The artist’s life can be a solitary existence, with more emphasis on the muse than on marketing.

Delaware By Hand (DBH), a homegrown group of artists and artisans, provides a sense of camaraderie, as well as enhanced opportunities to gain an audience for local art. That includes Delaware By Hand: Masterworks 2011, a juried exhibit currently showing at the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover that features the works of DBH masters.

“Delawareans are really interested in seeing what is produced in their own backyard, from glassblowers to quilters to photographers,” said Ryan Grover, Biggs museum curator. “Many of the works were inspired by the scenes people in Delaware see every day.”

Biggs Museum spotlights masterworks from online artists community

Biggs Museum curator Ryan Grover discusses Delaware by Hand and the Masterworks 2001 exhibit.

DBH was established in 2001 by Gov. Ruth Ann Minner’s Strategic Economic Council. Essentially, it’s an online artists’ colony. Each artist has an individual webpage on the group’s site, DelawarebyHand.org, which also includes a map of artists’ studios and galleries in each of the state’s three counties.

Throughout the year, the group shares information on galleries, festivals and other venues for showing and selling works of art, including paintings, ceramics, fiber art, jewelry and other media.

Every other year, artists can compete for a shot at DBH’s masterworks exhibit at Biggs museum. The 2011 artists were selected by Bryan Young, curator of Academy Art Museum in Easton, Md., and Sally Hansen, a dealer and collector who also is the retired owner and director of The Glass Gallery in Bethesda, Md.

Heather Siple, 40, a photographer who lives in Wilmington, is inspired by the natural wonders she encounters on the trails she hikes at Elk Neck State Park and Trap Pond. For 10 years, she has been experimenting with a homebuilt lens that makes images look as if they are being glimpsed through a crystal ball floating in space.

“Through the Bright Woods,” her winning entry in the Biggs show, depicts a wooded path in Newark, where she grew up.

“I tend to study places that are close to my heart and home,” she said. “I try to capture the spirit of that place.”

Usually, Siple shoots in black and white. But when Delaware experienced a rare October snowfall, she dashed out to photograph the landscape in color.

“I wanted to show that rare contrast of white snow with colorful autumn leaves,” she said.

Currently, DBH has about 200 members; 45 competed for the 18 spots in the Biggs exhibit. Artists are encouraged to embrace Delaware’s colonial past in their work, as well as the state’s nautical and agricultural traditions. But members are free to pursue their own artistic sensibilities.

Gabriel Jules, a printmaker, is inspired by the sheep grazing on the organic farm her husband and she own in Seaford. She also studies turtles on the Nanticoke River, as well as Hearns Pond, near her home. Her winning entry at Biggs is “Snack,” a large etching of an owl with a mouse in its beak.

Jules, 68, moved to Delaware six years ago from the greater Washington, D.C. market, where she benefitted from a vibrant community of artists. Delaware By Hand helped her establish a support system in her new home.

“We do better collectively than we do separately,” she said. “I’m an introvert and this gives me the chance to interface with clients at shows.”

Charles Allmond, a sculptor from Wilmington who studied agriculture before turning to law and ultimately art, transforms natural scenes into sweeping tableaus of stone.

“I’m inspired by native birds and animals, salt marshes, woodlands and wild lands that remain unspoiled,” he said.

His three works at the Masterworks exhibit are stylized, semiabstract depictions of birds. In “Daydreamer,” an owl carved from Utah alabaster, the mottled appearance of the stone is incorporated into the design to suggest an owl napping in dappled sunlight. “Windswept,” made from Indiana limestone, shows a bird caught in a windstorm. In “Joie de Vivre,” a pair of geese in bronze, one bird seems to merge into the other as they take flight.

“It is as if they are expressing their joy of being alive,” said Allmond, 80.

Click here to see a slide show of selected artists featured in the Delaware by Hand: Masterworks 2011 collection.

Deborah Lewis-Idema, 68, retired to Ocean View in 2005. The fabric artist has developed a line she calls Harmonic Handwovens, in which musical compositions set the tone for complex fabrics that evoke the tempo and mood of a particular composer or style of music.

For example, her Mostly Mozart design, interpreted in a hand-dyed jacket and scarf, was inspired by the opening measures of Mozart’s 15^th piano sonata.

“I developed a pattern of small black ‘notes’ that dance, like arpeggios, across the fabric,” she said. “Since Mozart’s music is light and airy, I chose spring colors: the yellow and orange of daffodils and green of new leaves.”

Although all the artists live and work in Delaware, there is not a single cohesive look or style as there is with other groups of artists, such as the Pennsylvania Impressionists, who painted idyllic farms and pastoral scenes in Bucks County in the early 20^th century.

“The Pennsylvania artists all lived within 45 miles of each other and sold to a lot of the same collectors,” Grover said. “Delaware by Hand took a group of artists who were already producing individually and made them into a community.”

Sy Blinn, 82, a woodworker from Wilmington, came to art after 20 years as a printer and 30 years as an antiques dealer. He says the group has helped him to be a better businessman.

“It has inspired me to think about new marketing possibilities,” he said.

His wood collage of two large, bold capital letter I’s followed by multiple exclamation marks is a tribute to the World Trade Center, whose twin towers were destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The piece ultimately will go the 911 Memorial Museum in New York City.

Alan Burslem, 59, designs and crafts ceramics in Arden, the New Castle County community founded in 1900 by sculptor Frank Stephens and architect Will Price.

“Having grown up in an historical artistic community, my surroundings have always been an inspiration to me,” he said.

Burslem mixes his own clay and glazes from powders. His three pieces in the exhibit—a platter, a bowl and a vase—all are glazed in black but make different visual statements.

Thrown from a 20-pound piece of clay, the vase allows the ceramicist to show off his technical prowess. After it’s thrown, 16 two-inch ropes of clay were rolled up the sides of the pot to cover the exterior

“Then the pot is expanded from the inside and then the neck and lip are finished,” he said.

Susan S. Johnston, a watercolorist and art educator from Dover, painted pieces of buildings seemingly lost in a deep forest.

“I love history and these paintings could be interpreted as a statement on historic preservation,” she said.

Arden Bardol of Dover mixes polymers with powdered metals to create original jewelry. Before she began making jewelry professionally, she designed buildings as an architect, senior associate and shareholder at Becker Morgan Group in Dover and crafted her own personal accessories.

“The small details of buildings and elements that make them stand influence my work,” she said. “Most of my original work is inspired by structural steel connections in buildings, most specifically the nuts and bolts. If you look closely, you can see that my handcrafted beads are colorful nuts, bolts and washers.”

From a nuts-and-bolts perspective, DBH helped her navigate the less traveled niche of artists who work in three dimensions.

“DBH provides a great opportunity to meet, learn and grow with artists at a grassroots level,” she said.

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