The Lompoc Valley Art Association’s Cypress Gallery will be featuring “To Bamboo!…an Homage”, an artist show with collaborators Beverly Messenger-Harte & C. Wood.
The show will be on exhibit from May 29 thru’ June 29, 2025 &
there will be an Artist Reception on Sunday, June 8th 1-3pm.
To Bamboo!…an Homage…
Beverly Messenger-Harte & C. Wood
An eclectic collaboration of mixed media in honor of the Beauty of Bamboo
Bio - Beverly Messenger-Harte
I trace the source of my love for bamboo back to my early childhood during outings with my parents to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I smile nostalgically as I recall wandering off by myself (while they sipped tea) into the magical & seemingly huge bamboo groves around the tea garden, crouching down & listening to the leaves rustling & the culms knocking against each other around me. I loved hiding in there amidst the lacy green pointed “paintbrushes” & the percussion of the culms that looked like flutes & sounded like claves & sometimes like xylophones. I also enjoyed skipping around the funny little low fences made of bamboo & traditionally tied with black cord known as “Otoko Musubi. These memories are very strong & happy ones of times that were the genesis of my life-long ‘attraction-become-passion’ for this beloved plant.
As a young adult, I grew bamboo in large containers wherever I lived & designed & created fences, gates & screens reminiscent to those from the Tea Garden.
In the the 1970’s, knowing of my unique interest, a friend gave me a poem about bamboo she had torn from a gardening magazine. It was to become the very first of my collection, which has manifested & grown over the years from diverse & sometimes surprisingly obscure sources. I soon became an avid hunter-gatherer, always delighting in discovering a new addition to the group.
In the early 2000’s, my bamboo-spirit ‘friends’ all sang out loud & clear that it was time to gather together my collection of 90+ poems & create an artistic self-published anthology! Designing the cover & page layout, & learning the fine art of the traditional Japanese stab-binding was truly a fun & inspiring new process. The first copies were completed in 2009. I have continued to create them over the years, gifting some, selling them by word-of-mouth & various online sources… & in recent years at the Cypress Gallery. Each book is a one-of-a-kind art piece, carefully & lovingly assembled & bound.
Also in the early 2000’s I began to be inspired by the compelling beauty of bamboo culms & twigs & started creating bamboo assemblage art pieces, incorporating found objects & patinaed copper.
I moved to Lompoc from Santa Barbara in 2017 with my beloved husband, Rex, & our beautiful Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Maggie. I greatly appreciate the presence & the unique high quality of the many fine artists exhibiting in the Cypress Gallery. Lompoc is blessed to have such a rich resource.
I am thrilled & honored to be collaborating with C. Wood for the Featured Artists show in June at the Gallery.
My creations intuitively & mysteriously channel & flow through me, via my beautiful, loving Bamboo Muse!
I like to think of my pieces as playfully introspective & meditative & my hope is that they inspire creative imagination within viewers, kind of like reading between the lines.
My intimate kinship & passionate love for this plant has evolved into a deep knowing that the beauty, essence, aesthetics & spirituality of bamboo is & always will be sweetly imbued in my fiber, my bones, my brain, my mind, my heart, my spirit & my soul…. …& forever shall I be the BambooMessengerWoman!
Bio from C. Wood
I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t love art. It’s wonderful to take something you know….people, places, a beautiful setting or some particular lighting, put your heart into capturing that moment and creating it into a piece of art. So much is learned about your own spirit through artistic interpretation. It’s that artistic interpretation that makes it uniquely your own.
Whether I’m creating my own work or enjoying others, one of the great things about art is the need to share it. Art enriches your head as well as your art.
I work in oils, acrylics, pastels. Landscapes, seascapes, farm animals and still life.
In this current body of work honoring Bamboo, I’ve continued with my love of Japanese patterns & color combinations, have added paper, foil, antique Japanese stamps & Origami paper. Mostly all of the paper is torn, not cut, layered and sometimes sanded, painted over and edited.
The artist process: what to keep and when to stop.
There is a saying among artists “the answer is yes! If you ask, “does it need more red?’ Yes. “Is it done?” Yes. “Should I try something new?” Yes. Just keep going, you never know what wonderful things will emerge.
I am a long-time resident of Santa Barbara County & am grateful to exhibit my work regularly at the Cypress Gallery.
I have very much enjoyed exploring & playing with the beauty of Bamboo for this presentation.
Please come by & check out the show & meet the artists. A Reception that is open to the public will be held on Sunday, June 8th from 1-3pm. The Cypress Gallery is at 119 East Cypress Avenue, Lompoc, across from the museum.
The Lompoc Valley Arts Association is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit, committed to expanding & supporting access to & exposure to the arts in Lompoc & the Santa Ynez Valley. LVAA sponsors arts programs, events, communications & other efforts that mutually benefit artists, businesses, residents & visitors to our Valley.
To learn more about the arts in the Valley, like our Facebook page “Cypress Gallery”.