A Navy nurse. Colorful grid lines that symbolize gratitude for breath. A doorbell that takes on added meaning during a pandemic. A popular tavern in Marietta. Birds of all kinds.
These are some of the subjects and inspirations that informed the work of the seven Lancaster County artists whose work was chosen for the 2023 juried Art of the State exhibit at the State Museum in Harrisburg.
Some of those artists have been in the show before and have even been honored with prizes. Others submitted their work to the show, which includes 86 works of art from 29 counties across the Keystone State, for the first time.
These finalists were selected from among 1,915 entries by 559 artists.
When Jill Brinser, of Elizabethtown, lost her longtime graphic arts job as a local advertising agency closed down, she had to reinvent herself as a fine-art painter.
The subject of her Art of the State acrylic portrait, “Navy Nurse,” is her own daughter, Leah Garrett.
“I was experimenting during COVID,” Brinser says. “I paint with acrylics, and they’re generally not thought to be the best for doing portraits. ... But I just wanted to try it. So I did six portraits, and my daughter happened to be one of them.”
Lancaster County finalists for Art of the State [photos]
The work of seven Lancaster County artists are part of the 2023 Art of the State exhibit at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, now through early January.
Jeff Sibbett of Lancaster, "Aqueous Constraint," Medium: Mixed media, acrylic, ink, spackle. This artwork is featured in the exhibition Art of the State: Pennsylvania 2023 at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg.
With her military camouflage and the surgical mask over her face, the focal point of the painting is Garrett’s eyes.
“I really wanted to capture her eyes,” Brinser says, “because that’s one of her best features and the portrait is all about her kindness and her compassion as a nurse.”
Garrett recently left the Navy at the end of her service and works as a civilian nurse. During her time in the Navy, Brinser says, Garrett was deployed to relieve hospital workers during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is the first time in the statewide exhibit for Jeff Sibbett, of Lancaster, with his work “Aqueous Constraint.” It’s a mixed-media piece of acrylic paint, ink and spackle, featuring sections of brown and blue with mint green, black and pale goldenrod lines in the upper left corner.
“The inspiration (for) a lot of my work is free form,” Sibbett says, “where I work with a lot of industrial pieces, a lot of industrial elements. Therefore, you see kind of like a burnished portion up top there, and then the free form of it is basically an underlay of just color and the overlay of the black acrylic ink — just kind of like a bubbling effect.
“It’s the free form of the water versus the very abrupt, constrained line of the metal,” he says. “ ‘Aqueous Constraint’ is basically just the two elements coming together. I wanted to show there’s constraint, there’s form in line, but there is also freedom.”
When he’s not making art, Sibbett works in radiology at Penn State Health Lancaster Medical Center.
It’s also the first year in the show for Diana Laura of Christiana, who created the images of 49 birds on hand-cut copper sheets — arranged on a painted wooden canvas — for her work, “Positions.”
Laura, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, was inspired by a work she saw at the academy featuring the images of soldiers on individual panels.
“I just loved how impactful that image was in my head, the composition of it,” Laura says. “I decided to do my take on it.
“I was really challenging myself,” she says. “I really wanted to make something big, something impactful. And I love working with birds. I think birds are very aesthetically pleasing. And I love the movement of birds.
“And I wanted to challenge myself to see how many different positions of birds could I create. And I ended up coming up with 49.
“Each one is a different position, each one is inspired by a different bird,” Laura says, a pair of bird earrings she also designed hanging from her earlobes.
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A past finalist and winner in Art of the State, Becky McDonah of Millersville returns this year with a metal sculpture titled “Wary Welcome: A Reliquary for the Doorbell.”
“It was obviously influenced by COVID and visitors at your door,” said McDonah, a Millersville University art professor. “All of a sudden, when the doorbell rings — when it used to be exciting, maybe somebody’s coming — now you’re wondering, ‘who’s coming, what do they want, and are they bringing a virus with them, or is it a package I’m waiting for?’
“It’s mostly about being more cautious about who’s coming to your door,” McDonah says.
“This one has my actual doorbell in it that I took off the house,” she says.
The bell is behind what looks like a mini louvered door and is surrounded by tiny cast door handles.
“One thing that I just personally think about is that we don’t visit people as often as we used to. ... You had visitors that were unannounced,” McDonah says. “But I don’t think that happens as much anymore. And so that doorbell is always a little bit more suspicious.”
Another new artist to the show, Martha Hines, loves the architecture and the shadows around a historic tavern building in Marietta.
Her watercolor painting, “Shank’s Tavern,” of the eponymous historic tavern, is filled with shades of rust and olive, with a beige sky, impressionistic trees and the dark parking lot in the foreground.
“This is may be my fourth time painting it,” says Hines, who owns MH Art Gallery in Marietta and works with Marietta Arts Alive.
“I like this view because of the way the shadows fall,” she says. “This time I made it mostly about the color scheme and the shadows. ... So the shadows sort of had a life of their own. ... It draws me in every time.”
Retired from a job as a financial analyst for the Postal Service, she has worked in watercolors for many years.
Her gallery, where six artists show their work regularly, is hosting the “Night Trees” exhibit, based on the work of a local poet.
(To read the LNP | LancasterOnline story about the “Night Trees” exhibit, visit lanc.news/NightTrees.)
Last year, at age 18, Manheim Central High School student Joseph “J.J.” Roach, won a first prize at Art of the State for his abstract pen drawing,“Celestial Dreams.”
This year, at 19, he won the William D. Davis Memorial Award for Drawing for his abstract pen-on-paper work, “Paradox.” The award winner is chosen by the Davis family.
To fully appreciate the work it took to complete the picture — “it took me eight months,” Roach says — you have to look at it up close, and all over.
Roach’s work is made of hundreds of tiny, colored shapes that create an effect of a solid color — in the case of “Paradox,” magenta — with a hint of an image floating amid the shapes.
Roach, who is autistic, says he is inspired by the sky, by dreams, by puzzles and by relics of the past.
Another past finalist and winner, Jerome Hershey of Lancaster, won third prize in painting this year with “Breath No. 3.”
It’s part of a series of colorful grid-like paintings that were inspired by the three weeks when he couldn’t breathe because — as he soon found out at the hospital — he needed open-heart surgery.
Hershey has been creating abstract paintings for more than 40 years in his North Queen Street studio,
“They’ve evolved considerably,” Hershey says of his “Breath” paintings. “They’re a lot more complicated, but all these paintings are a celebration of life. They’re a meditation — the joy of living and breathing.
“It’s the idea of inhaling, so if you can imagine the lines sort of expanding (like lungs), that’s the idea,” he says.
“It’s a more complicated paint application process,” he says, with the layering of thin lines of paint around the grids. “These are four panels that are painted individually and then attached together.
“The color is very subjective for me. It has as much to do with what I’m feeling when I begin the painting and how I kind of visualize where it’s going to go,” Hershey says.
The Art of the State is filled with lots of other works — atmospheric black-and-white photography, handcrafted wooden furniture and vases, works in textiles and a little booth filled with pop-culture images and sayings written on back-lit microscope slides.
There’s even an interactive work in which visitors are encouraged to walk on colored panels — to allow two glass vessels to pour water onto a surface and change the color and texture of it each time it gets wet.
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