Artist Spotlight
Marty Whaley Adams
2 - 4 p.m., Saturday, August 19
(Mini show continues until Saturday, August 26)

We're so excited to highlight the work of local painter Marty Whaley Adams in the next in our series of Artist Spotlight events, happening from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 19. This informal meet-and-greet event will feature a collection of Marty's most recent paintings, created in her home studio over the past year.

Since selling a historic family home in Charleston and moving full time to the Flat Rock home she shares with her husband, Marty is looking toward the future. "I think I've gotten to a big stopping point in our lives, moving here full-time, and I feel now that art can be my top thing."

Leaving the Charleston house that had been in her family since 1939 was bittersweet, but Marty is embracing this new, simpler situation. She says, "I feel like I've come to the end of a long tunnel, now that I'm not in charge of two historic houses (only one now), something that has kept me from painting how I wanted to. It's a feeling of freedom. I'm not sure what will happen, but it will be interesting to watch. I've got a lot more courage now."

Many of the paintings that Marty has either created or refined for this event include the luminous and exquisitely observed still lifes that she has long been known for in the Charleston art community as well as more recently here in western North Carolina.

Many of these still lifes—which often include family heirlooms and flowers from her own garden—have beautifully balanced compositions that radiate a kind of easeful serenity. In one painting, Marty pairs blue hydrangeas in a vase with sunflowers in slanting sunlight on a porch. She says, "There was just something so magical about the play of light and shadow and the way the blue and yellow went together." Marty employs a looser brushstroke new to her, learned from a painting workshop with Gallery at Flat Rock artist Marsha Hammel. This brushwork is most evident in a painting depicting a silver pitcher with a piece of china that Marty inherited from her great-grandmother, whom she never knew. "I feel good about the brushwork—it's allowing me to paint in a very impressionistic way."