Manitou Music poster features “Path Through Time”
From staff reports
Grand Rapids artist Randi Ford’s acrylic-on-canvas painting “Path Through Time” is the Glen Arbor Arts Center’s 2023 Manitou Music poster image.
Ford’s painting was selected by the GAAC’s Manitou Music Poster Committee from a field of 40 entries. The 2023 poster can be viewed and purchased online at GlenArborArt.org and the GAAC office.
Ford is a landscape painter who is inspired by the beauty, life and spirit that exists within nature. It is her goal to capture the energy and life within the landscape through her flow paintings.
“‘Path Through Time’ was inspired by my time spent exploring the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Shoreline,” she said. “As I walked along the path through time, I was in awe at the beautiful colors within the landscape. The greens and oranges against the teals within the water were so magnificent. This piece really captures the divine beauty I felt among these dunes.”
The GAAC’s Manitou Music Poster Competition is an annual event that had been open only to GAAC members until last year. The 2024 poster competition will be open to anyone. Applications for the 2024 poster competition can be found online at GlenArborArt.org/ARTISTS in May 2023. Deadline for submissions is mid-September.
Creativity Q+A LIVE with Mark Mehaffey
How do artists think, work, and practice? Those questions are explored during Creativity Q+A LIVE, a series of conversations with Northern Michigan artists at the Glen Arbor Arts Center. The first 2023 conversation is Feb. 25, at 11 am with Leelanau County resident Mark Mehaffey. The program is free. No reservations are required. Doors open at 10:30 am.
Mehaffey is an artist whose creative work refuses to be shoehorned into tidy boxes. He moves fluidly between representing the visible world, and working with not-so-representational subjects: marks, lines, scratches, color stories. His practice is less focused on “subjects” than it is on ideas, and “what-if?”. Working primarily in water-based media, Mehaffey paints, draws, collages, and taught art in the public school for 30 years.
Creativity Q+A LIVE is an offshoot of the GAAC’s online feature, Creativity Q+A. Since 2020, the GAAC has published monthly, long-form interviews that dig into artists’ creative practices. Mehaffey’s conversation was published in December 2022. To read it, and all the Creativity Q+A interviews, visit GlenArborArt.org/ARTISTS. The GAAC is located at 6031 S. Lake St., Glen Arbor.
