Mother-Daughter Art Team Featured in Batesville Exhibit

By Julie M. Fidler
The work of mother and daughter artists, Sheila Cantrell and Allison Cantrell, is featured in an exhibit at University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville through May 9, according to Marcia Wallace, speech, theater and visual art instructor. The show is on the campus in the Roy Row Sr., and Imogene Row Johns Library and Academic Building.

The exhibit includes examples of the duo’s graphite and colored pencil sketches. Mom, Sheila Cantrell, said it comes naturally for daughter, Allison Cantrell, to display her work right next to hers. Sheila was introduced to drawing through a community art class in her home town of Pine Bluff when Allison, now 24, was a few months old.

“By age three, Allison was emulating me, spending hour after hour of ‘playtime’ by drawing as well,” said Mrs. Cantrell.

While Mrs. Cantrell’s drawings are intricate likenesses of nature, still life and more, Allison’s are “renderings of the cowboy culture -- the West as it was and still stands today.” The two live in Batesville.

Sheila Cantrell’s work has been included in Drawing, an American Artist Magazine publication. One of her recent colored pencil drawings will be featured in the upcoming June 2011 issue of The Artist’s Magazine.

“I was a finalist in The Artist’s Magazine’s 2010 competition,” she wrote in her blog on www.sheilacantrell.com. “A small handful of finalists are selected to be featured in the magazine’s Competition Spotlight throughout the year. My colored pencil drawing, Red Pears at Play, was chosen to be in the June 2011 issue of the magazine.”

Mrs. Cantrell’s work was selected for inclusion in a SmithKramer traveling exhibition, The New Reality: The Frontier of Realism in the 21st Century from 2008-11. One of her colored pencil drawings was awarded an Honorable Mention at last year’s Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center. She received the Best of Drawing Award at the International Guild of Realism’s fourth annual exhibition in Naples, Fla.

She is represented by Greg Thompson Fine Art in North Little Rock and M.A. Doran Gallery in Tulsa, Ark. She is a member of the International Guild of Realism and the Colored Pencil Society of America.

On her web site, www.allisoncantrell.com, Allison writes, “I am primarily a self-taught artist, though I have been greatly helped by my mother over the years. Not only did I inherit my talent from her, but I also owe her for so many years of artistic guidance and motherly patience.”

Allison Cantrell’s work has been in exhibitions including the American Academy of Equine Art in Lexington, Ky.; the annual art show at the Grand National Rodeo in San Francisco; and the Bosque Conservatory Classic exhibit in Clifton, Texas. There, she won second place in the drawing category.

In 2010, Allison was awarded the Clyde Heron Award for the most historically accurate piece at the American Plains Artists’ annual juried exhibit in Lincoln, Neb. Horses in Art and Art of the West magazines published her work. She is represented by 83 Spring Street Gallery in Eureka Springs.

Sheila Cantrell’s upcoming shows include the National Contemporary Realism show at M.A. Doran Gallery in Tulsa in May. Also in May, her colored pencil drawing, “Cherries, Grapes, and Plums,” will be in the Annual Members Exhibition of the National Association of Women Artists at the Sylvia Wald/Po Kim Gallery in New York City.

In June, her graphite work, “No Fun Being a Single Pear,” will be in the Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community’s Eighth Annual Juried Art Exhibition in Harrisonburg, VA.

The show at UACCB is free and open to the public during regular campus hours.