Painter Chuck Ripper was born in Pittsburgh on October 28, 1929. His father was a blacksmith and an amateur landscape painter, who spent hours in the woods with his son. His mother was an elementary art teacher. Both encouraged Chuck’s interest in nature and art. While Ripper was a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, he had his first bird painting published in Nature magazine.
In 1953, Ripper moved to Huntington to become art director for the Standard Printing and Publishing Company. He quit in 1964 to become a full-time freelance artist, while continuing to live in Huntington.
He has created nearly 1,500 illustrations for a book in Peterson’s Field Guide series, illustrated books for the National Audubon Society and the National Geographic Society, and designed more than 550 conservation stamps for the National Wildlife Federation.
Ripper’s works have been displayed at the Norman Rockwell Museum of Illustration in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; the Explorers’ Hall at the National Geographic Society; the Denver Museum of Art; the Culture Center in Charleston; and the Huntington Museum of Art. Chuck Ripper is regarded as one of the country’s best-known wildlife artists.
Janice Summers-Young is one of two West Virginian artists who were selected for a new exhibit at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia. The exhibit, called Second Time Around: The Hubcap as Art, features 287 artists from 36 different countries and opened yesterday.
Young lives in the community of Queen Shoals, about a mile from the Elk River, right on the line between Kanawha and Clay Counties. By day, she and her husband Terry work for their construction business. Most weekends they spend hiking, camping, and collecting materials that Young uses in collages that are on display throughout their home.
“I’ve always loved art, and I’ve always done some form of art, and tried to make my whole life a kind of art,” said Young.
When Young and her husband began to build their home, they discovered fossils in the rocks that they dug out of the dirt. So they decided to use the fossilized stones to build the exterior of their home.
“The area had been coal mined quite a bit, some years back. We started building our house here, we started hand-picking our stones from where we had dug here, the excavation, the stones we turned up, and also stones along the creek bank, because they’re rich in fossils. And I also wanted it to look like this house fit here,” said Young.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Young with one of her collage pieces
Young’s art, like her home, also includes objects from nature, from wasp nests that are preserved with porcelain, to pieces of driftwood that are constructed into circular collages, inspired by whirlpools she finds in rivers.
She also finds imaginative ways to incorporate pieces of trash that other people dump in the woods, like using scrap wire to shape into trees.
Her work drew the attention of Pennsylvania artist Ken Marquis, founder of the Landfill Arts Project. He invited Young to submit a piece of art for a new exhibit, which opened on September 7th. Over 1,000 artists from around the world were given a hubcap. Each of them repurposed their hubcap in their own way. Young was one of a few hundred artists whose piece was selected for the exhibit.
“When I got the hubcap, the first thing that entered my mind was the driftwood piece, inside the hubcap. I’ve seen so many hubcaps in the river. And I’ve watched them pop off the hill and roll down into the river.
And there’s swirlholes where the whirlpools land, and they’re circular. And they’ll have little bits of wood or stones collect inside of them, said Young.”
The Landfill Arts Project organized the exhibit to help encourage the public to think creatively about re-purposing old materials. What one person might consider trash, artists like Janice Young see as materials that can be used to create.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Painting of an owl, by Janice Summers-Young
“I thought it was a really really neat project that’s gonna have that many people from all around participating in something that I’m passionate about. You know, just not wasting so much and trying to reuse as much as possible. No, we can’t all be environmental saints, but any little thing that we can do all adds up eventually,” said Young.
Young says she doesn’t consider herself an environmentalist. But as a West Virginian artist, she does feels inspired by the delicate beauty of the mountains and the rivers. Often, it’s a beauty that she thinks is abused.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Part of one of Young’s paintings
When she sees trash in the river, she picks it up, and tries to turn it into art. Now, that art will be on display in a museum, surrounded by the works of artists from across the world. All 287 of them are tied together by the willingness to create– out of the waste that most people call trash.
Young and another West Virginian artist, Romney Shelton Collins, will both have their hubcap art on display at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia through next March. The museum is open Tuesday-Sunday, 10-4.
After music, I love the graphic arts, photography, film and almost any variation thereof.
Graphic artists, like Ian Bode, fascinate me. I am not filled with envy, but with wonder at their ability to transform a blank canvas or an ordinary sheet of paper into something living, thought-provoking or transformative. How on earth do they do it?
Painting or drawing is about seeing, so I’m going to let Mr. Bode’s work speak for itself. Click through the slideshow above while listening to the interview. You’ll see “the passenger” and a four-paneled sketch followed by the final result.
