Exhibitions featuring trio of artists now showing

Rock School Arts Foundation will feature works by Kimberly Bost, Preeti Pajwani-Happer, and Carol Turner in exhibitions now through Friday, Oct. 9.

An artists’ reception will be held from 2-4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13. The foundation’s galleries inside the Old Rock School in Valdese. Works also may be viewed online at rockschoolartgalleries.com.

KIMBERLY BOST

Bost is a painter based in Hickory. She works in acrylic and oil, with a focus on landscape.

Painting runs in her family. Her mother, Susan Deming, is also an artist, and her great-grandfather was artist E.W. Deming.

Bost holds an associate degree in fashion design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and a bachelor’s degree in apparel design from the University of Delaware. She spent years in design and product development for nationally recognized brands before turning her focus to painting.

She has painted regularly since 2018 and continues to paint with her mentor, Stephen Brooks. Her work explores how color and light hold emotion, memory, and atmosphere on the canvas.

Bost believes art is a catalyst for personal and social transformation, using creativity to inspire courage, connection, and change.

PREETI PAJWANI-HAPPER

Pajwani-Happer was born June 8, 1965, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and grew up in Bombay, now Mumbai, India. She lived in and visited several countries before finding home in Western North Carolina.

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow,” Anita Desai wrote.

That sentiment applies to Pajwani-Happer and her artwork.

Since childhood, she has loved doodling and creating. As an international school teacher, she had the opportunity to nurture her creativity informally and through workshops in several parts of the world.

More recently, she has taken a deep dive into being “a sort of full-time creative,” learning new techniques through artist friends, workshops, and online tutorials.

The work on display is a blend of many forays and expeditions into the world of creating.

One material Pajwani-Happer is particularly drawn to is paper. She loves the idea of giving old paper new life by transforming it using traditional Asian techniques such as momigami, creating new paper from old, and using paper both as a surface and as a material.

She also has rediscovered embroidery, a skill she had abandoned since childhood. The women in her family were always sewing and doing embroidery, and embellishing her artwork with stitch and beads has brought her back to part of that heritage.

Recently, Pajwani-Happer learned how to make mica paint, which gives a shimmery look she loves. She likes experimenting with many art mediums, but the ones that appeal most to her are watercolor and gouache.

“As you wander through my artwork, I invite you to look for influences woven into my work. Perhaps you’ll discover something that I haven’t yet seen!”

CAROL TURNER

Turner is a mostly self-taught painter and collage artist whose images straddle representation and abstraction, sometimes with a bit of intentional awkwardness. Her goals are to simplify shapes and create something genuine.

She has found the collage process freeing, fun, and helpful in working toward those goals. She creates from life, imagination, memory, and her own photographs. She now works in acrylics and mixed media to paint directly or create her own collage paper.

Turner’s career was in education. She taught college English classes and, later, elementary students. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and history in 1965, a master’s degree in English in 1967, and certification in elementary education in 1968.

She grew up in Washington state and has lived in Hickory since 1967.

After retiring, Turner began her art journey with watercolors. She learned from books and, a few years later, from Kate Worm’s workshops and Open Studio at the Hickory Museum of Art.

Turner became a signature member of the Watercolor Society of North Carolina in 2013 and, in 2017, a charter member of Trade Alley Art Gallery, where she sold her work for four years.

A 2018 online workshop with Melinda Cootsona helped transform her work. Turner continues to learn from online artists and local artist friends as a member of the Piedmont Painters.

Her work has won prizes in area competitions, and she exhibits in group, two-woman, and solo shows in local galleries.

— AKC