Old Hotel Art Gallery features Cyber Art 509

OTHELLO — Paintings and sculptures from the Cyber Art 509 art cooperative are on display for the month of October at the Old Hotel Art Gallery at 33 Larch St. in Othello. Entry is free.

Featured artists are Carolyn Zingmark, Margo Fox, Barbara Sutton and Leo Bowman. Cyber Art 509 member Terri Rice said some artists in the coop have had individual shows at the Old Hotel, but this is the first time for a group show.

Fox is featuring a selection of her black and white works, not photographs, but oils. She said Monday she’s always been intrigued by black and white photographs, with their dramatic lighting, and wanted to reproduce that in oils. She does oils in color as well, she said, but the black and white works sell better.

Fox said she has previous solo shows at the Old Hotel, exhibiting there for a number of years.

Sutton, too, paints in oils.

“I paint mostly portraits,” she said Monday. “And animals.”

One of her works in the show reflects her Native American heritage, a favorite subject, she said.

Sutton said she started painting as a young woman, and like a lot of other Cyber Arts 509 artists, gave up art to raise a family. She started painting again about 25 years ago, she said.

“It’s a fun way to express a lot of feelings,” she said.

Zingmark is a watercolorist who focuses on outdoor subjects, according to information on the Cyber Art 509 website.

“Through my artwork, I try to bring the outside in,” she wrote.

She focuses on transparent watercolor, she wrote, due to its ability to produce rich color. Her works on display at the Old Hotel include landscapes, flowers and animals.

Bowman is a woodworker, a wood turner, he said, focusing on works made on a lathe. His works on display at the Old Hotel are not really bowls or sculptures, he said; they’re sort of hard to describe.

“I don’t know what the right terminology is,” he said.

He’s been turning wood, off and on, since the mid-1970s, and built a shop about eight years ago in preparation for retirement. Since then, he’s spent a lot of his time turning wood, he said, sometimes using really unusual materials like sagebrush reinforced with resin.

“I do a lot with grapevines,” he said.

Wood turning fascinated him from the time he first got a lathe, he said.

“Making furniture and cabinets is still good but my interest swiftly turned to finding the natural beauty hidden inside of trees. Searching for the beauty that nature has hidden away and finding a way to expose this beauty has become my passion,” he wrote on the Cyber Art 509 website.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.