First Friday Opening Reception: "Bathing Beauties at Play" - by Eileen Butler
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time
- Friday, Jun 5, 2026 5pm - 8pm
Location
C'Ville Arts
118 E Main St
Details
As our featured artist for the month of June, Eileen will share a new collection of mosaics, collages, and paintings inspired by the ocean and celebrating joyful abandon, human connection, and the healing power of nature. Come meet the artist at her opening show on Friday, June 5th from 5-8pm during the Historic Downtown Mall’s First Friday event. Our friends at Blenheim Winery and Vineyards will be joining us to serve up some of their iconic Virginia wines!
This brand-new series of work is rooted in the spirit of the beach, a place of freedom, healing, memory, and pure play. The ocean is both sanctuary and source, a landscape where heat, wind, plants, salt water, and light dissolve boundaries and return us to something elemental.
“I am unmistakably a saltwater girl,” says Eileen. “These paintings are scenes from memory, favorite days spent camped out on a favorite beach, recollections of the glaring sun on skin, dripping, splashing, laughing.”
Through acrylic paintings, hand-painted collages, and glass and tile mosaics, this work captures the energy of people frolicking in the surf, digging in the sand, thrashing through waves, and surrendering to the rhythms of tide and air. Vibrant color, layered textures, and fractured reflective surfaces echo the movement of water, shifting skies, and sunlit salt on skin.
Her hand painted collages are built from painted fragments assembled into new forms, mirroring the way the sea reshapes and reconnects what it touches. Each piece of paper begins as a fluid exploration on its own, moving paint colors, blending or stippling and splashing, like playing in waves in the sound.
The mosaics shimmer with iridescent light and texture, invoking shells, sea glass, tides, and minerals worn smooth by time.
Across every medium, Eileen’s work celebrates joyful abandon, human connection, and the healing power of nature.
These pieces invite you to remember the feeling of heat on your skin, sand between your toes, wind in your hair, and salt in your veins, that moment at the beach where play becomes spiritual, and freedom feels infinite.
ABOUT EILEEN BUTLER
Growing up on the Long Island Sound in New York, her favorite color became water - turquoise. Some call it aqua or teal, the color of a body of water so clean, it can reflect a pure sky and change with the breeze. You can see straight through to the sand or pebble floor. The color, light & movement evoked are magical. Turquoise is a rare stone and is not often seen in nature away from the sea. It always surprises and inspires feelings of relaxation, tranquility and calm. Water and wind infuse all of Eileen’s work.
Eileen’s art takes various forms and media which allows her to invent ways to make the art speak for itself. Mosaics represent the hard surfaces of her rocky North Shore Beaches, incorporating the fluidity of the sea in her designs. It’s not until the first piece of a series is completed that she has uncovered the process, it’s new every time she begins anew, whether in paint or in mosaic. This way of working keeps her art fresh and frees her to focus on the challenges of creating liquid and solid surfaces while letting the colors speak up. Richness is achieved through mixtures of media with layers of colors for the sake of surprise or whimsy.
You can find Eileen behind the counter at C’ville arts several times each month and at Scrappy Elephant teaching Mosaics.
