TRANSCRIPT
Christopher Prawdzik: Hey everybody. Chris Prawdzik here from Samson Properties. You may have seen one of our recent real estate market videos. But today, we’re doing a special feature on Nepenthe Gallery, this great business in the Hollin Hall shopping center. Let’s check it out.
Chris Prawdzik: Hey Carrie. How you doing?
Carrie Garland: Hey Chris.
Christopher Prawdzik: Good to see you.
Carrie Garland: Good to see you.
Christopher Prawdzik: Thanks for having us.
Carrie Garland: Thanks for coming to Nepenthe.
Christopher Prawdzik: We’re here at Nepenthe with Jim and Carrie Garland. And we just came to talk about their wonderful gallery they have here. Just wanted to start off by, tell me how it came about.
Jim Garland: You go.
Carrie Garland: Well, okay, Jim and I knew that we wanted to open a business and we have been thinking about this for years, and lots of different ideas. And, you know, that the time was drawing near. We have four kids and our youngest is a senior in high school. So, the time has arrived for us to move on.
So, we thought one of the most important ideas, or fun ideas, sounded like working close to home. We love Hollin Hall shopping center. I always say, it’s an iconic shopping center in this amazing neighborhood that we live in, community. And so, we thought, okay, we’re going to be in a shopping center in Hollin Hall. What, what kind of business would that look like? Art gallery was idea that a friend of ours talked about, and art has always been real important to our family. My family has a collection of art, and Jim Googled: How can you make an art gallery even more successful? And what was the answer?
Jim Garland: It said to open a frame shop. It was basically, how do you sustain an art gallery? It said to open a frame shop. So, I said to Carrie, we are opening a frame shop. And that was it. And then I did an apprenticeship with a gentleman up in Delaware. So, we added that component, and they really worked well together. And so here we are.
Carrie Garland: Jim said, you know what we need to name the art gallery? Nepenthe. It was named after a restaurant out in Big Sur in California—on the coast, in California. And my parents lived out there in the 60s and fell in love with this restaurant. Nepenthe is a Greek term that translates basically into “a place of no sorrow.” So, a perfect spot, aptly named for an art gallery. My mom always says about art: It’s a respite from daily life or daily stresses. And so, we really envisioned a place where people can come in and look around and really forget about what’s troubling them. And we feel like we’ve achieved it. So that’s how the name came to be.
Christopher Prawdzik: Do you specialize in any specific type of art?
Carrie Garland: We have an item from our family’s collection here at all times. That was one thing that we knew we wanted to do. It’s not for sale, but it’s on view, and that’s sort of tilts us into a fine art category and also into an art education, you know, a place of enrichment. So, obviously, we want a business that is sustainable and pays the bills, but we also love the idea of people coming in here to view art and to learn about art. That’s why we have our weekly art, wine, and cheese events on Thursday nights.
So, having one piece from our family’s collection was important to us. And also featuring local artists was important to us, giving artists who live and work around the Hollin Hall area, the Fort Hunt-DC area, a place to come, and maybe have their art on display. We’ve done a lot of that with local artists. And then we also, of course, we love finding art from all over the country and all over the world. We were doing that all the time. So, we have artists from really all over the world.
And the last thing, the last component of what we’re trying to do, is we have also, we find things at auctions that are interesting to us, that we enjoy, that we think our customers would like, and that are special, and that are created by renowned, famous artists. We think it’s nice to have pieces like that on the wall. And with the frame shop, we can get those things in house, and open them up, and check their quality, and Jim can reframe them in a way that’s special, that puts a Nepenthe touch on them. We have those available for sale. So, that’s our offering.
Carrie Garland: Our family has a collection of art. It’s mostly 19th century American art, and it’s currently on permanent loan at the College of William and Mary in their Museum, the Muscarelle Museum.
We started with a piece by a man named Theodore Butler, an artist who painted alongside Claude Monet and actually married one of Monet’s daughters. That was here from the time we opened until just a couple, a month or so ago.
