Helen Duckworth will be showing her collection entitled “Stories of the Heart” at the Wagener Room at Southend Brewery’s third floor on East Bay St. Charleston, SC.
The show will run from May 25 until June 9, 2012, with a reception on Saturday, June 2, 2012, from 5-8pm. Hors d’oeuvres, wine and beer will be served. This will coincide with the running of the Spoleto and Piccolo Spoleto Festivals.
“Stories of the Heart” features over twenty oil paintings gathered to represent an intimate expression of love. Each original work captures deep emotion and soft touch whether it be between lovers or friends. Set against the backdrop of historic Charleston with gorgeous views of the harbor, Southend’s Wagener Room is the perfect venue for Duckworth’s collection. Along the staircase leading to the third floor, guests will be treated to the artist’s vignettes displayed with her original poetry.
A familiar face to the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Duckworth has participated twelve times in the annual arts event. Area residents may have also met the artist during her poetry readings at the famous Dock Street Theatre. Best described as contemporary expressionism, Duckworth’s paintings reflect the artist’s full range of emotions expressed through color and form. Duckworth said, “I don’t use a formula when I paint. It is intuitive. I have a feeling of what I want to express and it evolves itself into shapes…like a puzzle that comes from me.” In the paintings of lovers, the artist shows the feeling through the way the arms are exaggerated and how the hands sometimes barely touch their beloved. In other paintings, the bodies appear to dissolve into each other.
Duckworth was born in the north of England and came to the United States in the 1960’s, settling in New York City and studying intermittently at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts. She is both a poet and an artist which is apparent in the way she paints, choosing to work from an inner place of imagination, memory and feeling. Mostly painting in oil, she does venture into mixed-media expression but she always returns to the lusciousness of the quality of oil which she has become addicted to, she says.
Duckworth’s work for the last twenty-five years has been a culmination of her feelings about life and her personal journey of love and sorrow and the ever-present question of inner work and relationship to something hidden.
For more information on this exhibit visit (http://southendbrewery.com/2012/05/spoleto-festival-charleston-sc-best-brewery/). To see more of Helen Duckworth’s works visit (http://www.helenduckworth.com).
Carolina Arts News 