For her first featured show at the gallery, Deborah Conn chose works that explore the human form, including portraits and figures. "I like the stories people tell without saying a word," she explains, "with only a gesture or a fleeting facial expression."

Deborah paints both from life and from photographs, primarily using transparent watercolor but working in gouache, collage, and acrylics as well. In any medium, she seeks to capture the interplay of light and shadow on her figures. She has been a member of the Loft Gallery since September 2009, and is an exhibiting artist at Stifel & Capra in Falls Church. Many of her paintings are displayed on her website, www.deborahconn.com.

She is a signature member of the Potomac Valley Watercolorists and the Baltimore Watercolor Society and an artist member of the Virginia Watercolor Society, and she belongs to a number of local arts organizations.

Surfer Girls

Carol Ann

Painter Lisa Neher believes the truest constant in our lives is motion. Time, Space, and Life all flow from one place or time to another. Even our beautiful Planet Earth spins on its axis and circles the Sun, which in turn rides an outer spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy as we all make our way together through the Universe. In space and time, roads link us physically from one place to another. Our destinations and starting points bracket our travels. And our lives - well, we incorporate the world around us. It nourishes us, and we in turn affect it with our actions.

How can a static, two-dimensional art form suggest so much motion and life? This is the question Lisa tries to answer with her expressionist, yet representational paintings. Full of action, layered with color and movement, she most often works on large canvases, but, as can be seen in her show From Here to There, at The Loft Gallery, she has managed to retain that liveliness of gesture on her small canvases, and her newest works on paper.

Lisa Neher has had a studio in the Jackson Art Center in Georgetown for more than a decade, and shows works throughout the Washington area. She has a large following on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and in the Hampton Roads area, where her paintings of oceans and beaches are well-known. Lisa works from photographs she takes on her travels and locally. "I am obviously not a photographer, but it is my worst photographs that seem to make for the best paintings."

Artists Susan Lawrence Norman and Gwen Harrison Lockhart have collaborated to pair two-dimensional paintings with similar three-dimensional pieces of sculpture in “Duets Too.” Both artists tend to portray their subjects, whether mothers and children, or dancers and musicians, in a romantic light.

Susan Lawrence Norman
Susan Norman is delighted to be exhibiting her art and participating with the other Loft artists. In the past, she was a member of The Occoquan Gallery and has shown her work in large juried art shows and one-artist shows. For the past eight years, Norman's concentration has been in the area of commissioned portrait work. She continues to teach oil-painting art classes weekly for adults, and in the past she taught children.

Norman paints romantic paintings. Her art reflects what the best part of life can be -- a couple in love, a mother with her child, a family at rest. Norman's mentors have taught her the discipline of art and have shared the tools she needs to bring an unquenchable romantic soul to canvas. Her experience has shown that a germ of talent and desire to paint a pretty picture does not an artist make. "To become an artist, one must dedicate time, energy, heart and mind to the art."
Norman is an Impressionist; her medium is oil. Her art uses light, color and brushwork to convey natural harmony and strives not to be judgmental, moralistic or arrogant. Rather, Norman tries to merge form and color to suggest the beauty of life itself.

Gwen Harrison Lockhart
Artist Gwen Harrison Lockhart strongly believes that sculpture is about capturing the movement and gesture, as well as the emotion of the moment.

She regularly exhibits her sculpture at The Loft Gallery in Occoquan and in her studio at The Loft Art Center. In addition, Lockhart shows regularly at The Art League in Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory and at the Lorton Workhouse Art Center, as well as the new Springfield Gallery, Belnavis. She has been accepted into many juried shows and selected for special one-artist shows throughout the metro area (Tysons Corner and downtown Washington), and in 2008, an out-of-state show in Aiken, South Carolina.

Lockhart served as board president of the The Art League at the Torpedo Factory in 2006 and in various other capacities since 1999. She was also the proud recipient of Alexandria’s 2006 Alex Award for “Excellence in Service to the Arts.”

In 2010, she joined fellow sculptor Tony Di Francesco in co-founding Sculptors-Network, which successfully sponsored a three-day sculpture workshop at Occoquan’s Rockledge Mansion featuring master sculptor Edward Eyth as instructor. Other workshops are anticipated.

As a sculptor, one of Lockhart's greatest pleasures is to constantly rotate the piece on which she is working so it can be fine-tuned from all angles. The varying effects of light and the formation of shadows as the piece is turned must be constantly evaluated and adjusted. Lockhart sculpts in clay, plastilene or wax and captures both expression and likeness whether doing animals, heads/busts, or full figurative pieces. Many of her sculptures, including commission pieces, have been molded and cast in bronze. All of her bronzes are cast using the lost wax process.

The Loft Gallery, 313 Mill Street, Occoquan, Virginia, welcomes everyone to see “Duets Too” and browse through the ever-changing exhibits of original fine art. The Gallery’s 21 Northern Virginia artists work in many media, including acrylics, alkyds, oils, pastels, photography, sculpture, monoprints, watercolors, and silk fiberworks.