IT MAKES ME WONDER: Kim McAninch

Opening Reception: January 5, 5-7pm • See it first. See it free. This event is open to the public. Come meet your neighbors at this free event!

Kim McAninch (b. 1964 Lakewood, Ohio) is a Sarasota FL based painter. She earned a B.F.A. in Surface Pattern Design from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1982. Her 20-year career as a wallpaper, fabric and interior designer, has laid the groundwork for her unique painterly style.

Her process begins as pure fiction, allowing limitless possibilities. Fueled by wonder and curiosity of what may emerge, she employs multiple tools and media. It is through this process that she extracts order, creating the exact balance between figuration and abstraction. Without a premeditated outcome, the compositions naturally emerge. She seeks harmony of color, rhythm, depth and energy, and most important to her goal, offering a visual invitation to enter. Each painting is an opportunity to be immersed in a personal moment. The color, and energetic and gestural markings intentionally offer more information with less detail, leaving just enough space in which a viewer may wander.

IT MAKES ME WONDER will include paintings from each of her series, on which she has simultaneously worked for the past 14 years. Her work conveys a positive world. Kim wonders what personal experience the viewer will add to each painting.

Kim is an award-winning member of the National Association of Women Artists. Previous solo exhibitions include The Westmoreland Museum of American Art and in June 2023, her work was again awarded in One Art Space in NYC. Her artwork is in select galleries and is collected worldwide. Learn more about the artist at https://kimmcaninch.com/

In the Theatre Lobby Gallery: Everyday by Anna Forrest Fischler

Everyday visually attests to a practice of persistent presence—of consistently taking the time to find something worth caring about. It is a compilation of moments discovered by slowing down to investigate the magic in the mundane.

On January 1st , 2023, Anna challenged herself to create a single drawing from life, each day of the year, using the same pocket-sized dimensions and the same four markers: magenta, yellow, blue, and dark grey.

The key to Everyday is that each subject is based in reality—a tangible and fleeting observation. Whether she wanted to or not, she had to find something nearby that could be transformed into a pleasing composition, and devote her time to taking it in, exploring each shift in shape, value, and hue. This endeavor served to catalog her daily life, encapsulating what was different or new about each day, no matter how seemingly insignificant. As a college student, whose life is uprooted and rearranged at the will of the academic calendar, the objects and spaces that were commonplace to Anna in March were gone from her life by October, only kept alive by her colorful, cross-hatched records of the everyday.

This exhibition holds a year’s worth of experiences in small glass frames, and Anna’s hope is that visitors will walk away with a new appreciation for tiny, beautiful moments, feeling inspired to dive into their own daily practice, art-related or not.

More information about Anna’s work and process is available on her website at annaforrestart.net and on her Instagram at @anna.forrest.art.

In the Member Gallery: Keith Chamberlain and Pat St. Onge

Armed with a degree in physics, Keith Chamberlain has held a number of senior management positions during his 50-year career in the aerospace investment casting industry. Keith and his wife, Hennie, followed his career to New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and southern California. The final move was to Florida in 2012, where he started a consulting business. During the COVID lockdown, Keith explored other interests. His love of science, manufacturing and design made painting a natural outlet. With no formal training, Keith found plenty of guidance and inspiration in books, magazines and museum visits, along with lots of practice.

Since relocating to Fort Myers in 2016, Pat St. Onge experimented with incorporating fluid art and traditional brushwork in acrylics. She finds that pouring challenges and delights her imagination to combine something abstract with something familiar. She particularly enjoys creating unique portraits of wildlife. Pat ties the textures and patterns created by the pouring process with the patterns in fur, feathers and environmental textures in her paintings.  She strives to engage viewers’ imagination as well as their vision.