CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/9336
Above | Rose Kennedy’s “Marinara” captured first place in “A Taste for Art” at Old Towne Gallery. vivid painting of a blooming bromeliad. And Flood is earning a reputation as a talented portrait artist. But that doesn’t mean they don’t like to eat. Flood comes from strong Italian stock, and food, she says, “It’s huge.” I found Flood in the guest room of her home in King’s Grant, studying a portrait of a Marine and his wife, wait- ing to be unveiled that very afternoon at his retirement ceremony. It was a sur- prise that Flood had been working on for weeks, and now she examined it for the finishing touches. This is her pas- sion. “To me, it’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” she said about painting portraits. “You have to see things in a different way.” So it was a whim that put brush to canvas for “A Taste for Art.” The end result is a painting of oranges in a blue- and-white bowl so refreshing you can practically taste the fresh-squeezed juice. Flood did it on the fly – she didn’t 22 | Food & Wine • 2008 even have time to snap a photo before she took it to Olde Town. If she wanted one for her files, she’d have to trek down- town to get a look at her own painting. “Marinara” came to Rose Kennedy in her kitchen – no prior planning, no photos, just tomatoes and basil from her own garden and her husband’s bor- rowed blue shirt for a backdrop. She even abandoned her usual medium – watercolor – for oil. The Kennedys farm in Gray’s Creek, and it’s the rural scen- ery that usually inspires her paintings. On a recent morning at Cape Fear Studios, Kennedy dabbed paint on a scene of hay bales. The artists’ coopera- tive downtown was hopping. Kennedy worked in the stall she shares with an- other artist. Down the hall, students enrolled in a class through Fayette- ville Technical Community College set up easels in every nook and cranny. Anita Allen was one of them. Allen, a retired teacher herself, is something of a permanent student. After raising six children and teaching 40 years, Allen is now a prolific artist. She entered not one, but four paintings in “A Taste for Art.” Allen has a simple explanation: “I love painting.” But don’t ask her how much time she spends on a single piece; people ask her all the time. And she has an answer: “Not quite a lifetime.”CV