TUSCUMBIA– Paintings by Yuri Ozaki and Stacie Thomas is on view at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art through April 29. This exhibition features the Alabama-based artists’ nature-inspired watercolor, oil, and acrylic paintings. Visitors can meets Ozaki and Thomas at the their Gallery Talk and Closing Reception on Saturday, April 29 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Yuri Ozaki grew up in a coastal small town in Mie Prefecture in Japan, and her favorite painting subjects have been woodland scenes in the Tennessee Valley as well as her hometown in Japan.
Ozaki’s exhibited work focuses on her depictions of nature, mostly trees. Her extreme attention to detail gives a portrait quality to her paintings of trees in faithfully recording textures, colors and the effects of light and shadow.
Yuri Ozaki paintings
Jonathan Cain, curator at the museum, says that visitors will be amazed by the beauty and realism of Ozaki’s work, especially her paintings of the bases of trees, which are “imbued with a quiet sense of spirituality that creates the impression of visual meditation. Her observations are carefully recorded in watercolor and gouache, verging on hyperrealism.”
Accompanying Ozaki’s work are small landscape paintings by Stacie Thomas, a
Stacie Thomas paintings
contemporary artist who is inspired by the people, landscapes, and natural ephemera of the southern Appalachian foothills. Her displayed work was created in the plein air style, which generally involves painting an outdoor subject on-site, in open air.
Cain says that Thomas’s use of the plein air technique gives her landscape series a “sense of immediacy and impressionistic understanding of masses of light, shadow and color.”
Admission to the museum is $5 for adults, $3 for students, and free for members of the Tennessee Valley Art Association. Visitors can also get free admission to the exhibit (and its companion show Pop!: The Art of Comics) by bringing a receipt from Superhero Chefs restaurant in Tuscumbia. They can get one free entry per meal listed on their receipt.
