Harrisonburg's First Fridays ft. Kristen Colebank

Name: Harrisonburg's First Fridays ft. Kristen Colebank
Start: 2025-09-05T17:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-09-05T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 380 East Market Street, Harrisonburg, VA, United States, Virginia 22801

Schedule

Fri Sep 05 2025 at 05:00 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

380 East Market Street, Harrisonburg, VA, United States, Virginia 22801 | Harrisonburg, VA

Kristen Colebank is an award-winning representational painter from the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia. She holds Signature status in the West Virginia Watercolor Society and has exhibited work in several juried exhibitions in the Mid-Atlantic and Shenandoah Valley. She was named a 2024 Tamarack Foundation Creative Entrepreneur Fellow. Colebank also regularly teaches watercolor classes and has been a judge for watercolor and multi-media exhibitions.
I create paintings that are inspired by the vistas and details of rural landscapes and small towns in West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley that I feel connected to and care about. While traveling around the area, I often sense intuitive responses to flashes of contrast and pattern in my peripheral vision. They feel like small jolts of energy, and they might be triggered by the lattice of metal components in farm machinery, or the contrast of an old tree’s foliage against the orderly geometry of a farmhouse. I’ve learned to trust these experiences, which I call glimmers, as points of entry that lead to many of my representational paintings.
This exhibition, “Pastoral Patterns,” mixes traditional watercolor landscapes with smaller abstracted works that focus on attention-grabbing patterns enclosed within the scenes. Through both styles of work, I encourage exhibition visitors to observe and reflect on the value of our rural landscape.