This is the second piece from the collection that is here. My mom is a former docent at the National Gallery of Art. She did that for over 40 years, so she is the art historian in the group. She selected this piece next from her collection to represent the bounty of our nation, aptly displayed during this time of the fall, in the harvest, and Thanksgiving, and those things. This is by an artist named Severin Roesen. And it’s called “Two Tiers of Fruit and a Strawberry Compote.”
Mom did a gallery talk about this piece a couple weeks ago, and she’ll do another one before we rotate it. After the first of the year, we’re going to have a new piece here. But we’re loving this, and Mom does a great job of pulling pieces of art from our Nepenthe collection that are similar, or similar in style, to compare and contrast. And it’s just it’s one of the things that we do on Thursday that’s that makes us really like an art enrichment, art resource, place for the community.
Severin Roesen, as an artist, was really a character, someone who was pretty beloved in his community. Works of his are in the most important museums in the world, so we feel like having works like this here makes us better stewards of everyone’s art. And we found that artists who, local artists who are here, appreciate having their works hanging alongside something like this. You know, by the renowned level of artists. Like I said, it just makes us take, really, a more serious approach to taking care of everyone’s art.
Christopher Prawdzik: So, talk to me a little bit about the building and why you chose to have your gallery here.
Carrie Garland: I love talking about Hollin Hall Shopping Center. As we all know, it’s a special place. We, in talking with so many different people before we opened the gallery, this one woman who owns a gallery on the west coast told us: “Don’t open in a shopping center, and don’t open near a hardware store.” So, I thought, oh no. But no, we weren’t worried at all. We love it here. We wanted to walk to work, which is what we can do. We do that very often. But the shop, this shopping center, is unlike most, you know. We got the variety store and the hardware store, so we knew it was a place that people come. They come from all around the region to Hollin Hall.
So, we’re really happy to be here. Our family, actually has a little bit of connection to the family who owns the shopping center. It’s been family-owned for four generations, which we love, which is why I think it’s been so thriving all these generations. My mom went to kindergarten with one of the folks in the family, so we knew that was a good connection.
But about ten years ago, they added these windows in this space because they thought this would make a great art gallery, so we do feel like we are helping the owner realize that. And the owner is a collector, and we hope to make him a customer someday. But we love being here.
Jim Garland: So, something that is important to know about Nepenthe Gallery is the wide variety of art, size, price, style that we offer, so you know, from big oil paintings to small acrylics to, I mean what else, watercolors and then we kind of run the gamut.
Carrie: Wood blocks, glass art.
Jim: Wood, glass art, yeah. We have one artist who paints encaustic, is that how you pronounce it? Encaustic, which is beeswax. But you can see stuff like this. They just have so much vibrant color to them, which I think is really fun. We wanted that vibrancy in here. And then we even have big works like this from our newest artist, Monique Rollins.
And so, the interesting thing here is it you can come in and buy a piece of art as a gift for maybe two, three, four, or $500, upwards of twenty-five, thirty, $50,000, depending on what your price range is. So, I think it’s great to know that you can come in to buy a gift for a loved one. Or you can buy something, like Carrie said, that you add to your collection. That really could be something that increases in value over time, and something that you, really, pass down as an heirloom to your children.
That’s kind of what we’ve tried to do, is really hit the market: all types of different styles of art, kinds of art, price points that people could come in and enjoy. And just come in and look around, because it really is a great wide-open space with lots of color and brightness.
Christopher Prawdzik: Okay, you talked a little bit about the variety of artwork that you have in here. What if you’re an artist, and want to contact you about art you have and want to display it? If you have availability for that, how does that work?
Carrie Garland: Absolutely. We have four movable walls in Nepenthe, and one of them, which is in the back of the gallery right now, but it’s often moved around, is for friends of Nepenthe. When we opened, one of the things we wanted to do was give our family members and friends an opportunity who are artists to hang their works in the gallery where they otherwise wouldn’t have that chance, so we have works hanging, and we always will keep that list active.
