University of the Ozarks alumni Courtney Ford ’09 (pictured, left) and Angela Teeter ’10 will be the featured artists for September in the University’s Artist of the Month Series in the Stephens Gallery.
The exhibit, titled “Virtuosos,” will be on display through Sept. 29 in the gallery, located in the Walton Fine Arts Center. There will be a reception to meet the artists from 4-5 p.m. on Sept. 29 in the gallery. There is no cost to view the exhibit and it is open to the public.
Ford, who lives in central Arkansas, is an art teacher at Joe T. Robinson Middle School in Little Rock. She said that after graduating from Ozarks in 2009, she began an extensive study of a 9th century Gospel manuscript whose text intersects meaning with image. The research conducted was presented at Savannah College of Art and Design.
She said her journey over the last 14 years has been about “understanding the possibilities of ingenuity and change. As an artist, I mostly cycle through learning by sketching, painting, photography, printmaking and mixing these media in the art rooms where I live or teach.”
Ford said in “Virtuoso,” tormented Saint Anthony is a cornerstone.
“It is based on a work by Northern Renaissance printmaker, Martin Schongauer,” she said. “Then an Italian Renaissance master, Michelangelo, made his visual comment on the design around 13 years old. I address this design through a lens of entirely different information technology than these predecessors. My initiative is to show resolute calmness through Saint Anthony. The figure is placed in a vast sky to breathe the freshest of air with rock in the viewer’s sight. And yet his gaze is fixed to look up without a thought that he’d fall to firmament. My art looks back to the artists I’d consider part of a great canon and forward to continuing the light they endow through the communication and technology available now.”
Teeter, who lives in Northwest Arkansas, has had her work featured at 21C in Bentonville, Ark., and Fayetteville Underground, and has made an appearance in Crystal Bridges’ notorious “WOW” (Wednesday over Water) as a featured artist of “Sensory Iconoclasts” in 2015.
Teeter said her artwork “implements the technique of traditional oil painting in both representational and abstract works of art.”
“Representational pieces explore an amalgamation of folk, spiritual, and metaphorical allegory while my abstracts are a product of a lifelong attraction to works of the mid-century modern masters and a strong interplay of basic design,” Teeter said. “Though nonrepresentational in genre, these works connect with the viewer through a kinetic nature where motion, weight, frailty, or strength is implied by the forms portrayed.”