Lyrical Lights & Darks

The Cincinnati Arts Association's Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts announces two new exhibitions: Lost & Found, a poignant and reflective mixed media installation by Cincinnati photographers Cal Kowal and Anita Douthat that addresses the fleeting nature of life’s experiences; and Lyrical Lights & Darks, a new series of paintings by the venerable Cincinnati painter Velma Morris that utilizes the simple elegance of chairs to imply human interaction of conversations past.

A venerable member of Cincinnati’s artistic community,Velma Morris has been making art since she was a young girl. In an artistic career spanning several decades, Morris has enjoyed considerable acclaim for her figurative and landscape paintings.

For her exhibition Lyrical Lights & Darks, the artist has devoted an entire series of paintings to the study of chairs, a common everyday functional object that through her careful compositions and painterly brushstrokes suggest evocative forms and suspended moments of human interaction. The simple elegance of the chair’s form and the stark contrasts in Morris’s use of color and shape transform these common objects into poetic visions. In a world of frenzied activities and harried lives the artist offers the viewer the opportunity to relinquish life’s chaos, filter clutter and transcend.

Primarily self-taught, Velma Morris took evening and Saturday classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Baker-Hunt Foundation in Covington, Ky. while working full time for Mercantile Stores and raising two sons as a single parent. Among her teachers were renowned local artists Ruthe Pearlman, Lela Cooney, Larry Zink, Vernon Rader, Louis Cecil and Michael Scott. She has an extensive exhibition history including national exposure in California, New York, Ohio, Washington, D.C., Kentucky and New Orleans. Her work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections. Now retired, Morris makes art full time and teaches child and adult art classes at the Baker-Hunt Foundation.