But early on we realized that there are a lot of artists in our community, and we love supporting them. So, we do have a process now where anyone who would like to have us take a look at their works, just send them to us in an email to either to my mom or Beth Hammond. They are the curators here. And we go from there.
And so, I can encourage anyone who would like to do that to do that, to do that. And then we also curate two exhibits. They are called the Solstice series. We do one in the summer and one in the winter, where we highlight four, five, six, eight of our local artists. And they each have six or eight works that they bring in. And we have an exhibit that we keep up for a few weeks. We did that in June, and had great fun doing it. And a couple of those artists actually, we have taken on as Nepenthe [artists], they are here all the time now. And we’re putting together the list for January, which is already full. We’re really excited to support the local artists.
Christopher Prawdzik: The last thing I have for you is, as real estate agents, we deal with a lot of people, a lot of homeowners, and what might you suggest to them? They have a new house. They want to put something on the walls. But they have, no, they don’t know where to start. They don’t know what to do. What would you suggest for someone in that situation?
Carrie Garland: Well, we, I would suggest that they come into Nepenthe, obviously, but they could also come in or call and make an appointment. And we can walk through our entire collection with them. We have about double the amount of art on the walls here downstairs in our storage area, which is right near, or the part of, Jim’s frame shop. So that’s one thing they could do.
And another thing they can do which we’ve done with a few people, and we love it, is they could identify some of the art, and artists, the styles they like, and then we pick a date. And we bring a couple dozen works of art to their home and spend a few hours hanging things on the walls in different places, to see what they, what they like. What works well together.
We did that with one woman, one customer, and you guys, she came in afterwards with almost tears in her eyes. And she said, we made her house a home because now, it’s full of art that she would never have known.
Jim Garland: Yeah, I think what’s important is that they came in and looked at some of the art and really enjoyed it. And so, we took them some of that. They, they knew what they wanted to see. And then we just picked up some random stuff that they had never even seen and took it to them. One of those pieces, which was a great one by artist Gary Fisher, and they ended up buying it, and then doing some other stuff from him, too because they just loved it. And they would have never, they said, in the gallery on the wall, they never would have picked it. But once it was in their home, they could totally see that it fit in the right spot.
Carrie Garland: So, it was really cool to do that. And we’re going to add that to our website where, we, Nepenthe, can come to your home or your office with some of our art.
Another advantage to having a business right here in your own community is it’s not unusual for a customer or friend to find a piece of art here, and take it home to see how it works at their house, and then they come back and either buy it or bring it back.
Jim Garland: Yeah, maybe hang it for a few days so they can a look at it at different times of the day and night, and have other people look at it and if they enjoy it just come back and pay for it. And if not, they just bring it back and maybe trade it out and try something else.
Jim Garland: Okay guys, welcome to the frame shop. This is where all the framing takes place. Just to give you a quick example. We start with stick. I usually order this in about eight-foot lengths, white black gold, whatever people may want. This machine here is called a guillotine chopper, and that chops a perfect 45-degree angle.
Then I take those two and put them together. They go in this underpinner machine here, which then staples the backs together. And I can program the machine for any molding I want. And then it memorizes it, and can do it again. So, that’s how we make the frames.
And then we have a mat cutter over here in the back. The mat cutter can cut out however many layers I want. It can also cut out 8 ply, 4 ply. It can do multiple openings. And basically, you get a cut out like this, which is perfectly square and has the beveled edge. Over here, we have my glass cutter.
And also, over here is a glass cutter and the mat cutter. And then this over here is called a heat press. And that presses like posters and stuff to a hardboard so that it can be framed. And so, that’s basically the process.
Christopher Prawdzik: Thanks for having us. You’ve got a great gallery. We wish you the best of luck.
Carrie Garland: Well, thank you. Thanks for coming in.
Jim Garland: Great having you guys in.
Carrie Garland: Come back on Thursday night.
Christopher Prawdzik: We will.
Christopher Prawdzik: Hey, thank you for watching. Make sure you hit the subscribe button so you can be alerted to other community videos, news, and real estate information. We will see you soon.
