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While quarantining for six months last year, Marlene Roeder went to Scriba Creek by her house almost every day to take pictures and draw what she saw. Putting together these sights inspired her artwork that is currently on display at the Baltimore Woods Nature Center Art Gallery in Marcellus.

The “Unique Perspectives” exhibit opened on March 6 and will run until April 23. The artwork can be viewed through the gallery’s website, but visitors can also schedule an in-person viewing on select Saturdays and Mondays by contacting the nature center.

Karen Smith, Baltimore Woods’ art gallery coordinator, discovered the exhibit’s two artists after seeing Amy Cunningham-Waltz’s work at the Syracuse Arts and Crafts Festival. She also noticed Roeder’s work after receiving a card that featured her drawing “Kitchen Karma,” which shows a circle of kitchen tools, including those from her mother-in-law who had just died.

Both artists deal with nature in different styles, leading to the creation of the title of the exhibit, “Unique Perspectives”, Smith said.

“It’s fun and enjoyable, and it’s unusual,” Smith said. “I don’t know of anybody else who’s doing art quite like these two folks. It just lightens up your day.”

Roeder’s “Circles of Life” collection began as a way for her to raise money for The A21 Campaign, a nonprofit organization that fights human trafficking. The show at Baltimore Woods displays her “Nature Circles,” which symbolize eternity and a sense of completeness.

Roeder loves the idea of seeing the world through a porthole, and she also colors some of her pieces and encourages others to color them as well. They include complex shapes and designs, such as her piece “Fibonacci Flowers,” inspired by the Fibonacci sequence — a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two numbers that came before it.

Both artists deal with art in different styles, which led to the naming of the exhibit “Unique Perspectives.” Wendy Wang | Staff Photographer

“What I really want people to do is look and look really closely,” Roeder said. “Art is kind of a spiritual thing for me, so I see these grand designs in the big picture and then also in the little picture.”

The other artist featured at the exhibit, Cunningham-Waltz, said it’s a perfect pairing of two very different styles that work really well together as they both showcase nature.

Cunningham-Waltz moved to Syracuse from the New England region three years ago. The art community in Syracuse has been incredibly welcoming with lots of opportunities to show her work, she said.

Cunningham-Waltz’s “Abstracted Nature” series portrays landscapes such as “Moonlight Landscape” and portraits of animals like “Angry Owl” and “Moose.”

“It always starts with color for me,” Cunningham-Waltz said. “Sometimes I have sketchbooks full of just me playing with shapes and color just putting them together.”

Cunningham-Waltz enjoys creating with her hands as opposed to using a camera, she said. Her artwork for the “Unique Perspectives” exhibit — inspired by what she sees in her backyard — is primarily created with watercolor and ink details, but includes some acrylics too.

“I was sitting on my neighbor’s deck back in Massachusetts, and there was a cicada on her bush, and she was all grossed out and freaked out by it, and I ended up making this really beautiful painting,” Cunningham-Waltz said.

When making a piece, Cunningham-Waltz enjoys the colors in the pattern and loves looking at things that appeal to the eye. If her work makes a statement about something, that’s a little bonus.

Published on April 12, 2021 at 8:24 pm