Valley Conservation Council teams up with local artist for educational, fundraising series

Artist Jennet Inglis and Valley Conservation Council are teaming up to produce a three part series of fundraising and educational events that link the honoring of nature in fine art with scientific conservation practices. Oct. 11, from 2-4 is the launch event at 134 East Beverly St. (second floor studio), Staunton.

VCC and Inglis Art share common goals: emphasizing the importance of the Shenandoah Valley, inspiring immediate and long-range education, and exploring the fertile intersection between conservation science and art’s language of natural order and natural beauty.

Bruce Rinker, PhD., executive director of Valley Conservation Council, is a Gaian scientist and science educator. Rinker states, “I respect Jennet as an artist and a scientist who nurtures and explores the belief and practice that land is sacred.”

One of Virginia’s premier land trusts, the Valley Conservation Council is a member-supported nonprofit that protects the natural resources, cultural heritage, and agricultural vitality of the greater Shenandoah Valley region. VCC provides advocacy, leadership, technical expertise, and training to help Valley residents keep our land heritage intact. Celebrating 25 years of conservation work, VCC and its partners have conserved tens of thousands of acres of private farms and forests in Virginia.

Inglis is an award winning internationally known fine artist residing here in Staunton. Inglis’s goal for her landscape painting is to preserve and translate her sense of the Shenandoah Valley’s unspoiled structural integrity, thus its natural order of beauty. Her study of the Valley’s geology, geography and topography sustain her contract with science. For Jennet, the Valley’s sweet-chanting rivers open channels of awe, and the spiritual saturation of light reveals the inviolate divinity of the land of the Shenandoah.

At the benefit Rinker will give a short talk about the mission of Valley Conservation Council. Jennet Inglis is offering a percentage of all art sales that day to benefit the ongoing work of VCC.

For more information contact Mari Selby 540-851-0864