Everything Nac

The exhibition “Vision & Substance: The Art of John Cobb” will close with a reception beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 10, in The Cole Art Center @ The Old Opera House in downtown Nacogdoches.

The exhibition, which is a feature of the Stephen F. Austin State University College of Fine Arts’ 2014-2015 University Series, has been showing in Ledbetter Gallery in Cole Art Center since opening on Oct. 25.

At the closing, Dr. John Handley, director of galleries at SFA, will conduct an interview with Cobb at 4:30 p.m. Additionally, the first catalog ever produced on this artist will be available for purchase in the new Cole Art Center bookstore. The catalog features insightful essays written by Handley and Dr. David Lewis, professor of art history in the SFA School of Art.

For more than 30 years, Cobb has been working on a series of egg tempera and gold leaf paintings for a chapel series. At present, the majority of the paintings are displayed in a temporary free-standing chapel that viewers can enter.

In the catalog, Handley writes that Cobb’s vision is “the creation of a chapel filled with glistening egg-tempera and gold leaf paintings, executed in the methods of the old masters, depicting his rendition of modern day saints in Biblical semblance.”

The exhibition was supported by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden. It was sponsored in part by the SFA Friends of the Visual Arts and the Nacogdoches Junior Forum.

All exhibitions and gallery lectures are free.

For additional information about this exhibition and others presented by the SFA art galleries, visit www.art.sfasu.edu/ or call (936) 468-1131.