Great weekend for Art! Friday night I was at ARTichokes Gallery in the Mission Farms area. I particularly enjoyed the paintings of Diane Boone, Ada Koch, Kristin Goering and Becky Pashia. Diane’s paintings are featured as you enter the gallery. Big, bright and bold, they are just plain fun! Ada, an instructor at ARTichokes, has 2 wonderful florals that are loose, free and graceful. Becky had many new pieces, all delightfully “Pashia”.

As for Kristin Goering, her current work is outstanding, and hanging next door in Room 39, a restaurant there in Mission Farms. The paintings, all beautiful 40” squares, are mostly florals, featuring native wild flowers and some of Kristin’s favorites. There were also several landscapes with trees casting interesting shadows. Kristin’s use of color is always exciting! What her paintings do for Room 39 is terrific. This is the first time I felt all of the paintings in the restaurant fit the space. Subject, colors, size….all working beautifully in the room. They should consider buying the entire collection!

As usual, Becky Pashia and her partner, Megan Sutherland, pulled off a perfect “opening”, right down to the Chocolate Crinkle cookies!

“A Retrospective of Barbara Cleary 1935-2010.”

Saturday night found me driving south down highway 169, headed to Paola.  Barbara Cleary, who died earlier this year, was a longtime fixture in the Paola art community. For the next month, that community celebrates Cleary's life and legacy with a three-part retrospective, all in spaces surrounding the town's historic square.

D'Marie Gallery hosts "Barbara's Journey," "An Impressionistic Viewpoint" is at the new gallery and artists co-op, For Art'Sake, and finally, David Gross’ Gas Light Gallery is displaying works from a private collection. All told, the shows will cover Cleary's entire career as an artist Along the way, she placed work in both private and corporate collections and earned pages' worth of awards for her work.

Barbara will be missed.