Going from the big picture to sandwiching in art
When Colleen Algeo was asked to take over eight years ago as the creative director of Peter Becker Community’s annual flower show, she had a lot of the right stuff, but no experience in one big part of the job.
“I was into gardening. I could take pictures. I could hold my own drawing, but I wasn’t a trained artist,” Algeo said. “The first day, I was up on the scaffolding painting a mural and I had no idea how I got up there.”
Since then, she’s gotten a lot more training and experience.
A painting of a large multi-layered peanut butter and jelly sandwich she did while taking an oil painting course at Montgomery County Community College won an Award of Distinction in the college’s spring art show this year and has been purchased for the school’s permanent collection.
That one’s not part of the display of Algeo’s artworks on exhibit during August at Generations of Indian Valley in Souderton, but another smaller drawing of a similar peanut butter jelly sandwich Algeo made for her grown daughter one day when the daughter stopped in between working two part-time jobs and asked for something to take along for lunch is there.
It’s called “The Best Mom Ever,” and Algeo remembers making the sandwich, then bagging it up and giving it to her daughter who was surprised by what she found when she went to eat it.
“I wasn’t the kind of mom that ever made their lunch, so she gets there and she says, ‘oh my gosh, it was oozing everywhere,’ and she’s like, ‘this is the best lunch ever,’” Algeo said.
The paintings at Generations have all been done in the past few years and represent a change in size from Algeo’s work for the flower show or as a board member and volunteer at DCP Theatre in Salford Township.
“I paint giant sets that all get painted over and they only have to last five days. I do giant flower shows with these giant murals,” she said, “so this is really different for me.”
One group of pictures Algeo jokingly refers to as her “dark period” shows the darkness outside her more than 150-year-old Harleysville farmhouse, including fireflies over a creek that appear similar to fireworks.
“The quieter softer places in life sometimes are way more exciting,” Algeo said.
Algeo, a longtime photographer, used a long exposure to photograph the fireflies, then recreated that scene in the painting.
“I found that the fireflies actually fly in all these formations,” she said. “They’re all following each other, like going someplace, so I decided to paint that. You really can’t see that in a photograph.”
Another group of pictures shows scenes from yearly vacations at the beach.
“We go to the Outer Banks for a week and we do a whole week pretty much of nothing,” Algeo said. “So when I’m down there, I try to do a painting a day. I don’t usually achieve that, but I accumulated all these and then I take a bunch of pic- tures and I bring them back and I paint them, too.”
Amy Stover, program director at Generations, said the exhibit was set up after she saw an earlier display of Algeo’s art at Peter Becker Community.
“I just fell in love with it,” Stover said.
“Quiet Creek,” one of Algeo’s paintings in the display, was particularly of interest to one of the Generations volunteers, Stover said.
“She said, ‘I felt so calm when I looked at it,’” Stover said.
A new railing system to display art was installed earlier this year at Generations and helps with the exhibits, she said.
“We do a different artist every month and I’ve been trying to get new artists in,” Stover said.
Some of the paintings are completed in one afternoon, Algeo said, but many aren’t done in one shot.
“I paint really intuitively in the beginning,” Algeo said. “Then I leave it and I come back and put the finishing touches on it.”
Print copies of the multi-layered peanut butter and jelly sandwich painting Montgomery County Community College purchased aren’t yet available, but when those prints are completed, Algeo said, she’s thinking of selling a glass of milk along with those.
It’s also given her another idea for upcoming paintings.
“My new planned series is basically my favorite sandwiches with a bite out of them,” Algeo said.
Tomato sandwiches and grilled cheese sandwiches are two examples of having the perfect ingredients to be part of the series, she said.
“They’re textural, they’re comforting,” Algeo said, “and they’re messy.”