Abingdon, VA's Highland Festival inveils signature art

Abingdon, Virginia's Highlands Festival unveils "signature art"

When Elizabeth Johns was asked to create the “signature art” for Abingdon’s Virginia Highlands Festival 2000, she never dreamed she would put so much of herself into her work - literally!

(Click on photo to see larger image.)

Johns unveiled the artwork on Thursday, April 6, to an enthusiastic room full of Festival volunteers. Titled “Festival,” Elizabeth Johns calls the oil painting “a celebration of all the arts which have been central to my life.” It represents the deep connections that Johns and other Festival patrons feel for the annual event and this area. The brightly colored art will appear on all Festival literature as well as souvenir items.

The Highlands Festival will be July 29-August 13 this year in Abingdon.

Border of vignettes

In producing the painting, the award-winning Bristol, Tennessee artist says she strove for “simplicity for imagery, with those images representative of as many aspects of the Festival as possible.” To that end, she created a border of vignettes representing various elements of the Festival — from Arts & Crafts to Creative Writing Day to Performing Arts to Natural Resources.

Look closely. You’ll find the artist herself in one vignette representing the Festival’s Juried Art Show, a competition she has entered many times. The Antiques Market and Fiber Arts Events are cleverly combined in a vignette of an antique brass bed covered with a colorful quilt that Johns inherited from her grandmother. Fiber Arts also are represented by traditional quilt squares, which make up the four corners of the painting. Local History Events are represented by The Tavern, where Johns says she once lived many years ago.

The vignettes surround a family apparently enjoying the Festival activities. Look again to see a painting within a painting. Hint: the man is wearing a Festival T-shirt.

The painting has a brighter palette than Johns normally uses. “I wanted it to represent summer and fun as well as the arts,” she explains.

Narrative quality

Though this painting is drawn from real-life events and places, it is through her dream life, both sleeping and waking, that Johns taps into the images which she brings to life on canvas. Her work is primarily figurative, with strong narrative quality. When the images which appear to her, sometimes in dreams at night, but more often in a quiet or meditative moment in the day, are compelling enough, she attempts to capture them by setting them down on paper or canvas. “The fascination for me,” Johns explains, “is to pull images through from the unknown, to wonder about them, to sometimes understand their meanings later on, or sometimes not at all.”

Johns contends that images communicate in a different way than words, sometimes bypassing the naming and knowing part of the brain. Johns continues, “As much as I love stories and literature, stories are not always told in words. And the source of stories is not always in what is known. Ideas can come through from the unknown, from the mystery, if we leave a window open and allow it. If we are working only from the unknown, then images will come through from the unconscious, often telling us, in metaphor and poetry, things we need to know.”

Born in Marion, Virginia, Johns moved to Bristol, Tennessee at age five. She graduated from Emory & Henry College in 1966 with a degree in sociology. While at E&H, she studied drawing and painting under George Chavatel and later completed graduate work in painting and design at Teachers College at Columbia University. In the Pacific Northwest where she lived for nearly 20 years, her work was widely exhibited and she illustrated two children’s books. Since returning to Bristol, her work appears in many juried shows and solo shows.

Johns enjoys living in the mountains again. Her mother and stepfather live in Bristol, while her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren live in Burnsville, N.C. Johns is the Product Development Coordinator for APPALMADE, a program which assists local craftspeople in producing and marketing their crafts through People, Inc. of Southwest Virginia.

Information about the Virginia Highlands Festival, call the Abingdon Convention & Visitors Bureau at 800/435-3440 or 540/676-2282 or the Washington County Chamber of Commerce at 540/628-8141, or visit the web site: www.va-highlands-festival.org.