Published: October 01, 2009 09:15 pm      

Bev Walker featured artist as Highland Arts continues season with Sunday performance

Exhibit precedes performance by Cherish the Ladies

KEYSER, W.Va. — Bev Walker will be the featured artist as Highland Arts Unlimited continues its season Sunday at the Church-McKee Arts Center on the campus of Potomac State College of West Virginia University.

Cherish the Ladies will take the stage at 7:30 p.m. For the hour prior to the performance, patrons are invited to view Walker’s work.

Walker is an instructor of English, speech and art at Allegany College of Maryland and owns her own art business, Chameleon Studio. After 25 years of doing free-lance art and design, principally in portraiture and liturgical design, Walker returned to college in 1984 to earn her bachelor of fine arts degree in painting (1989) and master of arts degree in linguistics (1992).

She withdrew from painting and exhibiting for six years following graduation in order to focus on teaching. After 18 months as guest lecturer at Bangkok University, Bangkok, Thailand, and a brief stay in Oregon, Walker chose to make her home in one of her favorite places in the world, Cumberland.

Combining her interests in visual arts, communication and linguistics, she teaches a variety of courses in art, English and speech for ACM, PSC and Frostburg State University.

Although Walker has been active in doing commissioned design work and sculpture restoration in the area since 1995, she has only recently returned to exhibiting her artwork. Walker now enjoys exploring figurative subjects that have intense personal and spiritual meaning to her. She also keeps up the traditional discipline of drawing the human form, which she finds both boring and challenging.

This seriousness and intensity occasionally finds some relief in frankly unserious subjects such as adding blue cats to a figure drawing or in painting old furniture with take-offs of famous artists’ works.

Walker is a member of the Allegany Arts Council and served on the board of directors as gallery coordinator from 1996 to 1998. She is currently on the boards of the Cumberland Cultural Foundation and the Cumberland Theatre. She has also served as jurist for the Lobby for the Arts and the Rocky Gap Festival craft show.

Tickets prices are reduced for students. Children under 12 will be admitted free with a paying adult. This year’s HAU programs are funded in part by membership contributions, grants from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, the National Endowment for the Arts, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, and financial assistance from Potomac State College, the Mineral County Board of Education and corporate sponsors.