The current Falls Church Arts Gallery exhibition, running October 4 – November 16, 2025, focuses on artworks that are “created on or include paper.” Both theme and material are simple, and yet the show exhibits unexpected variety.
We start with Suzanne Updike’s “Library Lion,” in which we see a remarkable example of a “reduction linocut.” Frederick Walton devised the material we know by a similar name, linoleum, in the 1800s. This work, however, might best be described as a more modern example of the even earlier process known as woodblock printing so commonly used in classical East Asian art. Here the artist uses it simple but impressive effect to depict “one of the lions guarding the library on Fifth Avenue in New York City.”
If ever there has been photorealism, “We’ll Always Have Paris” would be it! This work at first glance appears to be a scratchy black-and-white analog photograph, but upon further inspection, to one’s amazement, it is in fact a charcoal drawing. Here we see an odd angle of the Eiffel Tower through which captivating details become prominent parts of the image. The building, as many may know, was originally conceived for the 1889 World’s Fair. The tower is an incredibly complex engineering feat, and here we see that incredible form equally impressively flattened onto paper, holding the three dimensionality with jaw-dropping detail. To create such a work in any medium is something extraordinary, but to do so with a powdery, free-flowing, easily movable medium such as charcoal places this work in a league all its own.
Moving from this impressive work of the Eiffel Tower, the visitor to the exhibition notices many other works in the show also depcit a French theme. Keith Thurston, the Falls Church Art Gallery director, noted that for this exhibition “we could have had an entire wall of France-inspired art!” Francophiles will enjoy, for instance, Susan Sanders’ monochrome photograph “A Wedding,” in which bride and groom are seated outdoors at a café in Paris with just a touch of a 1940s noir film. The artist notes: “To bring out the bride’s beauty and the soft elegance of her dress, I chose to print on Hahnemuhle ‘Torchon.’ This is a paper with muted texture and cool white tones.”
Continuing along French paper lines, Nancy Newman’s watercolor “Bienvenue” depicts a home front from a French town. The artist’s crinkled Masa paper lends the stones a textured look. The “welcoming” title makes the audience wonder at the title—perhaps the painting is from the perspective of the homeowner returning home from a long journey.
French art aficionados will also admire James Hengst’s intriguing combined image of an Auguste-Louis Lepère 1911 etching of Reims Cathedral with a 2019 photograph taken in this location by Mr. Hengst himself. Sylvie Kostrzewski’s hot air balloon in three-dimensional paper rounds out our “tour de France,” for the artist notes: “As a French woman, I have always been fascinated by hot air balloons. The sculpture is made with folded pages of a Japanese book.”
We move to a wonderful and much-needed tribute to the recent past with Gretchen D’Amore’s “Morning Commute,” for she paints warmly and with vibrant colors the days when commuters were seen reading newspapers on the metro instead of being glued to their cell phones. While on the subject of vivid colors, it is also a welcome and seasonal sight to see the changing hues of leaves in DiCarlo’s “Morning Walk at the MSV: Shenandoah, Virginia,” a highly realistic acrylic painting. The leaves are green and yellow, yet with an autumnal monochromatic background.
In our final appreciation of a work from the “Paper” exhibition, seven mysterious slender figures are shown in this acrylic artwork by Elise Ritter-Clough entitled “Messengers.” Artist Ritter-Clough explains that “the intention was to create an ethereal and other-worldly depiction of spirits.” Although the spirits are faceless, they are wearing warm-toned fabric with intricate patterns in red and orange with cool tones of blue and green behind them, again a tribute to the lively use of color on paper in artworks which may be seen aplenty in this exhibition which has something to offer for all.