First Fridays: October 5

Michael “Doc” Doyle believes that the hardest thing you experience in life is your best chance to find out who you are. For Doyle, a carpenter who studied metal sculpture in art school, that chance came in the form of jail time. After battling addiction and depression, Doyle attempted suicide in such a way that […]

First Fridays: September 7

Tim O’Kane has made a career as a figurative painter, an artist capturing people napping on couches, teacups sitting on countertops, and bowls brimming with eggplants, all in a hyperrealistic style. But viewers of “One Intention in a Troubled World,” O’Kane’s September show at Chroma Projects will see a different facet of the artist’s work. […]

First Fridays: August 3

“The root of my inspiration—pun intended—is firmly planted in the natural world,” says local artist Sam Gray. “When I’m feeling crazy, the best medicine is to go into the woods and be with the mosses, trees, herbs, fungi and critters,” she says. “I find a lot of magic in that connection.” That connection between the […]

First Fridays: July 6

About a decade ago, Rich Tarbell sold a guitar to pay for his first camera. Frustrated with his own music, Tarbell decided instead to document local music on film. And while live concert photography is fun, it all starts to look the same after a while, says Tarbell, who likes the behind-the-scenes stuff that most […]

First Fridays: June 1

The inspiration for many of Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s paintings lies in another art form: weaving. At a roundtable discussion at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Wilson explains that her people, the Ngangikurrungurr, who are indigenous to Australia’s Daly River region, had passed on fishnet stitches from generation to generation, each community having its own special […]

First Fridays: May 4

Dave Moore believes in the sensuality of painting. “I want my paintings to look like paintings,” he says. “I am not trying to fool anyone into believing that an object is on the canvas. The painting is the object and the experience, whatever the subject may be.” A self-described “art history nut” who loves “all […]

First Fridays: April 6

“Nobody understands an artist like another artist,” says local portrait artist Frank Walker. And so Walker, who has drawn all his life—first imitating the figures in Sgt. Rock comic books and later working in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers graphics department, earning a BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and working […]

See what’s on display at First Fridays

During the month of March, local artist Judy McLeod exhibits work from her oeuvre at three different galleries, each individual show representing a different phase in her 40-plus years of art-making. “An artist works in series whereby an idea is pursued visually for months or years in terms of a medium,” says McLeod, and while […]

First Fridays: February 2

Sigrid Eilertson likes to paint surrealistic images of creatures that straddle the line between the realistic and the fantastic, like larger-than-life goddesses and wild animals. She always works in a series, and she tends to work large—many of her paintings are 6 feet or taller. But for her most recent series, “Star Creatures: An Exploration […]

First Fridays: January 5

As a painter, I’m always looking for the state of surprise and enchantment,” says Martha Saunders, whose “Transmutations” show is on view at Chroma Projects Gallery this month. Most of the paintings in the show will come from Saunders’ decade-long project Reading Series, a rumination on how the human system digests information. The series “started […]