It’s Story Time

It is once again time at the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts when we to turn to things literary.  Each February, we team up with one of the many well known authors who call Hillsborough home for a show titled “It’s All About The Story.”  This year is “Volume V, John Claude Bemis.”

John is an award winning Young Adult author.  This is the first time we are working with a YA author, and the first time that all the HGA artists are using the same story.  Our previous four shows have drawn from short story collections by Michael Malone, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, and Allan Gurganus.

pinocchio’s heart

Retelling Pinocchio’s Tale

 Out of Abaton: The Wooden Prince, is John’s retelling of the Pinocchio tale set in medieval Venice.  As you can imagine, a magical story with fantastic beasts, fairies, and the like would be right in a doll artist’s wheel house.  After much personal debate, and quite a few unfinished sketches, I settled on the main character.

detail Pinocchio’s face

Pinocchio is not a simple puppet this time around.  He is a finely crafted automaton servant boy who is automated, like all of of his kind, by magic from the kingdom of Abaton.  His automation is slightly special and he is slowly becoming real as a result.

torso detail

I decided to depict my Pinocchio before his transformation starts.  I am working with the title , “Servant Before You Are Real”, and decided to create him mostly of wood like his namesake. The photos throughout the blog post are Work-In-Progress pics.  I will share a finished image when the show is installed in a couple of weeks.

heart door closed

As usual, this show will open the “Last Friday” of the month on February 23rd from 6-9pm.  HGA will also host a reading by the author on Sunday, March 5 from 4-6 pm.