Artist Richard Baker (above)

Please join Balsam Ridge Gallery at 44 North Main Street in downtown Waynesville on Saturday, February 2, from 5:30–8:30 pm for a combined Groundhog Day celebration and Haywood Waterways Association post-Polar Plunge party with live music and refreshments. Themed costumes are welcome and encouraged. Prizes of no real value will be given for the best and worst costumes, with judging based purely on favoritism. Light refreshments will be served. The public is invited to this exclusive observance of ridiculous hilarity and genuine support for those brave souls who, earlier in the day, plunged into frigid waters for a good cause.

Landscape artist Richard Baker has hosted this creative event in the past at his studio and attributes it to helping to end the doldrums of winter. “Groundhog Day is a great day to get together,” Baker says, “and collectively hope for an early spring. Plus this will be an opportunity for Polar Plungers to thaw out and for the general public to reach into their pockets to help support the great work Haywood Waterways does.”

“I’m going to give you a prediction about this winter,” Baker adds. “It’s going to be cold. And it’s going to last a long time—unless a gathering at the Balsam Ridge Gallery helps bring on an early spring! So treat your cabin fever with a dose of the Balsam Ridge Gallery.”

A native of Tennessee, Baker has painted Western North Carolina for more than 30 years. Favorite subjects include the Blue Ridge Parkway, Cold Mountain, and Shining Rock Wilderness. Baker’s paintings of water and mountains are highly sought after for their remarkable realism, radiant light and evocative atmosphere reminiscent of the Old Masters and the Hudson River School painters. A prolific painter, his gallery walls offer paintings for every taste from weathered barns to Christmas tree farms to large-scale paintings of the French Broad River.