"December is for Members" is an open forum for visual artists who are members of the Lebanon Valley Council on the Arts. Their artwork will be featured in the Mezzanine Gallery of the Lebanon Campus of HACC, Nov. 29-Dec. 17. A reception will honor them Thursday, Dec. 9, 7-9 p.m.
Among the artists showcased are Ted Liles, Shelby Applegate, Dorothy Perez and Seamus Carmichael.
Liles is a native of Norfolk, VA, and graduate of Norfolk State College with a BFA in Graphic Design. After serving a stint in Vietnam, he spent nine years as a graphics arts assistant at Hershey Foods Corp.
He taught for some time in Harrisburg before returning to Norfolk where he joined a local Artist Coop (IFA ART STUDIO) and continued to paint. In 1990 he was part of a group who opened ALIVE Art Studio, offering artist-friendly rates for studio space, instruction to young artists in the community and a performance site for poets, writers and musicians.
In 1996 he moved his family back to the Lebanon Valley and has continued to exhibit his paintings, primarily in acrylic and charcoal, in the Norfolk area and Central Pennsylvania, including shows at Lebanon Picture Frame/Fine Art, The Grateful Bean Café in Elizabethtown, and the Lebanon Campus of HACC.
A self-confessed late bloomer, Applegate has been a full-time artist since 1994. She loves to explore new media, and in her summers at The Penland School of Crafts she has delved into the wonders of printmaking, papermaking, pastels and painting, to name but a few. Sharing this information with fellow artists and local students are ways that she spreads her love of these artistic processes.
Her own work has become increasingly free and abstract as her explorations have progressed. She has found herself working with handmade paper collages, doing monotypes and occasionally stitching works together to create pieces that are difficult to classify but easy to appreciate.
She is a founder member of a Lebanon Area Art Studio Tour where people are invited to visit artists at work in their studios, thereby creating greater awareness among the public of the creative process.
Applegate has shown regularly at the Mt. Gretna show since 1994 and has been a frequent participant in other area juried exhibitions. Within the last few years she has shown at the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery of Lebanon Valley College, Lancaster Art Museum, Lancaster Galleries West in Elizabethtown, The Whitaker Center, M & T Bank in Harrisburg and Lebanon Fine Art Gallery.
Perez lives and works in Lebanon. She has been illustrating and painting since she was a young girl and received a BFA degree in Communication/Design from Kutztown University in 1987. The summer before her senior year she traveled to Italy with an overseas studies program sponsored by the University of Georgia. She spent that summer touring and taking art classes.
While in Italy, she met her future husband Luis, Cuban born, but living in Florida, also with a fine art degree from Florida State University. They married in 1988 and have two sons.
During the spring of 2002 they added a daughter to their family from Nanchang, China, spending two weeks touring China and being inspired by Chinese artwork.
Perez has worked with Publications International illustrating two books in a series of "I can draw" books. Recently she has done illustration work for Morehouse Publishing, illustrating The Parish Acolyte Guide.
She also has done work for Rooftop Productions, various local companies and private collectors and makes herself available for just about any type of work including book, magazine and greeting card illustration and private painting commissions on almost any subject matter.
Carmichael began his formal art education in 1974 in the Ulster Polytechnic's Foundation Art course, progressing the following year to the Ulster College of Art and Design in Belfast. He graduated in 1978 with a bachelor of arts with honors in Fine Art. Upon leaving art school he became a technician in the print workshop of the Arts Council for Northern Ireland, working there for a year prior to entering an Art Teachers Diploma Course.
After completing his studies, he taught for a while in the local high school system but returned to making a living as an artist in the spring of 1981. Later that year he was awarded a Rome Scholarship in printmaking by Northern Ireland's Arts Council.
In Rome he worked on a series of color linoleum print illustrations to the poetry of Padraig Fiacc, a major Irish poet. While in Italy he traveled extensively and was influenced by medieval religious painting and sculpture. On his return to Belfast he resumed work as an artist and in 1983-84 staged a series of one-man shows throughout Ireland.
Marriage brought him to the United States in 1984, and he lived in Philadelphia and Stony Brook, NY, before coming to Central Pennsylvania, where his wife, a family physician, now practices.
The Lebanon Campus of HACC is located at 735 Cumberland Street in Lebanon.