Material Fabrications by Elaine Fleck at Perspective Gallery
BLACKSBURG, Va., June 2, 2009 – For
years Elaine Fleck has been a celebrated,
award-winning artist in the Roanoke area,
where she is known for her community activism
and service
as well as her unique art. June
1 through July 1 she brings her intricately
surfaced work to the Perspective Gallery,
second floor, Squires Student Center at Virginia
Tech, in Material Fabrications by
Elaine Fleck. An opening reception
will be held Friday June 5 from 5 to 7 p.m.
in the gallery. It is free and open
to all.
Fleck is as colorful a character as her paintings and garden mosaics and her love for nature and gardening are reflected in the rich surfaces of her works. “If you get a sense of being in a garden when you look at my paintings, look closer and you will see why,” said Fleck. “I have been an avid gardener and naturalist from an early age and, over the years, have formulated a technique to create the rich textural surfaces that appear in my paintings. For each work, I weave together a complex background of textures that combines insects, flowers, vines and reptiles to emphasize the natural world to which we all belong. In some works, I attempt to tell a story, weaving in people that I have seen or met over the years in my neighborhood and around town. Sometimes the inspiration for my pieces comes from dreams. In my paintings the images, set against a mountain, field or a hilltop park, simultaneously underscore the otherness of the human animal and suggest its connectedness to all living things.”
As the daughter of a military family, Fleck traveled extensively throughout Europe while growing up. In 1978 she graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA in two dimensional art. During the eighties she lived in San Francisco and attended an extended BFA program at San Francisco’s City College while also sitting in on figure drawing sessions at the San Francisco Art Institute. She later lived in Taos, New Mexico before heading back to Virginia to make her home in Roanoke, where she has lived with her husband and son since 1996. A resident of Roanoke’s Old Southwest neighborhood, Elaine has become known for her community activism. She has won several awards and has participated actively in the city art scene.
University Unions & Student Activities
(UUSA), a unit within the Division of Student
Affairs at Virginia Tech, is sponsoring Material
Fabrications. For more information,
contact UUSA Art Programs Coordinator Mary
Tartaro at (540) 231-4053 or tartaro@vt.edu. The
Perspective Gallery, on the second floor
of Squires Student Center on the Virginia
Tech campus, is free and open to the public.
Perspective
Gallery Summer
Hours:
- Monday: Closed
- Tuesday-Thursday: 12:00pm - 6:00pm
- Friday: 12:00pm-10:00pm
- Saturday: 12:00pm-6:00pm
- Sunday: 1:00pm-6:00pm
CONTACT:
Sandy Broughton
(540) 231- 3467
siemens@vt.edu