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5 Architects Display Artwork In Md. Exhibit

FREDERICK, Md. (AP) --

As an interior designer with a fine art background, Nancy Pascale knows the line she often walks between creative work and play. This line became the inspiration for the current exhibit she curated at Artique Underground in downtown Frederick.

"You have this job and you have this passion and they kind of fight each other," Pascale said recently, standing among work in the gallery.

"Home for the Holidays," on view throughout December, features paintings and drawings of homes by five architectural illustrators, highlighting the more artistic side of what they do as professionals.

"To me, the messier and smearier they are, the more interesting they are," Pascale said.

Paintings don't often have that same raw motion, she went on to say. This show has a lot of spontaneous energy.

Artists include Steven James Stannard, David Csont, Fred Craig, Steward White and W.G. (William) Hook, all of whom know each other professionally.

Stannard, a landscape architect by trade and a board member of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators, said he discovered his niche about 10 years ago, using the visualization technique to allow clients to see the designs, giving them a better understanding of what the finished landscape will look like, rather than a dry drawing used mainly to relay a message for construction.

"It's hard for people to interpret plans," Stannard said. "They're dry."

Before, his pieces didn't have a romantic visualization attached to them.

These visualists are "very few and far between," Stannard said. "This area has an unusual number."

Three of the exhibiting artists are from Maryland, while Bill Hook hails from Seattle and Csont from Pittsburgh.

"All these architects are artists," Stannard said. "This show shows that unique angle."

"To me, they have a very whimsical way about them," Pascale said of his pieces, "like they come straight out of his mind into scratchy ink drawings."

"Hook," she continued, "I think, is off the hook."

His Wyeth-like composition and earth-tone palette give his pieces a quietness, and they exude a simultaneous raw, brainstorm feeling and a clean and polished one. His work has been published in more than seven books.

"It has that energy but it also has that finished quality," she said.

White's pieces are done with vibrant oils whose depth, at times, makes them appear nearly three-dimensional.

Craig, meanwhile, uses oils to create textured pieces that sometimes border on abstract expressionism, with unusual house colorings, like shades of violet and purples.

Csont, who served as president of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators, uses watercolor in a way that looks detailed and yet lose, realistic yet dreamy.

Everyone can appreciate plein air painting, Pascale added. She coupled this idea with the theme of "Home for the Holidays," asking each architect for his interpretation of what home means.

The pieces show homes through all the seasons — from fall foliage to snow to the colors of spring flowers — but because people often spend more time at home around the holidays, Pascale thought December an ideal time for a home-themed exhibition.

(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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