By Warren Cobb | Photography by Holger Obenaus

If you think the Charleston Artist Guild exists for the sole purpose of promoting its member artists, you’re quite mistaken. Promoting its members is only one spoke in the wheel of a myriad of activities designed to promote the Guild’s mission: the furtherance of art and art education in Charleston.

“Our first job is to enhance community appreciation of art,” says Ron Gibb, the Guild’s president.“Art is for everyone. The larger we can become, the more people we can reach.”

The Charleston Artist Guild was founded in 1953 with seven artists.Today, the Guild boasts a healthy membership of 500 people and counting. It holds multiple workshops or practicing artists and lectures for art collectors, and performs community outreach to serve the needs of the greater society through art.
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Photography by Eero Heino

In the streets of Charleston, you may find one of the city’s best-kept secrets, an unusual artist with a unique style and technique. Referring to himself as DAB, this artist accurately captures his subjects and their proportions using only his eyes, brushes and paints—and without ever drawing a preliminary outline. In fact, unlike many other artists, he makes a point of not relying on image projections and tracing tools.

DAB has, in fact, perfected a technique all his own—a technique that takes advantage of of the way light refracts through his dense “mesh” of oil paint to create vibrant colors. Trademarked as the Dabistic Technique, it’s an approach to painting that he hopes will be adopted and taught in accredited art schools as Dabism. For his current Dock Street project, he is using a “thick over lean” technique that involves gradually adding increasingly denser layers of paint to his canvas, then applying additional layers of glazing. While DAB is meticulous and dedicated to his technique, he’s also well versed in the styles of the world’s greatest artists.
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By Scott D. Elingburg | Photography Courtesy Coleman Gallery

The American worker is, once again, the subject of intense political conversation.

More often than not, the American worker is mentioned in the same breath as words like recession, downsizing and economic crisis. But in 2005, long before the word “recession” was on anyone’s lips,watercolor artist Mary Whyte began a project that took three and half years to complete and holds stark relevance for our time: the painting of men and women in vanishing blue-collar professions in the rural South.

What began as a routine portrait painting turned into something much more. “In 2005 I was commissioned to do a portrait of a banker in Greenville, SC. And that morning, the newspaper headline was that one of the local mills was shutting down and several hundred people would be out of a job,”
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By Warren Cobb

The walls of the Spencer Galleries are covered with artwork in every medium. From watercolors to oils and acrylics, the galleries are a riot of color, and the works on the wall reflect the diversity of the galleries’ talented stable of artists.

Recently this rainbow of artistic expression has spilled over into a new wing. Owners Catherine and Jerry Spencer recently opened an addition to their Broad Street galleries, taking over the building next door and adding more square footage and wall space.

This is Spencer’s second expansion in 10 years.The original gallery is still located on Gallery Row at 55 Broad Street, while Gallery II, their initial expansion, is just two doors down the street, at 57 Broad.The newest storefront, at 57 1/2 Broad Street, connects with Gallery II.
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By Jason A. Zwiker

For Johannes Kepler, there was music in the motion of the heavens. Four hundred years ago, in a time of extreme political and social upheaval, he quietly gazed through a telescope, sketched polygons, and analyzed harmonic proportions. Did he hear music in his mind as he worked through the math? We do know this: he not only changed the way we saw the sky, he changed the way we saw science itself. In that long ago time, it was a thinker who ended up changing the path of history, but not with an army… with an idea.

The concept of changing the world with an idea has long inspired composer Philip
Glass. In honor of his 75th birthday and long history with Spoleto, the first fully staged U.S. production of his opera Kepler, which transports audiences into the life and longings of the 17th-century astronomer, will be a major highlight of the 2012 season. Kepler is directed by Sam Helfrich, with John Kennedy conducting the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.
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By Jennifer Bray | Photography by Holger Obenaus

A temple of treasures glitter from a gallery sandwiched along 438 King Street. Peering through the windows, rainbows of richly colored paintings glow like lamps. A Clydesdale-sized horse, crafted from wood, looks ready to gallop through the plate glass.

Welcome to the Michael Mitchell Gallery. Serene seascapes, provocative portraits and funky furniture bloom and brighten the 3,000-square-foot space. Also blossoming here are plans for this year’s 2012 Art for Charity event.The month-long event raises money for non-profits. For a $10 suggested donation, people can attend a cocktail party at the gallery and purchase works of art.A percentage of the money goes to one of six Charleston charities.

“I picked these six charities so that none were competing, I wanted to hit different demographics,” explains Michael Mitchell. He’s the director of Michael Mitchell Interiors and founder of Art for Charity.
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