The Friends of the Buellton Library will present the Spring Community Artist Showcase in honor of Mental Health Awareness and Mothers’ Day, opening with a Wine & Cheese Artist Reception, 4-6 p.m. Saturday, May 2 at the library, 202 Dairyland Road, Buellton.
The exhibit, which runs through May, is titled Creating from Within and features four artists from the Santa Ynez Valley.
The show expresses the love-bond between mother and child, the joy of life, sharing thoughts and feelings without words, and visually representing deeply felt emotions as part of a self-soothing artistic process, organizers said.
The art showcase can be viewed during the Friends of the Buellton Library Room’s hours: Mondays, 10 a.m.-noon; Tuesdays, 2-4 p.m.; and Saturdays 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
The featured artists are:
Renée Kelleher of Ballard. Kelleher is an impressionist oil painter who delights in beautiful or interesting surroundings wherever she lives or travels. Big city skylines and buildings, hillside vineyards or mountains and sea, interiors, and the people and animals she sees are her inspiration.
She is a member of the National Oil and Acrylic Painters Society, California Art Club, American Impressionist Society, and Women Artists of the West. She is owner of Gallery Los Olivos, where her artwork can be viewed.
Maggie Powell of Solvang. Powell, an artist and activist, holds double associate’s degrees from SBCC in studio art and art history, and in 2024 she graduated from UCSB with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Powell works in multiple mediums, drawing and painting, but has a primary passion for ceramic sculpting, and more recently creating installation art.
“Her work reflects a deep connection with the natural world and animals. Through organic semi-abstract representations, Maggie strives to capture the essence of her subject,” event organizers said.
She grew up the youngest of eight in a family of artists, naturalists, and musicians in Goleta, when it was still predominantly orange groves and ranches. Her sense of stewardship for the land led her to environmental activism.
Sherry Uyeda of Buellton. Uyeda’s formal art training includes learning to charcoal draw in an introduction class at SBCC in 2018, and partcipating in Irina Malkin’s Intro to Oil and Acrylic Painting at the Buellton Recreation Center.
She then began painting 10 self-portraits in oil illustrating her own sadness and difficult emotions as a means of acceptance of “What is.” Afterwards, she began her “Loving Embrace” series of oil paintings and charcoal, organizers said.
Alexandra Yakutis of Buellton. Yakutis began her leisurely college education in the early 1970s. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art in 1980 and began painting independently in 1982.
Yakutis had discovered Gaviota and the Santa Ynez Valley in the ’70s, too, but only came to live in the area in 1994.
“Even though the wild shoreline, breathtaking river valley and transverse ranges are worthy subjects of their own, the challenge has been to visualize, include, or reference what we sense in addition to an exclusively visual world. This, and how to share thoughts and feelings without words,” Friends of the Buellton Library said.