Tunbridge couple displays art at Gifford

RANDOLPH 6/12/07 - Tunbridge artists and married couple George Lawrence and Jacquelyn JiMoi’s artwork will be on display in the Gifford Medical Center Gallery from July 4 through Aug. 29.

JiMoi is a fiber artist who taught basketry throughout Vermont, New Hampshire and Florida for 20 years, sold her baskets at shops and galleries in 25 states, and who more recently began working in pastels.

“My pastels express my love for merging ‘nature-scapes,’ such as where the ocean meets the shore, old fences and lit backgrounds, and river and sky,” JiMoi says. “I feel these ‘nature-scapes’ somehow translate emotional experience through color.”

Lawrence is an experienced painter. A graduate of the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Fla., he has taught watercolor courses in Vermont and even in France. His watercolors have been shown throughout central Vermont, in North Carolina and Florida since 1960 and have been reproduced in publications such as Yankee Magazine.

“In any painting, the magic is in the spirit, the energy and the emotional impact of the elements, which not only give vibrancy and life to the form, but in doing so create a link between the tangible and the spiritual,” Lawrence says. “This then is my goal – to render the tangible with the hope that it will trigger the same emotional response in the viewer that it has for me.”

Together for 27 years and married in 1997, Lawrence and JiMoi first embarked on a group show just last year. In November, JiMoi showed her fiber art and Lawrence his paintings on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. In December, the couple’s work was shown in Vermont at the Tunbridge Library.

“Our desire to do a show at Gifford is in response to our desire to give back to Gifford,” the couple says. “We both have benefited from Gifford’s services over the years.”

The Gifford Gallery is just inside the hospital’s main entrance (and to the left) at 44 S. Main St., Randolph. The showing is free. Call (802) 728-7000 for more information.