Local artists honored at Guild juried show
The Guild of Creative Art in Shrewsbury is featuring a multimedia show of contemporary American artists through the end of October.

Departing from tradition, the Guild asked Michael Cagno, curator of the Noyes Museum in Oceanville and an experienced photographer and painter, to judge the entries.

"This was a difficult show because of the large number of high-quality entries," Cagno said.

From more than 200 submissions of painting, photography and sculpture, he selected 162 works from 119 different artists to fill the Guild's redesigned, museum quality gallery space. Entries were judged on classic fundamentals: composition, color and line, shape, and technique, with attention to the unique challenges of working in each medium.

Five local artists won prizes at the show: Muriel Rogers (Colts Neck), Valeriy Dyshlov (Marlboro), Bernice Gaines (Manalapan), Deborah Candelora (Colts Neck) and Jean Hutter (Lakewood).

Rogers won first prize in painting. Rogers, who paints in watercolor and oil, loves color, blending and mingling pigment to capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere in a realistic impressionistic style. Her prizewinning watercolor, "Home Town Creations," tells of a day in the life of a Colts Neck craftsman, who worked every day outside his workshop with his dog, building and painting birdhouses and outdoor benches, and displaying them outdoors for all to see.

Dyshlov received an achievement in painting. Dyshlov, born in Siberia, has been painting since he was 5 years old. A student of Vitaly Lenchin, Dyshlov taught graphics at the Art School in Kharkov, Ukraine, before coming to the United States in 1995. Many of his art works hang in Ukrainian museums as well as in private collections in Western Europe, Russia, Canada and the United States.

His award-winning work, "Lady With Mask," is part of Dyshlov's "Performance" series of oil paintings. It is set in the warm color palette with reds and golds in the tradition of old masters. As seen in this work, Dyshlov uses old masters' techniques and classical art forms and images. However, he transforms them to reflect his own contemporary world of images and actions.

Gaines received an achievement in painting. Gaines began painting 30 years ago and fell in love with the challenge of watercolor. Today, she paints realism in an impressionistic way, driving her to capture subjects en plein air. Gaines sometimes enjoys doing still life painting "with twist." Her favorite "twist" is painting onions in all sizes and colors.

Candelora received an achievement in sculpture. Candelora is a self-taught sculptor. Her formal training was in engineering, and her sculptures are a fusion of art, mathematics and human psychology. She uses a variety of materials and is always trying something new, but her passion is carving a work from a single solid block of clay. "Musical Wave" is a fluid, curvilinear form inspired by the rhythms and motions of the natural world. "Three Pi Swan," her second award winner, is a combination of organic and geometric shapes, which offers an unexpected, hidden element and is intriguing to view from all angles.

Hutter received the Friedlander award for abstract. The focus of her current work is on the qualities of line, shape, color and texture.

Her award-winning painting "What Zyg Taught Me" is a tribute to one of her teachers, Zygmund Jankowski, of Gloucester, Mass., who taught her about painting abstract space. In her abstracts, she paints mostly shallow space, unlike a landscape where you have perspective and middle to deep space. To create this particular painting, she used a piece of watercolor paper that her teacher had sketched on to illustrate the concept of shallow space. Hutter covered this with a thin wash of gesso to preserve the pencil lines and used this as the inspiration for her abstract painting.

The Guild for Creative Art is at 620 Broad St. (Route 35) in Shrewsbury. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, noon to 4:30 p.m. For more information call (732) 741-1441.