The In-Town Gallery on Frazier Avenue on the North Shore welcome Mindy June Kelly, mixed media artist, and Judith Jones, who creates gilded botanicals as their featured artists for October.
Mindy June Kelly, Mixed Media Artist
Mindy is originally from Atlanta, Georgia and has called Chattanooga home since 2006. Mindy spent 20 years in the beauty industry. She was an Aveda salon owner and educator the last ten years of her time in that career. Mindy has been creating art since she can remember and chose to shift her professional focus in that direction in 2017.
She has been featured in various art shows, including Four Bridges, and different venues in Chattanooga. Her artwork also resides in private collections around the Southeast and as far as Bahrain. Mindy formerly served as an Executive Director for an arts non-profit using her business acumen and passion for people and the arts in that role.
Mindy chose mixed media as her focus in art making because she loves to collect bits of history that are overlooked or forgotten. Old books, magazines, and manuals are given new life in her work that mixes collage with paint, pencil, and ink to tell a new story. Mindy is currently working on two series. The first is the Beauty series started in 2017 and ever evolving featuring portraits of women.
The series began with a vast collection of beauty industry magazines and has continued to evolve. Her new series, Edge of Chaos is inspired by the very same theory in physics. Each piece uses various techniques relying on the chemical reaction of materials and the building of layers to dictate the direction each piece takes.
Mindy currently serves on the board of the Association for Visual Artists and is a past graduate of the Holmberg Arts Leadership program. She is a trustee with her husband Bryan for the UNFoundation and has served on several grant panels in Chattanooga. Mindy currently works at Tandem Financial Partners in an Administrative Support role while also expanding her art career and teaching creative art workshops in Chattanooga.
Judith Jones, Gilded Botanicals
Judith obtained a BA in Fine Arts from West Georgia College in 1973. Upon graduation, she realized she had no directly marketable skills. Even though she continued to paint, she worked for the next few years as bartender at Sheraton Hotel (now Doubletree).
She met her future husband at this time and went to work at his company. He owned Kickoff Publishing Co. which produced a college football newsletter and was founded in 1952.
The company had grown to include a direct mail service. She worked with him for 15 years. Upon his death in 1999 the business passed to her. She ran the business for the next 6 years. In 2005, Judith sold the business and spent much of the next few years taking care of her mother and then her second husband.
A couple of years ago she came across an article outlining the works of Rachel Dein: plaster castings of spring flowers. She saved the article for some reason. About a year ago she came across the article and decided to research it further on YouTube.
"I had no success with her in particular but did locate an artist in Russia who had numerous videos demonstrating his work. There was no audio, only brief subtitles. But it was enough to inspire me to begin," she explains. "Needless to say, the first pieces didn't survive the process. But, slowly through trial and error, the innate characteristics of dealing with the medium were learned."
It should be noted in the case of pieces which have been "leafed", the product used is not real gold leaf. Rather it is a commonly used product called "imitation gold schabin." Cost of true gold leaf would be prohibitive.
To find out out information about the In-Town Gallery, visit them on Facebook at facebook.com/intowngallery or on the website at intowngallery.com
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