Laura Fontaine and Cathryn Miles

If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ll know one of the things I enjoy is the Charlotte art scene. While we have many art galleries in and around the city, we have a select few that we like to go to whenever they have a new exhibition. The Shain Gallery, located in the Myers Park area is a gallery we’ve visited often in the past few years, and during that time we’ve gotten to know the team that run the gallery, Sybil Godwin and Eli Cordell.

This past Friday, the first art show for the month of June featuring new work by artists Laura Fontaine and Cathryn Miles, opened at the Shain Gallery. We decided to check out the show the day after it opened, since we had yet another storm the night of the show. The weather was absolutely gorgeous on Saturday which is a change from all the stormy, humid weather we’ve been having… but we’re approaching Summer in the Carolina’s so a bit of weather is nothing out of the ordinary.

Laura Fontaine

Laura Lloyd Fontaine paints mainly on large gallery wrap canvas. Her style has been called representational painting, or as she refers to it as contemporary impressionism with a traditional flair. She works with oil glazes on a textured surface. Laura has always admired the American Impressionist Henry Hensche and Charles W. Hawthorne, founder of the original Cape Cod School of Art. Laura finds that working on a textured surface, she is able to layer color to create atmosphere and depth. – Laura Lloyd Fontaine

We’ve enjoyed viewing Charleston, SC based artist Laura Fontaine’s pieces for years. It’s always so calming to look at her landscape paintings featuring the marshes of Charleston up on the gallery walls, and her latest paintings for this show are some of our favorites so far. Her choice of color palette really seems to sooth to the viewer, and I’ve always loved the way the clouds she paints are reflected in the water.

Cathryn Miles

Cathryn Miles’s paintings are known for their rich color and textures and for their evocation of landscape without explicit depiction. Inspiration comes from her immediate environment, especially the turbulence of the clouds, colors created by weather and the natural patterning of the earth. – Shain Gallery

I really enjoyed the shades of blue that Cathryn Miles used through out her works for this show, and the broadness of the strokes on the canvas from her palette knives and brushes. The artists starts her pieces with simple, open shapes and linear elements that she creates with charcoal and oil pastels. She finishes the piece by filling in areas of color and even scrapping off and adding back layers until the composition of the piece is revealed.