- April 26, 2024
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Owner of Gallerie Elan, Gregory Graham Grant, with his autobiographical painting for the "It's All About the Light" exhibit. Photo courtesy of Yvonne Collins
An overview of part of the exhibit. Photo courtesy of Yvonne Collins
Thirteen of the paintings for the "It's All About the Light" exhibit. Photo courtesy of Yvonne Collins
LC and Tommy Tobey's section of stained and fused glass featured in the gallery. Photo courtesy of Yvonne Collins
Roderick Neswick with one of his sculptures featured in Gallerie Elan. Photo courtesy of Yvonne Collins
Galerie Elan’s new juried exhibit for March, "It’s All About the Light," invites viewers to experience light from new perspectives.
“That’s the joy of the show,” gallery owner Gregory Graham Grant said. “We have that eclectic mix and the interpret development, which means every person that comes in our front door is going to have a different take on the way the art is presented and that’s the beauty of art.”
Over 65 artists are featured in the exhibit, 16 of them being Ormond Beach residents.
From paintings to jewelry, sculptures and stained glass, the exhibit showcases a variety of mediums.
Grant included two of his recent paintings in the exhibit. His first painting featured is called “Yoneyama” and depicts a lion in South Africa bathing in the afternoon light. It's the only piece in the exhibit that utilizes wildlife to represent an element of life.
His second painting in the exhibit is an autobiographical piece — a self-portrait in an hourglass, surrounded by items that represent pieces of his life.
“It’s an homage to my wife, as defined by the things that are important to me which acts as a definition to my personal life,” Grant said.
Grant became an artist at a young age, which helped him pay his way through college. At 27, he had his first big breakthrough, painting a portrait of a former U.S. Secretary of Labor. He then continued in painting portraits for many years. He moved to Florida in 1986 and continued delivering congressional portraits for four years after that. He was also commissioned to paint the portrait of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, in Dubai before his death in 2004.
“I’m a classicist, and that’s what people look for when they want to leave behind a legacy such as a portrait," Grant said. "It needs to be the embodiment of who they are — of their essence."
He focuses now mainly on nature and wildlife.
Ormond Beach residents LC and Tommy Tobey have multiple pieces on show at Galerie Elan. The Tobeys have been married since 2009 and started their business together as artists, specializing in stained and fused glass. Before they were together, they were individual artists for many years, as LC Tobey studied under Robert Cooper who did restoration work for the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Society, and Tommy Tobey began doing stained glass in the early 1990s.
The two of them also have art pieces on display inside Ormond Beach City Hall, the Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens, and in the American Church in Paris, France, where they constructed a baptismal font out of broken pieces of glass with a cross in the center.
“It’s amazing to me that we have a piece in the American Church of Paris that could be there for hundreds of years, I hope,” Tommy Tobey said.
The Tobeys became members of Grant’s former gallery, Arts on Granada, in 2015 and followed him to Galerie Elan.
Ormond Beach artist Roderick Neswick is also featured in Galerie Elan and specializes in sculptures and jewelry carving. He started carving bars of soap at 5 years old with a plastic knife and began his career as an artist at 15.
His piece featured in the exhibit is titled “Moonlight Wind” and represents a new type of light as it shines only on the woman peering out of a castle window.
“Moonlight is so different from sunlight, it almost tingles your senses when you see it,” Neswick said. “I love the way the shadows play in moonlight and how it affects everything differently than sunlight does.”
"It's All About the Light" will run through March 29.
Galerie Elan, located at 230 S. Beach St., hosts new exhibits every month with new themes and artists, as well as offers classes to all ages enriching its role as a leader in a stimulating cultural society.
“The whole mantra behind my approach is cultural literacy,” Grant said. “That’s why we exist, this is not to be constructed as any type of entertainment because when you equate art with entertainment, then you have really depreciated the integrity of the sacred essence of art for those of us who are artists.”
