COURTESY: LAURIN MCCRACKEN
Southside Gallery will be showcasing new art work by painters Norma Bourdeaux and Laurin McCracken today through Nov. 22.While this will not be the first Southside Gallery show for each artist, the gallery is very excited for Bourdeaux and McCracken’s return.
“Both artists are great and have travelled to many places,” said Anna Benefield of Southside Gallery. “However, they are also very familiar with Mississippi and can add a somewhat familiar feel to their works for some of our audience members. We are very happy that they have decided to come back to Southside.”
Bourdeaux was born in Alabama and lived in several different places throughout her childhood, including Salt Lake City, Utah. She also spent many years as a resident of Meridian, Mississippi. She later received her undergraduate degree in commercial art from the University of Alabama and then moved to Oxford in 2001 to pursue a masters of fine art degree in painting and become a working artist. Bourdeaux has been exhibiting her paintings at Southside Gallery since 2005.
“We believe that the smaller size of the work will offer a feeling of intimacy for our guests that they will definitely enjoy,” Benefield said.
The exhibit will showcase some of Bourdeaux’s smaller paintings, along with some on panels or canvases that are complete and stand-alone, but are placed together to make a whole painting.
“Having been interested in art for many years, I find the more I paint, the more it fascinates me and the more I want to learn,” Bourdeaux said. “Landscapes, my focus, captivate me; those I see at home, see on my travels or imagine. I predominately work in oil on wooden panels or canvases.”
The other featured work in the exhibit will be McCracken’s watercolor paintings. McCracken is known internationally for using objects to paint realism in watercolor paintings.
McCracken’s paintings have been included in multiple shows in China. Most recently he participated in the Qingdao International Watercolor Salon Exhibition 2014. Two of the paintings now on exhibit at Southside, “Barn with Tractor” and “Boats in the Howrth Bay, Ireland” were juried into the International Watercolour Biennial in Belgium.
Audience members can also expect to see a combination of three other mediums in his paintings: silver, crystal and clear glass.
“Not many watercolorists paint glass and some of the other things that I paint,” McCracken said. “I wanted to be set apart and do something different, and now it’s one of the things that I am known best for.”
McCracken said he wanted to add a homey, relaxed element to his work in this exhibition.
“For this show, I added things that would be nostalgic and familiar. Things such as bowl jars, canning jars with cashmere and plastic toy soldiers and other things that you would find in the home.”
Southside, McCracken said, is one of best galleries in Mississippi.
“Southside Gallery is one of the top three galleries in this state,” McCracken said. “When people talk about the great galleries in Mississippi, Southside is always one of the top ones, and I am very glad that they like to showcase my work.”
The exhibit opened today, and the reception will be held Thursday, Oct. 30 at 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. in Southside.
