Gallery

The Harford County Cultural Arts Board has an exhibit by Harford County artist Lin McLain is on display at the Council Gallery, 212 S. Bond St., Bel Air. The exhibit features oil paintings with the focus on scenes from nature. The show, which runs through March, is free and open to the public from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. McLain's work is inspired by nature and the desire to "capture the beauty and amazing wonders of it all," according to a cultural arts board press release.

Ephrem Kouakou prefers to work while the world sleeps. The artist says that in the dead of night, absent the sound of any human voice or music, he can best hear the "spirits" talking. He says he's been hearing the spirits steer his brush since he started painting as a boy in Ivory Coast - a fact that alarmed the elders, who apparently thought he was practicing witchcraft. Now 50, the artist left home decades ago, but the inner voices and traditions born there traveled with him from West Africa to Algeria to France to Washington to Baltimore, where he lives now. Folkloric images that have sprung from these voices - vividly colored masks and magical animals, lush foliage, big-eyed human figures staring straight at you in dreamy landscapes - are on display in a new exhibition at the Still Life Gallery on Main Street in the historic section of Ellicott City.

Words and images go together quite harmoniously in the exhibit "Poets and Painters" at the Artists' Gallery in Columbia. Its participating writers and artists have come up with pairings that prompt one to think about various ways in which to creatively describe the world around us. Those artistic forms of expression actually go beyond painting. Some of the exhibiting artists are photographers. Their straightforward depictions encourage the paired poets to come up with narratives that comment on what's before our eyes.

Inline photo galleries

With its bell tower, arched windows and handsome red-brick facade, the structure at 1427 Light St. looks like what it once was — an elementary school. Nothing about the 1890 building suggests that for the past 33 years, School 33 has been one of Baltimore's premier showcases for contemporary local art. That's about to change, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation that will help enhance the reputation of the nonprofit, city-run arts group with its neighbors, throughout the city and nationwide.

The newspaper ad promised Boston Terrier puppies and there they were, gamboling about an Annapolis breeder's kitchen, five or six of them, squirmy, sweet and wild. Tom Boeke knew which one it would be after only a minute. The one that sashayed right over, sat down and gave him some heart-melting puppy eye. "You know how you just know sometimes?" says Boeke who a few days later fixed a red bow onto the pup's collar thinking he was giving his friend Michael Muller a dog for Christmas.

Appropriately rising from punk graves in late October, Baltimore quintet Sick Weapons -- which disbanded after a Golden West Café performance in late December 2010 -- has reunited, and will finally release its debut album, "Birthday Gift," early next month. The album will come out as a joint release from two Baltimore labels, Reptilian Records and the formerly defunct McCarthyism Records (run by Josh Sisk , a frequent photographer for The Baltimore Sun). The maroon-vinyl record will first be available at Day 1 of Unregistered Nurse Booking's U+Nfest at Metro Gallery on Nov. 9, which Sick Weapons will headline.

The National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition, “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets,” uses portraiture, biography and verse to explore the people who created a distinctive, American voice. Walt Whitman's free verse in "Leaves of Grass," (1855), was a shocking departure from literary tradition, the museum notes -- both for its form and for the inclusion of topics that described ordinary life. (That mirrors the equally shocking mid-century shift to realism by painters such as Courbet in France.)

Drive west on Mile Lane in Allegany County, then crest the ridge in the road, and all of a sudden, the big barn on Leaning Pine Farm bursts out of the surrounding countryside like a display of fireworks. Eight-sided stars wheel exuberantly against the weathered boards in hues reflecting the natural surroundings: water blue and grass green, sunset orange and the brown of turned furrows. Passing motorists honk or slow down. A few get out to chat with artist Bill Dunlap, who is about a third of the way through a project to paint a large-scale mural on at least one barn in each of the state's 23 counties.

When he wanted to get the attention of his scuba class, Ed Kidera would bang on a full air tank that he used for instruction. His students would instantly redirect their eyes toward him, drawn back to reality by the beautiful tone emanating from the heavy steel cylinder. The tank's special sound wasn't lost on Kidera, either, as he immediately recognized its potential as kinetic art. That moment of serendipity more than 20 years ago changed the direction of his life. Kidera, who has a master's degree in ocean engineering and was a self-employed consultant at the time he was giving scuba lessons part time, began experimenting with making bells from various types of tanks shortly after his chance discovery.