I arrived early to judge this exhibit and enjoyed a short walk along the Rappahannock, wondering as I walked how the history and environment (and the environmental history) of Fredericksburg would be represented in the works submitted for the exhibition. I wondered what it’s like to live in Fredericksburg, a place that I know mostly as a halfway point between my home in Richmond and my family’s home in Maryland. The impact of the natural and built landscape loomed large in the work submitted for this exhibition and is definitely reflected in my choices. I chose works that no doubt represent what it is to live in your part of Virginia: there are barns, fields, riversides and horses aplenty. But as much as this rooted-ness in place was a predominant theme, the work I enjoyed the most were the pieces that took my mind to a place other than that of the reality I saw on my short walk. I was most enchanted by works that seemed to have one foot planted firmly in the reality of this place and another rooted in an idiosyncratic world of the maker’s mind. How else could one describe the moody brushstrokes of Tom Smagala’s Finney and Daughter or the murky green heaven of Another World by Susan Krieg? Barbara Byrd’s painting Sycamore Tavern also illustrates this otherworldliness: in it an impossibly large sycamore stretches to an electric blue sky while looming in front of what’s no doubt an historic structure. I was drawn in by the odd sky and a composition that seemed as informed by the camera’s eye as it was the painter’s. Richard Woody Young’s painting Far Away is a perplexing delight. I was happily flummoxed trying to understand the decisions that Young made and mean it as a compliment when I say that this was a painting I had never seen before.

Striking a balance between the actual world and one constructed from the tendencies and investigations of an artist is a fascinating line to walk. To do this simultaneously asks much of a viewer while still affording them the benefit of the doubt and allowing them to find their own way into the work.

Thank you all for the opportunity to be the juror for your exhibit. It was a great honor and I wish you all the best in your endeavors.

Michael Lease, October 2010