Kimberly (Kimmi Lou, to her pals) Brookshire, a native of Clark County born at the Guerrant Clinic and a 30-something year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service, has a photography show in the library’s Rose Mary Codell Brooks Community Room during October. 

Working for the Forest Service gave her opportunities to travel all across the U.S. from south Florida to central Alaska, where she photographed many of the landscapes, seascapes and buildings.

Kim takes pictures for her own pleasure, so she was a little reticent about showing her photographs. Encouragement from friends and inspiration gleaned from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” (about not letting perfectionism put the kibosh on creativity) gave her the confidence she needed to exhibit her work.  It’s a wonderful show.

This show has no images manipulated by special filters or developing techniques. If her work has a tradition, it’s the family album, and that is exactly what makes her pictures so interesting. 

The most exotic image is an angel in a tombstone that’s been carved from a tree trunk. There are still-lifes of bridges, barns, scarecrows and Boonesborough. 

Patterns of color and textures of objects fascinate her: the side of a building made of terra cotta, concrete and wood; glowing foxtail grass bordering corrugated strands of chain link fence anchoring sunlit spider webs.

Thank goodness photographers like Kimmi Lou teach us to once again see the beauty and light right here.  

As she says in her artist’s statement: “My greatest hope is each person finds something that will make them laugh or at least smile….It is amazing what you can see if you look twice.”

Next time you’re at the library, stop in to take a good look at Kimmi Lou’s show. It’s free and open to the public for viewing whenever the Community room is not in use. 

There will be a show reception on Saturday, October 29, from 1 to 3 p.m. The reception is also open to the public. For more information, call 744-5661, ext. 110

Devotees of the macabre will thrill to know that circulation manager Caleb Diederich has reprised his “Gallery of Ghastly Graphics” for Halloween 2016 in the Community Room side display booth in the library lobby. 

Viewers of Wayne Barlow’s “Pacific Rim Concept Art” will probably never again be able to dine at a Red Lobster. Fuyuko Matsui’s “Keeping up the Pureness,” a take-off of “Ophelia” by John Everett Millais, is weird and eerie for lots of reasons, but I’ll let you decide why for yourself.  That’s what art’s all about, si?

Of all the pictures in Caleb’s display, I enjoy Will Sweeney’s “Diner” most because it’s the truest representation I’ve ever seen of the 3 a.m. crowd that inhabited the Toddle House at the corner of Euclid and High Street in Lexington in the 1980s. It’s real Nighthawk nostalgia.

Across the lobby, there’s a display of the “Toy’s Halloween.” Adventurous sheep, Raggedy-Ann, a plush toy dinosaur, Mr. and Jr. Potato-Head and lots of their friends wander the Trick-or-Treat night street in front of a Spooky Old House under a gloomy sky. 

Library Director Julie Maruskin put together that display, cutting the house out freehand with a box knife and a Baker and Taylor box.  Imagination is not confined to books at the Clark County Public Library.

So, come on in, check out the displays and photographs and while you’re here, browse through all the library books and materials you need to make this Halloween season spooky.  The library has materials on everything from decorations to costumes.

Not to mention a two-CD set entitled “George Jones: The Tender Years.” 

And what can be spookier than that?