Featuring works by Virginia Pendergrass.

“When I heard that I was to be featured artist at the Asheville Gallery in December, a child-like voice in my mind shouted Toys!” says Virginia Pendergrass. The result of her enchantment with toys will be on display at the Asheville Gallery of Art from December 1-30, 2015.

Painting toys was an adventure of discovery for Pendergrass. She first envisioned treating toys as still life subjects, but she found that when you have toys, and add imagination, even grown-ups play.

“My Teddy Bear shared a chair with Goldilocks, and they decided that the chair was JUST right for both of them together. A tousled head of a youngster is seen in the mirror above the bathroom vanity where his rubber ducky and towel sit. But wait, that vanity has some rather adult products on it – is Daddy playing with the rubber ducky, too?,” says Pendergrass.

Although she felt like a child painting toys, she realized that her techniques were not child-like. Children will no doubt enjoy the bright colors and depiction of toys they love. However, her impressionistic painting style pays attention to hard, soft and disappearing edges, light and shadow to create volume, accomplished drawing, and other techniques of the experienced and educated painter. This makes for an unusual combination of an a child’s love of toys and her 16 years of experience as an artist.

Pendergrass describes her art as “contemporary impressionism. I like broader brushstrokes than the early impressionists, and of course we have brighter and more durable colors now. Color is almost always what first attracts me.”

Her informal art training consisted of painting and drawing courses at Old Lyme Art Academy in CT, Crealde School of Art, and Valencia Community College in FL, and numerous workshops with her favorite artists.

Pendergrass’ oil paintings have been accepted into regional and national exhibitions of the American Impressionist Society, Oil Painters of America, Paint the Parks, and Women Painters of the Southeast, where she has won multiple awards of excellence.

Recently, she began urban sketching (pen and ink drawings with watercolor) while traveling. She found the sketches so appealing that she has continued to catch street scenes at home in small towns in North Carolina.

In addition to the Asheville Gallery, her work is on display at the Silver Fox Gallery in Hendersonville, and her French Broad Artists studio (with AGA partners Sandra Brugh Moore and Sahar Fakhoury) in the River Arts District.

If You Go: Toys, works by Virginia Pendergrass, on display from December 1-30, 2015 at the Asheville Gallery of Art, 16 College Street, downtown Asheville. For more information, visit ashevillegallery-of-art.com or call (828) 251-5796.