MAY 13, 2004 • THE JOURNAL

The ART of fine winemaking

By Melissa Breazile-Ensz

Art and wine enthusiasts got their fill Saturday, when Louisville Art Gallery was host to representatives from two Nebraska wineries and new works from three area artists. 

The house was full as visitors, sipping a variety of wines, admired paintings and glasswork in the show, “The Art of Wine.” Cuthills Vineyards and Blue Valley Vineyard supplied the beverages; Valerie Light Anderson, James Bond and Jean Mason provided the visuals.

Mason was pleased with gallery owner Steve Sherman’s “assignment” to create work based on wine. The subjects of her bold paintings typically are jazz musicians.

“I love his assignments,” Mason said. “Steve has a very creative mind.”

So do the artists whose work now hangs in his gallery. Mason, for example, uses her imagination—and tunes by Ben Harper, Jack Johnson and the like—to fuel the vibrant musicians popping from her paintings. Her children often serve as models to help her through tricky figure positioning. Mason’s style hints at the artist behind it: Work is colorful, high-energy and inviting.

“It makes people happy, and that’s my goal,” she said.

If Mason’s work is a hot trumpet solo in a smoky Chicago club, Light Anderson’s might be a Christmas brass quintet playing on a snowy afternoon.

In Light Anderson’s still-life paintings, natural light interacts with glass objects and creates glowing highlights on shiny fruit.

The artist considers her still-life paintings her “poems.”

“I’m trying to show something beautiful about the simple and everyday,” said Light Anderson, who by day is a software development manager.

While Light Anderson uses glass as a subject for her work, Bond uses it as a medium. His reverse-glass paintings—on plates and tabletops—shimmer with metallic color. Chinese calligraphy adorns the plates. Bond was taught by his father Milton Bond, a well-known glass painter, but strives to find his own identity in the craft.

“I never want to copy anyone,” Bond said. “That’s very important to me.”

He has researched his art and developed a “fluid process” uniquely his own. By the time the process is complete, a simple piece of glass has been transformed into a transfixing piece of art.

As winemakers might tell you, art also can be consumed.

Holly Swanson said her husband, Ed, spent about a decade learning and perfecting the craft of winemaking before they opened Cuthills Vineyards in Pierce.

Aided only by grape-pickers during harvest season, the Swansons produce 18 wines a year. The deChaunac, a dry red, and traminette, a semi-sweet white, are favorites. Blue Valley Vineyard grew from Jim and Marlene Johnson’s purchase of 40 acres of land near Crete. They planted grapes and went “from vines to wines,” said Marlene. Her grandson, Chad Pickschus, helps with the operation and said the winery’s blush is its most popular. Marlene enjoys meeting people, as well as the craft.

“The art of making wine is fascinating,” she said.

See the work by Mason, Light Anderson and Bond through July 3. Next up for Louisville Art Gallery is “Thrown and Blown II,” a two-day festival of demonstrations by a glass blower, several potters, wood turners, carvers and lamp workers. The event will be noon to 6 p.m. Saturday, May 22, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, May 23.