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Bordentown Historical Society hosting online art show featuring local artists
Burlington County Times
BORDENTOWN — From Black’s Creek to the Gilder House (built in 1788) to the Clara Barton Schoolhouse (the first public school in New Jersey), Bordentown is filled with scenic and historic places.
An upcoming art show will highlight many of those places.
Beginning Friday and running through Oct. 2, the Bordentown Historical Society will host an online art show called “Visions of Bordentown,” featuring local artists and images.
Twenty artists, including several from Bordentown, have contributed 42 paintings to the show, according to Maggie Rose, a historical society member. The full- and part-time artists have captured images like the Thomas Paine statue, the entrance to the Bordentown Yacht Club and the tall red doorway of an old Farnsworth Avenue home.
The paintings will be available for purchase on the historical society’s website. The price range goes from $80 to $2,900.
Artists will get 80 percent of the money from the sales of their paintings, while the historical society will take 20 percent, with proceeds going toward its yearly operating budget.
“It will be good for the artists,” said Bonnie Goldman, the historical society’s co-president-elect. “These COVID days are tough times for everybody.”
Some of the artists in the show are well-known around the area, like Al Barker of Bordentown, and Marlon Davila, who painted the Bordentown Beach Mural, a scene overlooking the water from the beach, down by the boat launch where the Crosswicks Creek meets the Delaware River.
But several of the artists in the show are part-timers who use art to earn extra cash, like Claudia Teal, a resident of Hedding, just outside Bordentown. In a normal year, Teal, a bus aide in the Northern Burlington County Regional School District by day, sells her art at street fairs and festivals around the area.
But in 2020, all those events have been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. So Teal’s art income is down 50 percent, she said.
Teal will have two paintings in the show, including one of Black’s Creek. They will sell for about $100 apiece.
She said it was energizing to be able to get out and make some art for money again. In the spring, during quarantine, with in-person school on pause and no shows to attend, she was just going out and painting images on a hiking trail for fun.
“It relaxes me,” she said. “Otherwise I just go nuts not doing anything. There’s only so much you can clean in the house.”
“It will be nice to sell these and raise money for the historical society,” she added.
A local news and sports reporter around Pennsylvania and New Jersey since 2015, Jarrad Daniel Saffren joined The Burlington County Times’ award-winning local news team in October 2019, adding business, education and town government features to the coverage. Contact him at jsaffren@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @JarradSaff. Please help support local journalism with a subscription to The Burlington County Times.
https://www.burlingtoncountytimes.com/story/news/2020/09/22/bordentown-historical-society-opening-online-art-show-sept-25-visual-art-south-jersey-burlington/5864230002/
