Cheryl Keefer

Painting

For the month of June, local artist Cheryl Keefer will be featured in the FW Gallery at Woolworth Walk.

 Cheryl’s compositions are extensions of her life's philosophy; through wind and rain and all kinds of weather, through happiness and sorrow, there is cause for celebration.

Since college, her experience as a painter has mostly been working in the traditional manor, from life. Drawing from the model, or painting a landscape on site, en plein air, thrills her as she hastens to mix colors and capture the light and mood of a particular moment. The final paintings are loosely constructed, impressionistic, and more about her feelings and gratitude for the subjects than the subjects themselves. In her studio, she sees a glowing sunset over a range of mountains, a couple walking on a gray afternoon-punctuated with a colorful umbrella, a yellow forsythia blossom on a crisp spring morning. These examples of natural, everyday scenes move her deeply and inspire her work. She hopes her paintings inspire viewers to feel hopeful, joyful, and even celebratory!

The Cheryl Keefer Exhibit at Woolworth Walk, June 1-29, will include original oil and acrylic paintings, as well as fine art giclées.

Keefer maintains a working studio, in the River Arts District, Asheville. She holds degrees in art history and art education from The University of Alabama, Birmingham, and graduate painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work is featured in Carolina Home Magazine, April-June, 2021.

Cynthia Decker

Digital

For the month of July, local artist Cynthia Decker will be featured in the FW Gallery at Woolworth Walk.

Cynthia thinks of her images as a calculated combination of the familiar and the impossible. Her images are how she sees feelings and experiences, and it’s her hope that you can see how they fit within your own life story as well. She is inspired by the everyday, by life lessons, small moments, and big ideas. Her goal is to take these inspirations and present them to you the same way she sees them in her head—as objects for you to discover, and places you could walk into and explore.

The digital medium is finding its place in the art world, and it's her hope that artists use, value and enjoy all available means of creative expression, whether that's digital or physical. She hopes that artists and art lovers everywhere continue to push the boundaries of what constitutes a fine art medium.

She lives and works nestled in the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina. Her home office studio faces right into the woods adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Every day she is surrounded by the perfect balance of technology and nature. She couldn't wish for more. As a child, she would draw and paint at any opportunity. Her mother was the head of the computer science department at a local community college, and did some work in artificial intelligence for NASA. Her father was an engineer for Ford Aerospace. Because of her parent's jobs, they had a computer in the house when not everyone had home computers. She became comfortable with them as a kid and was starting to do digital art with paint programs in the late 1990s.

Throughout high school and college, she practiced art and design, and continued working with traditional media. She left college early to begin a graphic design career and continued to teach herself and explore new digital media. She began using 3D software and finally felt she had really found the medium that best let her express her artistic ideas. She began showing and selling prints of her work online and in local galleries in 2002. She shows work here in Asheville at the Woolworth Walk Gallery, as well as online, and in galleries in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Hawaii.