By Rebecca Rider

rebecca.rider@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — Come noon, paintings will be taken off hooks and carefully wrapped, and the bloom of color that has filled the Salisbury Civic Center since Tuesday will fade.

The 2017 Carolina Artists Expo is coming to a close, but the annual showcase has given local artists a chance to share their work with the public.

It’s the expo’s 27th year, but the Carolina Artists Guild has been showing off local talent longer than that.

“Before that, we used to do Easy Street,” artist Tanda Coutu said.

But guild members wanted an official gallery to hang their work — even if just for a few days.

“A lot of us didn’t have places to showcase our work,” Coutu said.

So in 1990, the expo was launched, offering visibility both for guild members and community residents.

Artists in the 2017 expo ranged from well-known local professionals to beginners and covered a variety of mediums, from oils to photography.

“Any kind of work that you wanna see is going to be in here,” artist Andrea Brown said.

It’s that variety that Coutu thinks makes the expo unique among local art displays.

“It has more than any museum around here,” she said.

The expo is just one of many annual programs the guild sponsors each year. Others include the young artists expo, Arts in the Park and the Plein Air Expo. Coutu said the guild is trying to cultivate an appreciation of the arts that goes beyond paint on canvas.

“We’re trying to get more people to understand the art and how it affects people,” she said.

The walls were hung with acrylic and oil paintings, and lattices supported mixed-media, ink and watercolor works. There was no specified subject, Brown said; artists simply submitted the work they thought best.

Artists who are not guild members were able to submit as many as 10 works, and guild members were able to submit as many as 12.

Brown said she “went overboard” and submitted 12. Her works are mostly of animals — cats, a bucking horse. She also had a watercolor painting of a mud dauber’s nest.

Brown chuckled as she remembered watching the nest being constructed.

“I didn’t know I had that much dirt on the property,” she said.

When it was finished, the nest showed different hues and colors of earth — something Brown reflected in her painting.

Coutu also had multiple works, mostly scenes from her old home near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Other local artists featured included Clyde, Mark Brincefield and James Taylor.

Awards were given for each medium.

Contact reporter Rebecca Rider at 704-797-4264.