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Betsy Stewart and Patrick Craig at MacLean Project for the Arts

Jan. 15, 2008

Betsy and Richard Dana enjoing the show

They're looking at one of the Metascules

My studio-mate Betsy Stewart has had a fabulous year, including two shows running concurrently, one in New Orleans and one that opened Friday at MacLean Project for the Arts, the jewel of the town of the same name. I have moaned with envy before about the exceptional level of support that northern Virginia communities give to the arts and to individual artists. MPA is one of the sterling results – an arts-oriented full-service community center that offers, among other things, educational programs and an absolutely first-rate exhibition schedule.

"Shrouds" by Patrick Craig

Did I mention they put on a spread at the MPA?

Betsy Stewart and Patrick Craig are both well-established artists who have developed unique and individual voices and whose work shows an assuredness and confidence as well as technical mastery and compelling imagery. Betsy’s work creates worlds that pulse and push at the edges of the canvas. Her large canvases especially give her the scope to produce entire fanciful ecosystems, surfaces overflowing with gorgeous teeming life.
Patrick’s canvases are from any entirely different imagined environment – one that I envision as peopled by anime characters and video game machines. The surfaces are slick, deeply colored, strangely inter-twined.

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