Between the Sea Foam
and Over the Sand

Exhibiting artist and DeBlois member Virginia Fishburne Stone explains the title of the show this way: "So much of Rhode Island is surrounded by the sea it seems inevitable that DeBlois Gallery put on a beach-going season art show with the subject matter of its ocean, beaches, boats, sea life, swimmers, beach bathers and anything else the artists for this show can surprise us with of oceanic subject matter. This show was named for a line in an old medieval ballad 'Scarborough Faire,' made famous in a version by Simon and Garfunkel. 'Between the Seafoam and Over the Sand' is just one variation of that line. We hope you will delight in the solving of the impossible tasks undertaken by our show artists in creations of paintings, graphic work, ceramics, metal, sculpture and jewelry."

For this show I focused on the sensation one has in jumping into the ocean.
The excitement, joy and pleasure at once. The exact moment one enters the water our eyes shut.
My focus was observing that moment from behind the eyes.
The flash of color as ones senses are overwhelmed, is what I hoped to capture in these examples.

This new series of works is both playful and colorful. The glazes I've been developing over the past decade with a couple of studio assistants is something I'm particularly proud of. All the glazes used in these works are made from natural ingredients mined from the earth! The layer of shine comes from silica, kaolin and salts while the colors come from metals such as iron, copper, cobalt, chrome and tin.

Laura White Carpenter is a Providence-based artist who primarily works in hand-built porcelain sculpture and mixed media of found materials (metal, wood, "junk"). She is an accomplished welder and manipulates her found steel, also often adding hand-built ceramics to her sculptures. She has lived on four continents and has been greatly influenced by the seemingly universal imperative of using decorative marks to indicate an object’s or place’s significance. Meanwhile, she has increasingly utilized techniques and supplies that have a lower impact upon the Earth. She enjoys creating the perfectly imperfect form and intentionally retain tool marks in her hand-built ceramics. For the past few years, she has been creating hand-built spherical raindrop forms, inspired by the roots of ceramics, using the coil-building method as humans have done for tens of thousands of years to make essential functional items. She was also motivated by the desire to realize a consistent practice, to truly hone her skills, and to explore a wide variety of decorative processes, including experimental methods such as adding glass, metal, fiber, and found objects into the clay body or glaze. The coil-building process uses minimal water, and having lived in a highly arid area for a few years (northern Ghana), she recognized this is a more sustainable form of ceramics in a world where clean water is a privilege not the basic human right that it should be.

All humans have the need to connect with each other. Touching is the most immediate way to connect. Words can be misunderstood.

Juliette is an artist, educator and mom native to Rhode Island. She is from a family of artists, smart talkers, and opinionated loud mouths. Juliette's art is inspired by her love of nature, her kiddos, movies, and sometimes her own lesson plans.

Frank Fishburne was born an artist but it was not revealed to him until later in life. His grandmother was an artist and three of her grandchildren have become artists. Although he inherited artistic sensibilities he spent his working life working with machines and metal. He reveres tools. He has been called "The Man of A Thousand Vises" not because of his bad behavior but because he has a thousand actual metal vises.

As I recall, his artistic journey began with a series of Helmets he made and brought to a family gathering. He has made both sophisticated, intellectual, refined and crudely finished metal pieces. Raised inside the beltway, he has been painfully aware of political absurdities and once did a collection of 9 crows in metal, assembling them in a line entitled "The Judges" referring to the 9 Supreme Court judges. He enjoys taking parts of metal objects and redefining them as something else. His work ranges from the acerbic to the silly.

Frank’s reply when asked to comment on his work is "Hope you like it."

-Virginia Fishburne Stone

Life’s a beach, some say, and I’ve beachcombed life’s shores all my life. I’m fascinated by the detritus cast away to the margins, shores, middens, and yes, dumpsters that I encounter. As our climate changes, our tidelines creep farther and farther inland, and the debris that people have casually tossed into Mother Ocean is slowly but surely being tossed back at us.

My dimensional collage, Washed Ashore in Senegal, is based on a photograph I took on the beach at Joal, Senegal, birthplace of Senegal’s first president, the revered poet-statesman Leopold Senghor. The high tide line is a tangled clutter of seaweed, shells, plastics, and piles of rags. Second-hand clothing from overseas that doesn’t sell in charitable outlets is bundled and sold to vendors in West Africa and elsewhere. Too often, the tee shirts and other textiles that don’t sell on the street are thrown into the ocean, only to wash up miles down the coast, including the stretch where I caught the ironic image of an Obama backpack among the other debris.

My other piece, a mixed-media photocollage, is probably self-explanatory once one knows the title: Trinity-by-the-Sea, Newport, RI, circa 2051. Present-day Trinity Church sits uphill from Newport Harbor on grassy Queen Anne Square, but the shoreline depicted in the work is approximately where some predictions of sea level rise indicate that the water’s edge will have advanced by mid-century. Enough said.

Fascinated with the beautiful distortion of the underwater world and with a history of life drawing, a wonderful union was made. As it continues to call to me, the Swimmer Series is born.

As so many folks, I have spent a lot of time at the ocean. Currently I live in two locations near the ocean in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts and along the North Carolina shore. Hence, I have much accumulated ocean related art. The background for the invitation for the show is an oil I did as a child which due to my parents I now own. It was painted at the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Sometimes I say that if it is not sold that I will rework it. There is a figure drawing in this show that I drew in college back when we were not allowed nude models. I reworked it. At the time of the original drawing it was still the time of the white and black racial division of beaches in North Carolina. I turned this vintage pastel piece into a commentary on a black bather looking through the handrail bars on a deck at the water that she is not allowed to go down to enjoy.

Some of the other pieces are just fun, some are commentary. Some celebrate the magic of the beach, even at night. Many study the people on the beach. If they are hung I have two that were early watercolors of shells that I collected and painted at the beach house kitchen in dishes when I decided to move from abstraction or nonobjective symbolic art to realistic painting done back back in my late twenties. I tend to slip easily back and forth from realism to abstraction without even thinking about it. One of the results of being a teacher of art and art history for much of my life is that I have a lot of stuff in my head. I also have have had lots of change in my life and lived many places. I have been to all fifty states and some countries outside the US. I think all that is reflected in my work. People say "Oh these things are such different styles." But to me they are just reactions to doing something and then doing something else and then trying to solve the piece in whatever way that works. The only thing I can say for sure about my approach is that if I think I have a plan about where it the piece is going I get fooled and the piece ends up somewhere else. I am in charge but not in charge.

Like my cousin Frank says about his work, "I hope you like it."

Women have been forever lured and influenced by trends in fashion. My work focuses on women's shoes and undergarments, as well as jewelry. I sculpt with metal to underscore how some of these styles might feel when worn, and to mimic and/or exaggerate different current styles, hopefully to bring a smile to the viewer's face. Miniature versions of undergarments and bikinis in wire weaving, cut metal and natural stone are made into jewelry.