”Fall Fun” by Connie Wininger, who is the featured artist at the Southside Art League in June. Wininger’s paintings will be on display through June 30.
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With soft, pleading eyes, the good dog stares at the viewer — so lifelike you wish you could reach out and scratch behind her ears.
The bubbling exuberance of a happy child is captured in vibrant color on another canvas. Father and daughter wade carefully into the foaming waves in a third painting.
Connie Wininger has found that colors help express the best of her work.
“I was always drawn to work like Vincent Van Gogh’s, and people who worked along those lines. I like to have a mood and feeling in my artwork, and you need to use colors to do that,” she said.
Through colorful expression, Wininger tries to capture the joy of the world around her. Her vibrant paintings of people, animals and places take over the Southside Art League’s Off Broadway Gallery throughout the month of June.
Wininger hopes that those who see her work sparks a recollection from their own lives.
“Maybe they’ll get a feeling or a memory that they can relate to connected to it,” she said. “I like for them to make a personal connection.”
Wininger has grown up in creative spaces. She was immersed in art as a child, took courses through high school and then went to Franklin College to study art education. After graduation, she taught art at Perry Meridian High School and Perry Meridian Middle School, in addition to working as a librarian at Glenns Valley Elementary School.
While teaching and raising her two children, Wininger didn’t have time to explore her own art. But following her retirement, she decided to get back to painting and drawing.
“It brings me a real peace. When I started painting again, I had forgotten how good it made me feel,” she said. “I feel very at peace and it brings me a lot of satisfaction to do it.”
In the past few years, she has shown her work in local art shows at the Greenwood Public Library, Southside Art League and the Art Sanctuary in Martinsville. Her time at the Art Sanctuary inspired this solo exhibition in Greenwood.
Wininger started going to an open painting class at the Art Sanctuary, where she worked with artist Nancy Maxwell to rekindle her creative spirit.
“We’d come in and work for a few hours, and she’d critique our things. She asked if I showed my work, and I said not really, and she suggested I start,” Wininger said.
As a member of the Southside Art League, she inquired about having an exhibition of her own. The gallery had openings in its exhibition schedule, and she signed up.
The show will be an opportunity to showcase her approach to painting. Wininger looks for subjects that inspire her, sometimes people, sometimes animals and sometimes everyday scenes that she encounters.
She prefers to not paint entirely realistically, instead opting for saturated colors that radiate emotion.
“I tend to choose colors for the expressive purpose. I like very expressive artwork, but also to see images in it; it’s not abstract,” she said.
The exhibition is a blend of work that she’s completed, mostly over the past two years. Her paintings will be on display through June 30. A public reception is scheduled for 3 to 5 p.m. June 5.
