This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Arts & Entertainment

Monrovia Artist Featured at Verdugo Arts Event in LCF

Midwestern-bred artist Charles Ketcham will demonstrate vibrant pastel landscapes to audiences at the Community Center of La Cañada Flintridge Friday.

Local artist Charles Ketcham will show live and on the spot pastel techniques Friday at a Verdugo Hills Art Association demonstration.

The  Pasadena Art Center College of Design graduate will demonstrate simple, effective and often under-utilized pastel techniques that he hopes will stimulate young artists’ creativity. The The Demonstration is from 7 to 9 p.m. at the , 4468 Chevy Chase Drive. Admission is $5.

Ketcham, a native of Cape Girardeau, MO, is the grandson of painter Austin Ketcham and Sculptor Florence Olson Ketcham. The many motifs in his work represent his adolescence spent hiking and canoeing amid the lush greenery and sprawling Midwestern lakes of Cape Girardeau, he said.

Find out what's happening in La Cañada Flintridgewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Although the Midwestern landscape and its honest, hardworking inhabitants inform much of his subject matter, Ketcham admits that the region’s history proves decisive in his motivation to create art as well. 

“I’m currently working on an illustration of a colonial French fortress on the Mississippi River, near where I grew up,” Ketcham said. “I’m trying to recreate [the time] when it was occupied by the French.”  

Find out what's happening in La Cañada Flintridgewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Despite his Midwestern background and connection to home and family, Ketcham has studied art on both coasts, earning a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts at Art Center College of Design and a Master of Fine Arts in Figurative Painting at New York Academy of Art.

His desire to pursue higher education grew from living in an academic household with his history professor father and English teacher mother.

“Being raised in an academic environment, [higher education] seemed very natural to me,” Ketcham said.

He now teaches at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut and Glendale Community College.

The Verdugo Hills Art Association is sponsoring Ketcham’s demonstration as part of a Foothill Artist of the Month series. The VHAA is a local arts non-profit organization founded in 1946 to foster artistic culture, providing a forum for local artists to meet and share ideas.

Liz Perrigue, publicity chairman of the VHAA, spells out the organization’s mission with an heir of passion that could not be expressed otherwise, “to promote the local area’s interest in art.”

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?