Portrait

A life-size portrait of a stunning woman, an image of an elderly man and paintings of an Asian warrior in full regalia are among the varying stages of life portrayed in the gallery at Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis. The Maryland Society of Portrait Painters has filled the Willow Gallery this spring with more than 70 expressions that its members have captured in multiple media The show, which is free and open daily during park hours, highlights the work of the society's members, some still honing their art and others well established.

Linda Furiate's saga began when she noticed her head drifting to the right. The odd and uncomfortable sensation began shortly after a car accident whose date -- Nov. 13, 1995 -- is forever etched in her memory. The awkward positioning of her head led to her losing her balance and running into walls since she couldn't look forward as she walked. Soon she was regularly experiencing jerky movements and abnormal posturing that made people stare and steer clear. Cervical dystonia, a painful and incurable condition triggered by the trauma of her accident and marked by contracting of the neck muscles, was Furiate's diagnosis -- a fate that would eventually derail a number of her professional and personal relationships.

Laura Neuman remembers exactly what she was wearing the night she was raped -- down to the pinstripes on her pajamas. She remembers the night so vividly that when she talks about it there is a visceral quality to the story. It happened when she was 18. She had come home late from waitressing to an empty apartment; she remembers falling asleep, only to be awakened with a pillow over her head, and a gun aimed at her right temple. On that night, Neuman was raped by a stranger, a man who took away her innocence and instilled in her a lifelong fear of the night.

Growing up in a Baltimore row house, Elaine Northrop had a happy, if somewhat unconventional, childhood. Her father was a dreamer and a gambler, recalls Northrop, who grew up to build one of the most successful real estate companies in Howard County from the ground up. Her mother was the family's breadwinner and dealt with their money woes, but her father was an eternal optimist who taught her to believe in herself. At age 23, such life lessons would be called into play when she agreed to marry her first husband on their second date.

World-class track athlete Tatyana McFadden is not a flashy person. Soft-spoken with a thin face, dark brown eyes and a deceptively muscular frame, she is not the type to speak of her accomplishments without some prompting. But when she does talk about her accolades, she lets people know that success hasn't come easy. “I've worked hard for it,” says the Clarksville resident, who is paraplegic. Just shy of her 23rd birthday, McFadden has an impressive résumé. A graduate of Atholton High School, she holds U.S. records in the 100-meter, 200-meter, 400-meter, 800-meter and 1,500-meter races.

Two years later, George Huguely is barely recognizable from either his mug shot or his lacrosse team photo. In the way that photos like that "read," based on what we all thought we knew, in the former he looked sullen, in the latter he looked smug. Huguely enters the Charlottesville Circuit Courthouse these days noticeably lighter, at least physically, but with sunken cheeks and heavy eyes. It could just be that, often, he seems to be looking down or away, perhaps to avoid the apparent glares from Lexie Love, sitting in the first row of the courtroom where he is standing trial on charges that he killed her sister Yeardley.

Not long after 9/11, playwright and actress Rohina Malik attended her best friend's wedding wearing a hijab. "There was an American wedding going on in the same place as our Pakistani wedding," Malik said. "A guest from the American wedding saw me and had a really strong response to my veil. It got really ugly very fast. I knew afterward that I wanted to write about it. " What Malik ended up writing was "Unveiled," a provocative one-woman play that she will perform at Theatre Project . She portrays five Muslim women living in the West, post-9/11.

If Oprah Winfrey singles out just 13 items as her "favorite things" of 2011, and one of them is yours, it's safe to assume you're going to quickly become very — very — popular. So now is probably not the best time to try to reach Sherry Kendall. Ever since Winfrey raved about Kendall's Christmas ornaments featuring hand-painted pet portraits in December's O, the Oprah Magazine, visits to the Woodbine artist's website have spiked, orders are piling up and the glass balls have appeared on two national TV shows.

It may not be part of Artscape, but it's still art, says Joe Giordano, who spent Friday morning hanging 12-foot-tall provocative photographs of nude and clothed models from buildings along North Avenue. "I doubt that Baltimore has ever seen pictures displayed this big," said Giordano, who started his morning hanging two photographs from the roof of the Load of Fun studio at 120 W. North Ave. Giordano said he wanted to get in the spirit of Artscape, which will be going on all weekend just south of where his photographs were being hung.

By some accounts, Randy Scott DiGennaro was a terrific neighbor — the type who would shovel snow and cut grass for the elderly, and run errands for the sick. But others felt intimidated by the man who sat guard on his front porch. Baltimore County authorities said the tension on Fairgreen Road in Dundalk erupted Friday night in an argument over a parking space and ended with gunfire. In the aftermath, the 55-year-old DiGennaro has been charged with attempted murder and a man who lived nearby remains critically injured with bullet wounds to his face and chest.