ARTISTS AMONG US: 'BORDERS: REGIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION' TO OPEN AT LORIMIER GALLERY

"Elizabeth" by Craig Thomas of Cape Girardeau

"A Light Behind the Shadows" by Eric Ejchler of Cape Girardeau

"Settle for a Roll, Mr. Fox?" by Aaron Horrell of Chaffee

They are your neighbors, people you see every day strolling down the street or walking through the aisles of the supermarket. You find them at their jobs or sitting next to you in a classroom or in a movie theater. They are your neighbors, your friends.

But they are more. They are also artists.

The artistic works of these neighbors and friends will be on display when a new month-long exhibit, "Borders," opens Friday at the Lorimier Gallery in Cape Girardeau.

"Borders" is the 17th annual regional juried exhibition sponsored by the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri featuring artists from within a 100-mile radius of Cape Girardeau. The exhibition was expanded last year to 100 miles to bring in artists from further away.

This year's entries, 65 in all, were submitted by artists from Farmington to Carbondale. Daniel North, executive director of the Arts Council, said the council eventually hopes to include St. Louis artists in the exhibition.

Being an artist isn't a full-time occupation for these people.

"When you're an artist here in Southeast Missouri you can't stop working at some other job," said Aaron Horrell of Chaffee.

In addition to his artwork, Horrell, who has three pieces in the exhibit, works four days a week at a hardware store in Jackson.

"It is like two different worlds," he said.

Though he has painted off and on since 1972, Horrell said that for the last five or six years he has been doing more. The added work has paid off. At last year's "Borders" exhibition, he was one of three artists awarded a prize.

The award-winning work led to a exhibition of Horrell's art at the University Museum. Horrell calls his works "phaintings" because they are combinations of photos and paintings, an art form Horrell says he created.

In this year's exhibition, Horrell will have one "phainting," "Settle for a Roll, Mr. Fox?" Horrell calls it a spoof of the children's story of the gingerbread man who is eventually eaten by a fox. In addition to the landscape he has painted, it includes the photographic images of his daughter, Toni, his niece, Emily, and a fox whose picture he took one day in the woods.

Horrell did not start with the story of the gingerbread man in mind but began the artwork with 20 cut pieces of photographs in various colors and shapes. As he arranged them in various orders on the canvas -- a very time-consuming process, he said -- the idea began to form in his mind. It was, he said, as if the art created itself.

His two other pieces are more traditional, impressionistic paintings of places he has visited in the area. One, entitled "Evening at Mingo," is "from a memory" he had of a visit to the wildlife refuge.

"I like to go down there and fish, look at the ducks and the wildlife," he said.

Another award winner from last year, Travis Perr from Jackson, will have three pieces in this year's exhibit, including one of the exhibit's more unusual pieces. North describes it as "a coffee table transformed into artwork."

Perr has "taken the traditional two-dimensional medium of painting and merged it into a three-dimensional form," North said.

Perr, who works most days printing T-shirts for Custom Screen Printing, said the piece was actually made so that it can be used as a coffee table, though an abstract painting also is part of it.

Of the 65 submissions, 20 pieces juror Ronald Clayton chose 20 for exhibition. Clayton, a graduate of the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art and a name on the Chicago art scene, currently teaches painting and drawing at Southeast Missouri State University.

The exhibit opens Friday at Lorimier Gallery, 119 Independence in Cape Girardeau, and will be open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Feb. 28. An opening reception will be held on Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. at the gallery. Both the exhibit and the opening reception are free and open to the public.