Exploring Color at Alliance Art Gallery

Exploring Color by Pat Kerns

St. Louis photographer Bruce Toulmin is Alliance Gallery’s guest artist for the month of April. After years of taking only black and white film photos, his family gifted him a Nikon digital camera when he was in his 60’s. This led to him exploring the options available to him to manipulate his images. Six months later he applied for the Shaw Art Fair and was accepted. This was just the beginning and he has done art fairs in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Bloomington along with other St. Louis art fairs.

With no training and using only free digital editing apps, his photos are what he calls digital folk art. He creates his artistic photographs in a variety of categories including musicians, sports (especially St. Louis teams) and portraits. He has a variety of framed as well as matted works.

Bruce reflects that “It has been a great joy to find this a bit later in life although finding it when I was 39 would have been great too.”

April will also spotlight the collaboration of Alliance artists Peggy Burchard-Ballard, Libby Campbell and Patricia Garey. They will be presenting new creations based on colors selected from the watercolor paints manufactured by Peggy. Patricia’s watercolor paintings inspired the dyed, spun and available in the yarns and weavings of Libby. Patricia’s paintings have a concentration of florals. Libby’s weavings are an exploration of woven patterns of geometric shapes like monk’s belt and summer and winter.

As these four artists present their work exploring color, visitors are encouraged to do their own exploration by taking a Color Walk. They may select a printed color card and then look for that color as they move throughout the gallery and then continue the Color Walk up and down Main Street.

An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 12, 2025 from 4:00 until 7:00. This event is free and open to the public.