Artists continue to demonstrate their crafts this week at the 22nd annual Stars of Texas Juried Art Exhibit.

The art exhibit, presented by the Arts Council of Brownwood at the Depot Civic and Cultural Center, continues through Saturday. Three different demonstrations are scheduled daily through Friday.

Hours for the exhibit will be 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, the final day. The show is open to the public at no charge.

A change in the previously announced lineup for Friday has been released. R.J. Barnett will show Print Marking; Sandra McSwain, Portraiture in Acrylics; and Ginger Test, Watercolor Painting.

Demonstrations by artists — three each day — will be ongoing between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 12

Molly Gore Merck
Encaustics

Molly Gore Merck, an art educator living in Abilene, will be demonstrating encaustics.

“Painting with wax is a new and exciting medium for me, as I just picked up the habit this year,” she said. “I received a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art at Howard Payne University in 2011. Since then, I have worked in various capacities in the art industry including gallery work, museum collections, and public school and museum education.

“My interest in art began later than some when I picked up a pencil and participated in my first student art show at 15 years old. It was in college when I realized that the days I spent in art classes for my minor were my happiest, and I decided to take the plunge to change my major and entire life trajectory.

“I love working with my hands and getting messy with paint, markers, oil pastels, or anything else I get my hands on,” she added. “More than anything I love encouraging the creativity in others and teaching my students new skills and how to realize and embrace the talent they already have.”

Paige Shelton
Pottery

Ebba Paige Shelton has been the heart and soul of Paige Pottery for over three decades, but who’s counting?

She began studying art at an early age, watching her mother paint portraits live in her home studio and paint beautiful landscapes all over central Texas and Hawaii as they traveled with Paige’s father as a career USAF pilot.  As a young girl born in the East Sweden area of Brady, she enjoyed the country life of their grandparents’ ranch, graduated from kindergarten in Germany, lived in Virginia for a few years, and then moved back to Texas — all because her father was called back into service during the Korean War.

She continued her interest in art and received a BFA from the University of Texas. She was so inspired and motivated by her ceramics and sculptural classes to move into a new direction with three dimensions. She joined with a group of potters and made a business partnership at Westbank Pottery in Austin for many years, launching a career that took her to shows, galleries, and teaching all over Texas and elsewhere.

Her artistic, colorful and detailed porcelain and stoneware is a pleasure to use and enjoy.

She enjoys teaching and inspiring young and old. Watching other artisans and participating in workshops has always brought her inspiration. She and her husband, Ray, still live and work in their Bastrop County acreage near Bastrop State Park, even though her pottery building itself was lost in the worst fire in Texas history, the Bastrop complex fires of 2011.

Since that time, though, they have made much progress in rebuilding her shop. She also wants everyone to know what a valuable experience the children in this community have with the opportunity to view excellent works of art in the exhibits at the Depot and to watch artisans demonstrating each day. She will be at the exhibit for two days, Wednesday and Thursday.

Claudette West
Pastel Painting

Claudette West will be demonstrating and talking about the different properties of four types of pastels.

“I have drawn as long as I can remember,” she said. “I took private art in Odessa and Brownwood. I have a BFA in art from Stephen F. Austin University and taught public school art for several years. Also, I am currently teaching art to children at the Art Center on Tuesdays.”

THURSDAY, FEB. 13

Paige Shelton
Pottery

Paige Shelton also demonstrated pottery on Wednesday. Her information is provided earlier in this story.

Bob Stuth-Wade
Painting and Drawing

Bob Stuth-Wade of Dublin be demonstrating non-toxic emulsion medium using standard oil paints.

“I have been painting since I was a child,” he said. “Presently I mostly do landscape — watercolor, oil, acrylic, pastel, encaustic, and egg tempera.

He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and studied with Perry Nichols and Mary Sloan. He has been exhibited his work for decades, going back to a solo exhibition at the Fairmount Gallery in Dallas in 1972. He was a visiting artist at Baylor University in 2011, and has won “Best of Show” at the Brownwood Stars of Texas Juried Art Exhibit for the last three years, all judged by different jurors.

“Standing or sitting at my easel painting, there is a sense of sweet transparency,” he said. “I become like the magnifying glass I held as a child that focuses the diffused light of the sun to a burning point. As an artist, I am a lens that focuses the diffused light of awareness and the beauty of this experience into a painting.”

Wanda Wade
Mixed Media with Clay

Wanda Wade will be doing a combination of textured panels and sculpture at her demonstration, showing the process from panel, sculpture, to finished piece. She described the work itself is an expression of the primitive energy found in nature and ancient relics, petroglyphs, pottery, and sculpture.

“From the recreation of rock like surfaces to the carving of stone and the shaping of clay, this work expresses the primordial longing of my spirit to find its most authentic expression,” she said. “When personality and its expression are in harmony life itself becomes art, and art is born of art.”

Her work is primitive and present. These objects and paintings represent the joy of awakening.

Born the last of 10 children on a farm in the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, she was often left alone. In that isolation she found the peace of an ever-flowing waterfall and old growth forest. Up the road from the falls is a bank of red clay that glows warm in the sun. After cold winters trapped in a drafty, noisy house, she found refuge there. She spent hours lost in the perfect creative process of a child making clay figures. Her work is still imbued with child–like wonder, which is the foundation of her art. Along the way she learned from her high school art teacher, Mrs. Ferguson, Niki Riddle of North Carolina, Mark Davis, Carol Stavish of Tarleton State University, and her husband, Bob Stuth-Wade.

Her compassion and enthusiasm have influenced the lives of thousands of children and parents during her 30 years of teaching dance in Stephenville and Dublin. After retiring she continues to share her gifts through art, yoga classes, and healing therapy. She is a certified Sivananda yoga instructor whose personal practice of over 40 years has empowered her physically and spiritually, enabling her to walk a path of compassion, gentleness, and harmony.

She is also a certified Bowen therapist and a trained Shamanic healer. She said art, yoga, healing therapy, and her experience of raising four children have blended into a person of profound wisdom with a natural motherliness that enfolds those around her in love.