Artist Kelly Charlesworth: Capturing a sense of place
A young artist’s mischief turned her family’s world purple when Kelly Charlesworth, a perfectly behaved child by all appearances, left behind an unexpected canvas — her bedsheets, transformed with a single crayon. What began as a childhood mystery would spark a lifelong artistic journey.
“She said, ‘Kelly would never do that,’” Charlesworth recalls. “But the sheets were colored purple.”
That was the beginning of Charlesworth’s life as an artist. The lifelong Harrisburg-area resident now showcases her shimmering works at Homeland Center, where she exhibits in Homeland’s Florida Room Gallery.
“I’ve heard so many good things about Homeland,” she said. “It is a really cool place.”
She noted this is her first exhibit in a retirement community and that Homeland offers “a nice display space.”
“It’s new and fun,” she said. “Nice for people to have something different to look at.”
The display is part of Homeland’s partnership with the Art Association of Harrisburg and its Community Art exhibit series. Every quarter, AAH invites member artists to display their works in sites throughout the area, from businesses to theaters.
Homeland is the only retirement community in the program. Artists are selected by AAH for their compatibility with the space and the residents, staff, and visitors who stop to enjoy a moment of serenity or awe.
“It’s always nice to come through and see the art,” said a visitor as she paused on her way to see her mother-in-law.
From her purple-crayon days – just like Harold of the classic children’s book, “Harold and the Purple Crayon” — Charlesworth has made art a part of her life. She was fascinated by the famed TV artist Bob Ross. After graduating from York College of Pennsylvania with a degree in art, she worked in insurance “to pay the bills.” Now, she works in grant writing.
“I use my creativity for writing grants for the food bank,” she said. “I paint on the side for fun.”
In 2005, Charlesworth took a landscape class with the Art Association of Harrisburg, where she learned plein air painting, which has since become the focus of her oil work.
Participating with plein air groups and competitions, including the Susquehanna Valley Plein Air Painters, she visits the region’s scenic sites and captures them on canvas or panel – Children’s Lake at Boiling Springs, a stone barn in Marietta, the Pennsylvania State Museum as seen from a hilltop across the Susquehanna River. At one spot, she discovered Native American artifacts and burial grounds that local residents had found there.
Charlesworth completes each plein air piece in about two hours, taking on the challenge of capturing scenes as atmospheric conditions evolve and the light changes.
“It’s very addicting,” she said as she hung her paintings at Homeland. “You try it and then you don’t want to go back to the studio. You capture it on the scene, and you can look at it later and remember how you were feeling that day.”
Her work vividly evokes the landscape and history of central Pennsylvania – a region with “some of the most beautiful scenery in the world,” she says — in shades of green, pink, and red. Her inspiration lies in finding beauty in the natural world, from misty mornings to forests in the fall.
“They say don’t put too much green in your paintings because it doesn’t make for a good painting, but I can’t help myself,” she said. “I still love the green.”
Charlesworth lives in Lower Paxton Twp. She has two children, a 17-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son who attend Harrisburg Academy.
She exhibits her work at local galleries. One of her paintings, “Tea Time in Wales,” hanging at Homeland, reflects Charlesworth’s love of world travel. Her excursions have taken her to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and more. A family trip to Greece is on the horizon.
“We’ve got the travel bug, that’s for sure,” she said. “It’s great to see the museums.”
In Paris, her favorite museum isn’t the Louvre but the Musée d’Orsay.
“It’s got all the Monets and all the Impressionists,” she said. “It’s gorgeous. You see it all in person, and there are so many artists that you never hear about. I like to see what inspired these Impressionists. These places are so old that you can sit at the restaurant where Van Gogh sat.”
Find her work at kellycharlesworth.com.
Homeland Center (www.homelandcenter.org) offers levels of care including personal care, memory care, skilled nursing and rehabilitation. Homeland also provides hospice, home care, home health and palliative care services to serve the diverse and changing needs of families throughout central Pennsylvania. For more information or to arrange a tour, please call 717-221-7900.
Nicole Simmons was hanging her artwork in Homeland’s sunny Florida Room Gallery when a resident came by.
Look closely at Evelyn Dunbar’s paintings, and you might find “a little gift” – a tiny fairy worked into the scene or a little light.
A. Wendy Warner felt a sense of oneness with art and nature as a little girl.
Still unsatisfied with her solo attempts, she tried a couple of teachers and finally enrolled online with Evolve Art Education. Evolve’s systematic rigor demanded commitment, but “if you just muddle through and work and work and work, I’m convinced that probably 90 percent of people can actually paint,” Wendy said.
“I still have a massive amount of learning to do, but I’m very happy with a brush in my hand,” she said. “Very, very happy.”
Margo Konetski didn’t initially think of herself as an artist, but as a child, “everything had doodles on it.”
Margo carries a sketch pad and takes pictures, capturing beautiful scenes and intriguing architecture everywhere she goes. She recently returned from a trip to Lake Ontario in New York State with five drawings.
Shelly Lipscomb Echevarria has a gift for seeing the spectrum of colors in a blue sky. The skies in her paintings shimmer in blue, green, gold, red, and orange.
