Page 9 - Leisure Living Magazine July 2017

Herndon Galleries And Gardens Are A Treasure For Visitors To Kelleys Island
By Jerry Mix, Feature Writer
When you go to Kelleys Island this summer, be sure to put the Herndon Galleries and Sculp- ture Gardens on your agenda. Be prepared to be simply delighted by what you find when you go to Herndon’s. Cindy and Chuck Herndon have put together some wonderful pieces of art and you will want to take your time seeing the entire exhibit.
Chuck Herndon has been crafting pieces of art for a long, long time (56 years to be exact) and he and Cindy take great pride in showing you what is on display on Kelleys Island.
“I’m driven, I have to work,” Herndon explained on the day we visited them on the island. “It’s an obsession. I’m thinking all of the time when I’m working so that what occurs is sometimes better than I could have imagined.”
“Sometimes I start working with something in mind,” he con- tinued. “Then I see something else. But when I’m working, I also keep my brain working. I look at the stone and I see things in the stone. Things that could be.”
Over the years, he has worked in a host of different media in- cluding stone, wood and glass and when it suits him, Herndon also paints.
Charles Herndon’s sculpture Sun Spirals
“I never duplicate a piece,” Herndon said. “And that has been a difficult thing for me,” Cindy Herndon added. “I have some favorite pieces and then when they sell, I will never see them again.”
“Sometimes to keep something from selling, we would increase the price, but the pieces would sell anyway. They were good,” she explained.
Today at age 70 years old, Chuck is not turn- ing out pieces of art like he once did. Time and
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various and assorted injuries have taken a toll on him, but he still works.
“I do more paintings now than I used to do, but I don’t paint in the summer,” he explained. “I carve when the temperature is above 50 degrees. My air tools freeze below that temperature.”
There is now an unused stone quarry on the west side of Kelleys Island and over the years,
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