Oct. 28 – Dec. 7, 2011
Fine Art Gallery at SCF Bradenton, 5840 26th St. West, building 11 North
State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota (SCF) will display work by artist Joyce Ely-Walker in an opening reception from 6-8 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 28, in the Fine Art Gallery at SCF Bradenton, 5840 26th St. West, building 11 North.
Selected by internationally know artist Craig Rubadoux, the exhibition, “Departures,” features Ely-Walker’s drawings and paintings tat empathize the feeting nature of life including works from her series Wind Shift, Mangrove, Silent Mountain, Nest, Rainforest, and Train.
Ely-Walker, who taught at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School since 1985, has exhibited work in the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, Clayton Galleries and Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art.
She has earned the Surdan Art Teacher’s Fellowship, Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Fellowship, Teacher’s Institute for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Julia and David White Artist Colony Fellowship.
Ely-Walker has a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from the Florida State University.
Exhibit dates are Oct. 28-Dec. 7. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. For more information, call Joe Loccisano, gallery manager, at 941.752.5225. Maps and directions are online at scf.edu/maps.

Artist’s Statement
Painting in the landscape has allowed me to combine two of my passions— nature and travel. I work on location and try to capture a unique sense of place wherever I go.
Place means an area where I have spent time and been moved enough to paint several times over. I absorb the image, space, scent and light. Like Cezanne, I tend to go to a place many times to walk, explore, and paint – building layers of association. These places become a part of me and the paintings, my expressions.
These works are selections from bodies of work done over the past ten years at the Julia and David White Artists’ Colony in Costa Rica, the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Withlacoochee River, and the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York. Also included are images from a train while traveling across North Dakota, Montana, and Washington.