The Co-op has more than two dozen member artists whose talents include painting, carving, blacksmithing, sculpture, stained glass, photography, furniture making, basketry and more.
Read on to learn more about the individual artists and their work.
Joy Cooper
Joy Cooper
and her husband
Doug host guests from all over the world in their bed
& breakfast, Nakiska Chalet. Joy is a native West Virginians and whitewater paddler. She enjoys exploring West Virginia and sharing those experiences with her watercolors. She seriously began to paint in 1995 and offers her work on her website and in Artists at Work Gallery in Elkins, Showcase West Virginia at the Charleston Town Center, Tamarack in Beckley, and several other shops and galleries. Joy has exhibited her work in state and local art shows, and she has been pleased that several have received awards. Joy is a Juried member of the West Virginia Watercolor Society and Allied Artists of West Virginia.
Kay Gillispie
The works of watercolor artist
Kay Gillispie have
been accepted in numerous exhibitions and earned her recognition as a
juried artist at Tamarack. Her paintings have appeared in the WV
Department of Natural Resources Wildlife
Calendar and in Wonderful West Virginia.
She is also active at Artists at Work, in Elkins. Nature gives Kay the
greatest inspiration for her paintings. She studies shapes and forms of
plants and animals in resource books and in her photographs
of wildlife in the Monongahela National Forest areas near her home.Ed Jett
Bird Brains
Creating
the products that have become the vehicle of Bird Brains is a
constant challenge and a guilty pleasure for Ed Jett. It is a guilty
pleasure, he says,
because customers actually pay him for something that he has such
fun doing. The constant challenge is to ensure that his creations are
interesting, well made and unique. Ed truly enjoy all three phases of
producing 
his whimsical yet
functional bird houses and unique oil
lamps. Ed's search for materials takes him to flea markets, yard sales, auctions, thrift stores, scrap yards, mountain streams and southwestern deserts. Sometimes past customers even bring items they think he could use. The wood for the houses and feeders come from local forests, turned into lumber by a nearby sawyer. Much of the wood for the rock oil lamp boxes (and some houses) comes from the rescued siding of a turn-of-the-century railroad hotel.
Tom Melko
Eye of Gandalf Photo Works
Photographer
Tom Melko shoots black & white images with antique cameras made
between 1939 and 1970. Tom crafts each of his prints by hand in his
darkroom in Green Bank. No digital or mass production techniques are
involved; therefore, no to images are exactly alike.Tom draws inspiration for his photographs from Clyde Butcher in the Florida Everglades, who in turn was inspired by the legendary Ansel Adams' work in the American West decades ago. Tom's images are his way of capturing the natural beauty of West Virginia, Florida or other places of interest the old-fashioned way, one image at a time.
José Rodríguez-Vélez
Bird of Wood
Woodcarver José
Rodríguez-Vélez is
known for his astonishingly life-like carvings of birds, combining his
love of carving with his studies and training a biologist and
ornithologist.José became interested in woodcarving as a youngster who observed, mesmerized, as his grandfather carved and shaped the body of musical instruments called "cuatros" out of blocks of precious tropical hardwoods. José would dream
about getting his hands on those
rudimentary carving tools, reproducing those same shimmering curvy
shavings as and soaking in the aroma of freshly carved mahogany and
Spanish cedar.Today, his work has earned him recognition at the Ward Wildfowl Carving Competition in Ocean City, Maryland and as a juried artist at West Virginia's Tamarack.
Drew Tanner
Drew Tanner began his journey in photography during his travels to Belize and South Africa as a a student of International Studies. He has since turned his lens toward closer, more familiar subjects in the community and region where he now lives, attempting to capture the character and strong sense of place of the Allegheny Highlands.
While Drew uses digital equipment in his newspaper work, he has a passion for creating gelatin-silver prints and enjoys the alchemy of the black-and-white darkroom.
His work is regularly published in The Pocahontas Times, where he has been a staff writer and photographer since 2004. His photographs have also appeared in Greenbrier Valley Quarterly, the Washington City Paper and The Sun. Selections of Drew's photographs were recently exhibited at the Randolph County Community Arts Center's Juried Gala Exhibition.