Three longtime friends take the stage to share lifelong passion for art

Longtime friends take center stage to share passion for art

The Gulf Coast Artists' Alliance gallery needed an exhibition for the month of September, so three long-time friends stepped up to the plate. FOX 13 photojournalist Barry Wong takes us there.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - The Gulf Coast Artists' Alliance gallery needed an exhibition for the month of September, so three long-time friends stepped up to the plate. 

"I have such joy in my heart to be with these women and to be in the show with them," artist Barbara Beyhl said. 

The appropriately-titled "3 Women...3 Points-of-View" was born. The trio's art styles are vastly different, but their passions for their crafts are the same. 

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Behyl is primarily a watercolor artist but used this exhibition to share work that she usually does not show. Her section features a mixture of mediums and styles. 

"It's all driven largely, not from painting what I see and trying to interpret it, but rather it's from what do I feel about a particular concept or something that's going on," Beyhl said. "I hope if any of this touches them, it helps to bring them catharsis in some aspect of whatever is heavy for them."

Donna Plunkett primarily works with one medium, paper. She manipulates paper in a variety of ways to create animals, landscapes and other sculptural pieces. Sometimes, she adds found objects like rusted metal cantops. 

"I like lots of texture, something coming out at you, which is why I call what I do porcupine paper. I also like color, so you'll see that I have blobs, blurbs of all kinds of paper that is colorful," Plunkett said. "I love working with shapes and always see that in nature, so I try to get that in my art as much as I can."

Like Plunkett, 92-year-old Carole Rosefelt works mainly with one medium, alcohol ink on Japanese Yupo paper. 

"I take my brush, dip it into alcohol, and I move it around until some shape and form comes to me that creates some form of design," Rosefelt said. 

She views this exhibition as a culmination of 15 years of experimenting with the ink, which adds a transparent nature to the work. She paints abstract landscapes that she says people think look like underwater scenes. 

"It just kind of shocks me that I could still be painting every day. My curiosity, my energy, my creativity, color, just give me some colors and a piece of paper, and I'm there," Rosefelt said.