abstract images to capture their emotional responses. I, too, have on occasion taken photographs that had an abstract feel to them or reflect patterns that I find pleasurable to look at. However, I have remained envious of painting artists who can create abstract and pattern pictures without having to discover them in nature.

All of this led me in 2024 to produce a gallery show at the Arts Council. This consisted of images that create abstract and pattern emotional responses for me. Some of these images I printed as the full image that my camera recorded, and others come from my looking into a small part of a full image, often very small parts, that evoke a response in me.

For this show, I have chosen 15 images that represent my attempt to create abstract visual art that evokes an emotional response in me as well as being examples of pleasing “Light and Color of Nature and the World of Man”. Next to each image in this show, I have hung a small copy of the original photograph that I took so that you will be able to see where the image comes from. Three of these are photos that I originally took specifically as abstract images and the rest are a part (often a very small part) of a larger landscape image that morphs into an abstract image. All of these pictures have created some emotional response in me. I hope you also find them evocative.

Thank you to the 19405 Emerald Sq. Edward Jones for sponsoring this event!