Painting By VGCC Art Student Chosen For Display In Raleigh
A watercolor landscape by a student in personal enrichment art classes at Vance-Granville Community College has been chosen to hang in the offices of the North Carolina Community College System in Raleigh throughout 2003.
Laurie Stephens of Oxford painted “Peaceful Pastures” while a member of Lelia Brigham’s Continuing Education art class at VGCC. President Martin Lancaster of the state Community College System chose Stephens’ painting, along with other pieces of art and crafts created by students, faculty and staff of the state’s 59 community colleges to decorate the halls and public rooms of the Caswell Building this year.
A Charlotte native, Stephens said she has been painting more than 25 years, since she was in junior high school. She said she always liked to draw and first took art classes for children at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. Since moving to Oxford in 1983, she has taken classes with Brigham at VGCC, as well as portrait painting classes with Leslie Johnson at the college.
“I work predominantly in water colors and acrylics,” Stephens said. “I prefer to paint landscapes, pastoral scenes and gardens.”
Don’t look to identify the barn and horses in Peaceful Pastures as a scene in Granville or a surrounding county. Stephens said it is a composite of scenes she has witnessed.
Stephens enters her paintings in two Kerr Lake Art Society shows each year, and she has received a second- and third-place ribbon and several honorable mentions. She has also sold several of her paintings but says, “Painting is primarily a hobby for me.”
Laurie Stephens earned an associate’s degree in advertising from Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte and currently works at Coble Printing Co. in Oxford.
In the photo above, LaurieStephens of Oxford displays her watercolor, “Peaceful Pastures,” which will be on display in the Caswell Building in Raleigh, headquarters of the North Carolina Community College System, throughout 2003. Stephens takes art in Continuing Education classes at Vance-Granville Community College.
