Past Exhibitions
Trish Crowe: Teeter
My first love was line, and then color happened! I worked as an illustrator and graphic designer all my professional life. I live in the Piedmont of Virginia, and it is a feast for my artist soul. I now work only in watercolor.​Born in England, I went to Parsons School of Design in New York City, lived in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and London until I moved to Firnew Farm. There I founded the Firnew Farm Artists’ Circle in 2004, and my Artist Statement would not be complete without acknowledging the collaboration and inspiration of working with such talented artists and friends and celebrating together the beauty of this magical place..
Aggie Zed: The Close and Holy Darkness
A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Aggie Zed grew up in a large family on Sullivan's Island riding ponies and donkeys on the beach. As a child she watched her father repair television sets and played for hours with cheap plastic horses and cowboys which had no moving parts. She could always draw.
Living in Richmond, Virginia, after graduating from The University of South Carolina with a degree in Fine Arts, she supported her painting by designing and building ceramic chess sets. Her work in clay evolved to become a widely-collected series of human-animal hybrid figures with which she has made a living.
She divides her working life between sculpture and drawing and painting.
Aggie Zed's sculpture ranges from intimately-scaled ceramic figures of people and human-animal hybrids to copper wire and ceramic horses to ceramic and mixed-metals contrivances she calls "scrap floats". Her scrap floats are intended as entries in a parade of the future.​
Her drawings and painting are informed by a lifelong celebration of the beauty and strangeness of dreams posed against the absurdity and poignancy of supposedly rational human activity. Her mediums are dry pastel and various inks with water on paper.
She currently lives with her husband in Gordonsville, Virginia where she keeps animals in her life, especially chickens, which defy anthropomorphism.
Giselle Gautreau: Meridian Drift
In Meridian Drift, my collection of encaustic paintings, I explore the intricate relationship between landscapes and the visual language of maps.
The landscape in my work is not only a source of visual inspiration but also a metaphor for the themes of loss, change, resilience, and adaptation that resonate deeply with me.
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The Mapping Series originates from my deep love for natural spaces, particularly coastlines, estuaries, salt marshes, and tidal rivers. These environments, with their ever-changing boundaries and delicate ecosystems, have long captivated me. My appreciation for maps—especially nautical and topographical maps—guides my artistic process. I use their visual language as a foundation, creating fictional maps
where the boundaries of land and sea merge and shift. Often, I incorporate physical maps as an underlayer, allowing them to peek through the layers of pigment and encaustic wax, symbolizing the intersection of reality and imagination.
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A concept that subtly informs my work is shifting baseline syndrome—the idea that each generation perceives the environment they grew up with as the norm, even as
it gradually changes over time. My paintings reflect this phenomenon, capturing the delicate balance between nature's resilience and the relentless forces of change. By blending the real with the imagined, I aim to evoke a sense of place that is both familiar and otherworldly, encouraging viewers to consider the landscapes they know and how they, too, may be drifting.
Raymond Berry:
Bellair: Making Visible the Invisible
Bellair Farm represents something elegant and resonant that shoulders a great history with warmth and meaning. I asked permission of Cynnie Davis to study it from the viewpoint of the landscape and not that as merely a picture of what we think a farm should be. How would this
beautiful site see and consider itself? What was important? What would the curl of a year or so of visits and observations teach me about this varied and protean landscape?
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That ball of golden thread is a lovely image that has connected a handful of families to this place; I am always humbled by the graveyard that holds Reverend Timberlake and his family next to where I am painting. He was an original Trustee of the college I have taught in for over
forty years. Am I part of that thread now? I always say hello and place my hand on his headstone when I pass him by. He’s checking on me…
I have found some sacred places here, viewpoints and vantages that encourage stillness and contemplation. I have found allies in my investigations: the wonderful people who work the farm and turn the soil and give me good advice and good questions, who know so much more than me about the ebb and flow of this landscape. My good colleague, Franklin, who guards the house and escorts me around the grounds when I venture into the higher clouds of heaven…all these things get into the paint.
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Cynnie Davis is the longest resident of this farm. She walks the paths and spreads the wildflowers with grace and love. She has lost a beloved husband and son while living in this spiritual place and she has taken upon herself to share and nurture its benefits to those around
her. People are welcome to walk trails and pick the vegetables and bounty of her CSA and enjoy for a bit, the dream of living a life here. Her generosity and sense of giving comes as naturally to her as the mud and hard labor of farm work does to this beautiful estate. It’s good to
have a sense of humor about such beauty because it’s hard work, making such a place a home as well. She would just say, “easy-peasy”!
Peter Eudenbach: Nocturne
Peter Eudenbach uses sculpture, video, installations, and curatorial projects to explore the relationship between function and absurdity while challenging our expectations of the commonplace. A 2007 recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, Eudenbach’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as Exit Art in New York; the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus, Germany; the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia; the Hermitage Museum and Gardens, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is a Professor in the Art Department at Old Dominion University.
Lucy Farley Coates: Color as Air
Lucy Coates's tender watercolor paintings are evanescent meditations on the fleeting beauty and scent of flowers.
Installed and titled in the sequence of the lines of a stanza from William Wordsworth's ode "Intimations of Immortality", Coates's paintings are a visual representation of Wordsworth's poem comparing the innocent, childlike soul to the flower.