Blue Moon Gallery launches fall season with paintings, pastels and monoprints

GRAYSLAKE – The Blue Moon Gallery in Grayslake is launching its fall season with an event from 6 to 9 p.m. Sept. 24.

New guest artists, live music and a pop-up show will be featured. The opening reception will present two new exhibitions: “Creatures Great and Small,” featuring mixed media paintings by Kittie Yohe of Northbrook, and pastel paintings and monoprints by Mark Price of Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Both are award-winning artists.

Mixed media artist Colleen Steenhagen of Kenosha, Wisconsin, continues her exhibition of cyanotype photography, and new works from the gallery’s collective artists – Tony Armendariz, Mike Bellefeuille, Leisa Corbett, Juli Janovicz and John Kirkpatrick Jr. – will be on display.

A one-night-only pop-up show will be presented by Frank Fitzgerald of Lindenhurst. Guitarist Tom Clippert of the Oakton College Guitar Ensemble will be the gallery’s musical guest.

The gallery also will be open from 1 to 4 p.m. Sept. 25.

Yohe’s mixed media paintings are a response to her environment, her life experiences, the beauty of the natural world and the ideas and emotions within her, according to a news release.

In recent years she has employed more experimental techniques and approaches in her artwork. Using Yupo, a synthetic Japanese paper, Yohe applies airbrush paints, inks, watercolors and other materials using playful techniques and applications to achieve unique effects.

Price transforms his pastels from imagination to reality by using primitive tools introduced centuries ago coupled with new techniques learned through his experiences. From a distance his pastel paintings, presented on Thai gossamer paper, appear as a landscape or figure, but as viewers get closer, the piece often looks abstract and features an engaging pixelated or cube-like pattern.

Fitzgerald’s pop-up show will feature oil and acrylic paintings that have at their center a relationship to the Chicago suburbs. Each work encompasses a gestural and tactile response to Fitzgerald’s experience as an artist and an art educator in the Midwest suburban landscape.

Patrons are invited to the opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Sept. 24 to visit the gallery, meet the artists, enjoy live music and experience the arts. The event is free and open to the public.

The gallery is at 18620 Belvidere Road in Grayslake.

For more information, call Director Kendra Kett at 224-388-7948 or visit www.thebluemoongallery.com