Story By John Mann

It may be a few months late but the Mountain Valley Arts Council in Guntersville finally held a ribbon cutting ceremony for its renovated gallery on Tuesday, along with a reception welcoming both new and returning faces for their current display.

“This ribbon cutting is a little bit overdue,” MVAC President Becky Scheinert said. “We closed down the Mountain Valley Arts Council in March and had to move everything out. We installed new gallery lighting, painted the walls and then stained and sealed the floors. We’ve been slowly moving things back in and reopened in April, and now we finally got around to having a ribbon cutting to bring the community back and see the difference and this is a great turnout.”

Immediately following the ribbon cutting there was a reception held in the gallery to show off a wide variety of pieces that will be on display throughout the month of October. The first of these, visible from outside the gallery, is a new window display by Georgia Duke. The festive scene is a play on Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting, with a painted backdrop and a field of sculpted pumpkins in the foreground, most prominent of all a large scale pumpkin headed figure that is releasing crows over the field.

“The main guy is a sculpture made out of a paper-clay mix from a recipe I have,” Duke said. “Everything is recyclable, I try to recycle when I can. The stump is made of Great Stuff and then I added some natural things I found in the woods. Some of these Jack O’ Lanterns I made and some are my students, based on Starry Night but with a pumpkin field.”

Going inside the gallery you can see the four other artists for the current display. Guntersville resident Jimmy Trotter, a former art instructor at Snead State College, provided a number of large oil paintings, recreations of famous works such as Albert Joseph Moore’s 1887 painting Midsummer.

“He (Jimmy) is very talented,” Scheinert said. “He has this little idiosyncrasy in that he will only exhibit his work in a single medium at a time, so this time we have some of his oils which are large scale. He loves to work in large scale, previously we had his acrylics and his airbrush and we had one of the Queen of Hearts that was eight feet tall, needless to say we didn’t try to hang that one on the wall.”

Another featured artist, Denise White, has a big collection of paintings which follow a more abstract theme. Many of White’s paintings are women in witch attire as well as cats, but White also has displayed some rag dolls which follow a similar theme to her paintings.

Along with Trotter, White and Duke there are quilts by Diane Pansing and Mala Kennemar and wood carvings by Staten Tate and Howard King, both members of the North Alabama Woodturners.

The Mountain Valley Arts Council is located at 440 Gunter Avenue and is open five days a week from 10-3 pm Tuesday through Friday and 10-2 pm on Saturday. You can find out more about the current gallery and the MVAC by visiting their website at mvacarts.org.