The friendship between Diane Kilgore Condon and Teri Peña sprouted nearly 25 years ago when Kilgore Condon founded Artbomb Studios in Greenville, South Carolina. Peña joined the roster of 16 artists who exhibited their works every spring.  When Peña moved to Midway nearly 12 years ago, th e two still maintained their friendship and began showing their works at Trove Gallery on Park City’s lower Main Street. “I think the coolest thing about the Trove exhibit is that it’s a completely different experience now that Teri lives in Utah,” Kilgore Condon said. “Even though she comes back to Greenville and shows with us every spring, there is something familiar but seen through a whole new angle with people and topography.” The friends will open a new exhibit with a reception that runs from 6-9 p.m. on Friday at Trove, 804 Main St., and Kilgore Condon will make the trek from Greenville to Park City. “I love it out there,” she said. “I think it’s beautiful.” Even though Peña works in multimedia with acrylic paints, found items and charcoal, and Kilgore Condon’s go-to medium is usually oil, the artists don’t toss around ideas when it comes time to create works for a joint exhibit, according to Kilgore Condon.  “We just know each other,” she said with a laugh. “While we do different things, we come from the same place. We came up in our careers in the same place, at the same pace and from the same pattern of thinking. So, the art rotates around the same basic similarities.” Kilgore Condon will show between 12 and 15 works at the Trove exhibit, which opens the same night as the Park City Kimball Arts Festival. “Our spring show was in May, and all of these are new works that were completed shortly after that,” she said. “It’s been fast this year. I’ve done three shows so far, and there haven’t been many carryovers. Everything either sells or stays at the gallery. I need a week to clean my house before I do another show in November.” Kilgore Condon’s grandmother was an artist and one of her earliest influences. “She had a summer house in Wisconsin, and the cousins would circle through,” Kilgore Condon said. “It was the most beautiful place, a Victorian farmhouse on a hill, and we spent a lot of summers there. Everybody had bird books and binoculars on the coffee table.” Family members would eat a large lunch in the early afternoon and then a light supper in the evening, so they could go for post-meal walks, according to Kilgore Condon. “My uncles and my grandmother would talk constantly about two things on these walks — food and the natural world that they were seeing at the moment,” she said. “That became a heavily etched groove with me.” Teri Peña’s mixed media work, “Spring Has Sprung,” will be among the abstract works that will show alongside works by her friend Diane Kilgore Condon at Trove Gallery. Credit: Image courtesy of Trove Gallery During her 20s, Kilgore Condon painted all types of subject matter, including architectural structures. “They were kind of quirky township images, but that kind of ran dry after a while,” she said. The artist soon found inspiration on Greenville’s famed Swamp Rabbit nature trail. “I still walk on that every day, and see different things,” she said. “Sometimes things look different when you see them up close.” Kilgore Condon saw a copperhead snake the other night. “I had not been so close to one before, and I noticed how flat it was,” she said. “It’s also interesting when you see that there is no end in how the light changes something or what the wind does. Things become shapes and masses, forms and lines, and colors change dramatically from the middle to the top.” Kilgore Condon paints her works in quadrants. “I do a lot that start from the subject’s center bottom, but sometimes the whole movement is up at the top,” she said. “So you’ve got to shift things around and bring them down into a triangular point.” Doing that makes Kilgore Condon contort plants and animals into new shapes. “It’s a gestural thing,” she said. “You can try and work off photographs, but you have that filter in your mind. So stuff shifts and changes all the time, and I like how that process works.”  Kilgore Condon, who also cited Jennifer Bartlett, Peter Doig, Mamma Andersson and her husband, Jockum Nordström, as influences, likes oil because she doesn’t have to work quickly. “You have to be very balanced and careful when you work with acrylic, and I’m none of those things,” she said with a laugh. “And because I do so much work on panels, I can use a sander on dry oils, and that changes the painting very quickly.” She also likes working with the medium called galkyd, which is a type of oil. “It creates a lot of transparency and dries in a glossy surface like enamel,” she said.Kilgore Condon also uses special paint brushes. “They are completely square, and the bristles are stiff, so they have a lot of snap,” she said. “So, I can catch a very thin line if I move quick enough.” Usually Kilgore Condon knows when it’s time to stop working on a painting. “Sometimes it is very clear because all the big problems have been solved and the little ones left are more interesting because those big ones have been solved,” she said. Still there are times when the artist misses those cues. “I’ll take photographs of the work along the way, and I’ll sometimes look back and see that it was working but didn’t catch it at the time,” she said. Kilgore Condon has also let a painting sit for two or three years. “Then one day I’ll decide that I’ll need to touch it or sand it, and I will finish it that afternoon,” she said with another laugh. Sometimes a painting will come through mistakes. “I may put my paintbrush on the palette the wrong way, and it will wind up dirty with something completely surprising,” she said. “You never know. It’s like visual taste testing. You make marks until something falls into place.” Kilgore Condon enjoys exhibiting her work because she likes the pressure of deadlines. “It’s like a sprint at the end of the race,” she said. “You’re running all the time, but then you pour it all on in that last little bit.” She also enjoys meeting people and walking into a space where art by different people exhibit together. “I don’t like the day after a show opens,” she said. “I like new starts, but it’s always a little sad.”  Exhibit by Diane Kilgore Condon and Teri Peña When: 6-9 p.m. Friday Where: Trove Gallery, 804 Main St. Cost: Free Web: troveparkcity.com and artbombstudios.com The post Artists share friendship that weaves exhibits together appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less