Patti Edmon

Patti Edmond is a Lexington artist whose work pulses with color, layered mark-making and irrepressible sense of joy. Working in acrylic mixed media, Edmond builds her surface through an intuitive process—accumulating washes of saturated color, gestural drawing, stamped textures and collage elements that speak to one another across the picture plane.

Her paintings move between two distinct but related vocabularies. In her aqueous blue-green works, organic forms—leaf shapes, vessel-like curves, scattered dots—float in luminous fields of cyan and teal, suggesting gardens, water and the quiet rhythms of the natural world. Her warmer compositions in rose, magenta and gold carry an exuberant, almost musical energy, with loosely rendered blooms, drips, layered text fragments and bold graphic marks that give the work a spontaneous lyrical quality.

Throughout, Edmond’s hand remains visible and alive—lines loop and spiral, shapes emerge and dissolve, and no surface feels overworked. The result is painting that feels genuinely playful without being lightweight: there is real depth beneath the brightness, both literally in the layered surfaces and conceptually in the sense that each work is a record of discovery rather than a predetermined outcome.

Photo credit: Kevin Nance Photography

Constance Grayson

Constance Grayson is a Lexington-based contemporary artist working across acrylic painting, textile and mixed media. Her practice is rooted in a single obsessive question: how do things begin? Creation, origin, journey and transformation recur across every body of work she makes, approached from different angles and in different forms but never fully resolved—which is, she would say, the point.

Her Pictures at an Exhibition series—fifteen large-scale acrylic paintings in conversation with Mussorgsky’s piano suite—has been exhibited twice in Lexington to strong response. Her Creation series, a twenty-piece exhibition combining paintings, textiles and sculpture and a collaboration film drawing on global creation myths, opens at LexArts in November 2026.

Grayson previously operated the Caifiordi School of Art in Italy. She is the founder and director of Gallery 645 and Kids Place Lex, Inc., a nonprofit providing free arts education to foster children in central Kentucky. Her work is available through Gallery 645.

Photo Credit: Kevin Nance Photography

Darryl Halbrooks

Darryl Habrooks is a Lexington, Kentucky artist with a practice spanning more than fifty years and refusing easy categorization. Working primarily in acrylic on plexiglass with polyester and epoxy resin—and occasionally incorporating handmade paper, Legos or whatever else serves the work— Halbrooks brings a restless curiosity and a sharp wit to three different bodies of work that somehow cohere around a single sensibility.

His figurative paintings subvert the conventions of Russian religious iconography and European royal portraiture with deadpan irreverence: Madonnas check smartphones, saints cradle engine parts, sacred and secular collide without apology. His vertically oriented landscapes, inspired by the 38th parallel between his Kentucky and Colorado studios, distill the American West into urgent, luminous columns of terrain. His abstract work pursues pure color and material investigation in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists—though here too, transparency is both medium and metaphor, with plexiglass allowing viewers to see front and back simultaneously.

Guided by Hockney’s freedom and Sagan’s cosmic perspective, Halbrooks paints what interests him. After fifty years, that remains more than enough.

Honora Jacob

Honora Jacob is a Lexington, Kentucky artist whose paintings occupy a compelling space between the Old Masters and the contemporary—portraits of women rendered with the gravity and technical precision of Renaissance and Baroque court painting, set against backgrounds that fracture, pattern and recontextualize that tradition entirely.

Her subjects are timeless yet unsettled: women in elaborate ruffs, period dress and jeweled adornment who meet the viewer’s gaze with calm authority. They hold compasses, crystal spheres and orbs topped with crosses—objects that speak to navigation, knowledge, mystery and power. Around them, Jacob constructs richly layered environments, bold damask patterns, gold-leafed halos, pomegranate trees, floating geometric forms and abstract paint handling that refuses to let history stand still.

The tension between the meticulously painted figure and the flattened, decorative or gestural ground is where Jacob’s work comes alive. These women are not simply historical: they are archetypes—observers and oracles pulled out of time and placed into a present that is still reckoning with what female power looks like. The signature “H” in the corner feels less like a modest mark and more like a quiet claim.