The Nourishing Root Café and Coffee Shop, 100 1st St. SW, will host art installation by local artist Chris Childers titled “A Painting a Day” throughout the month of January 2023. Sales from the project will benefit the Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance Service (LMVAS).
Patrons are invited to watch the installation updated daily in real time by the artist as he installs the “Painting a Day” project inside the cafe. In the end, Childers’s 31 paintings will appear as a giant calendar on the east wall, each painting representative of a day in Iowa using weather patterns in Eastern Iowa to tell the story of Iowa in January.
“Mr. Childers is one of our regulars here and came to us with the idea of taking one wall and creating this daily installation throughout the cold month of January. We were excited to see what he could do and jumped at the opportunity to host this project,” said Marva Becker, owner of The Nourishing Root.
Artist Chris Childers, a new transplant to Mount Vernon, and originally from Minneapolis, will use the project to document his first full January as a resident of Eastern Iowa.
“My intent is to convey the mood of each particular day in January through small landscapes wrought with a pallet knife using oil paint. Each work will be informed by the light, temperature and overall weather conditions of the day it is painted,” said Childers. “I chose LMVAS to partner with because two of my friends and neighbors have benefitted recently from the local ambulance service. I know first-hand what a valuable service this is and wanted to help ensure its continued success.”
“This fundraiser comes at the right time for the LMVAS,” said Jake Lindauer, Director of the Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance Service (LMVAS). “Several of our volunteer staff need Emergency Medical Technician Training, the entry level of training for an ambulance service, and if Chris were to sell all of his 31 paintings during January, the proceeds would send one of our volunteer staff through this continuing education program.”
The complete collection of 31 pieces, each in a 4” x 4” format, will be a meteorological history of Eastern Iowa in January 2023.
Although all paintings will remain on the wall as part of the installation, each individual piece, signed and dated by the artist, will be on sale throughout the month with buyers only able to take possession of the individual pieces as of February 2023.
An example of Chris Childers’ artwork.