Monty!
2018 Featured Artist

To the outside world, I may appear to spend my time doodling while binging on streamed TV shows and internet videos. But in reality, my avid consumption of every aspect of popular culture helps me understand the cultural forces that reflect and influence those around me. I absorb the chaos of the outside world, interpret it through my own filter and from it create color, movement and form on my canvases.
The materials I use include pastels, acrylics, Spackle, Pebeo paint, Copic markers and gel pens on canvas. My technique consists of adding texture and detail to a base coat of hand blended pastels. My work touches on a variety subjects that are personal to me: women who have influenced my life, being black in America, the city of New Orleans, the pop culture and comics that raised me and the music that has been my soundtrack.

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Glinda Schafer
2018 Featured Artist

A longtime resident of Terrytown , LA, Glinda Schafer has fallen in love with the beauty of the surrounding marshlands and landscapes. Her realistic paintings are mostly pastels with an occasional oil. She believes there is beauty in the most ordinary of landscapes and tries to capture the light and mood while delivering to the viewer a kind of peacefulness and serenity. Glinda regularly exhibits and has won many awards in juried and non-juried local and national exhibitions. She also has had four one-person museum exhibitions and has been included in numerous invitational exhibitions, including the March 2018 Juried Plein Air Competition and Exhibition in New Iberia.. Schafer was one of seven featured “Artists to Watch” in the Nov /Dec, 2017, issue of the Pastel Journal international magazine. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Claiborne State Office Building in Baton Rouge, LA, the Jefferson Parish Government Building in Gretna, LA, the Reagan Ranch Center Young America’s Foundation Museum in Santa Barbara, CA, the World Trade Center in New Orleans, LA and in private and corporate collections across the United States, Great Britain, South America and Europe.
She is a charter member and on the board of directors of the Degas Pastel Society and a Juried Associate Member of the Pastel Society of America. She is also a member of the West Bank Art Guild, New Orleans Art Association, New Orleans Arts Council and the Foley Art Center, Foley, AL. As President of the Rotary Club of Algiers, she is also active in the community.

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Brenda Fortmayer
2018 Featured Artist

Brenda Fortmayer returned to painting after taking a 40 years hiatus to work as a textbook editor, marry, raise her children and finally retire.

She has a Bachelor's Degree in English from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Massachusetts where she took a number of painting and photography courses, and completed an Associate's Degree in Accounting from Hagerstown College, Hagerstown, Maryland.

She was employed as a production editor for Houghton-Mifflin Publishing, Boston, and R.J. Brady, Division of Prentice-Hall Publishing, Laurel, MD. She then hit the jackpot and married her Air Force husband of 40 years. This allowed her to live in Maryland, Germany, Mississippi, and finally New Orleans. She will not be moving back North ever.

She served as substitute teacher at Eisenhower Elementary School, New Orleans, as well as full time secretary from 1996 until 2002.

Brenda continues to improve her work by working a lot. She paints on a regular basis, minding the words of a dear friend: "Talent is doing something enough until you get good at it". She concentrates on local scenes of fishing boats, swamps and New Orleans in general. Her favorite scenes are of Bourbon Street and shrimp boats.