Opening Exhibition for Arnold Art Gallery will feature paintings and drawings by local artist Cathie Tyler. Tyler received degrees (BA, MFA) from the University of North Texas in Denton. She taught art at Paris Junior College full-time and administered the Fine Arts Departments before retiring and moving to Mason.

The artist’s paintings and drawings have been in invitational, juried competitions and solo exhibitions throughout Texas and many other states, and are in numerous private, corporate and educational collections. A list of her recent exhibitions and images of work can be seen on-line at cathietyler.net.

In Mason, the artist is restoring a mid-twentieth century hill top ranch house that over-looks the distant hills in the day and the streetlights of Mason at night. She has also created a spacious, light filled studio that will eventually have room for art classes. She says that the light and feel of the air reminds her of her early years in Colorado.

As a third generation artist, Cathie Tyler has always had painting in her life. Her grandmother, Lulu McLean, was an active landscape painter in Colorado Springs from the 1930s through the early 50s. Lillian Tyler, the artist’s mother, learned the rudiments of oil painting from Lulu as a young woman while her husband was overseas, and continued to paint after the family moved to El Paso and then later to Paris, Texas. Lillian spent the last twenty years of her life working on a series of paintings based on verses from Revelations.

In addition to the family tradition of painting, the natural environment has been a second background for Tyler’s life and work. Over the years, the mountains and plains of Colorado, the desert and mountains of El Paso, the prairie around Denton, Texas and the rolling hills, fields and hard wood forests of Paris, Texas have served as inspiration for her drawings, paintings and ceramics. Her current series, Water’s Edge, includes drawings and paintings based on close-cropped, intimate images of plants against a continually changing sky and the lush vegetation that were cast as reflections on surfaces of water.

Tyler painted in acrylics for many years but for the last ten years she has continued the family tradition of painting in oils. Drawing, primarily in graphite, watercolor and/or ink, is the basic link between the different series of her paintings. The landscape of Mason has expanded her subject matter from the close-up focus and intimacy of the Paris Water’s Edge paintings to include the distant horizon and the different patterns of light that fall across the hills.

Everyone is invited to the opening exhibition at the Arnold Art Gallery will open during the Mason Art Walk, Friday November 2 from 5 - 8. The exhibit will remain on view through December 5th.