Meanwhile, over at the Virginia Museum’s Studio School Gallery is another fine exhibition to take in without moving the car. This one, titled “Painterly Prints and Folding Images” is a compendium of select works by students of the monotype classes featured regularly at the Studio School. Facilitated by Mary Holland, a former founding artist member of the Richmond Printmakers’ Workshop, this collection of prints demonstrates the light, liberating medium of monotype. Many painters employ monotype as a technique to release themselves from old patterns of representation in order to develop their work in fresh ways. The works on display illustrate the spontaneous and serendipitous effects of this art form, using watercolor, oil, Carand’ache crayon and printer’s ink to achieve unique results

Polly Bullard’s caricatures of animals are delightful portraits of dogs and other friendly mammals, demonstrating their ability to assume highly evolved, wry expressions. Mary Watt New’s anthropomorphic “Green Chair” and leering “Faces in the Crowd” offer some psychological tension, as does Phyllis Biddle’s screaming self portrait (an expression of her rage at the pollen count, perhaps). Janet DeCover’s large abstract fragmented studies of clover forms provide a lyrical poetry to the exhibit, as does Sallie Thalhimer’s lovely little hazy representation of cedars along a Spanish road, and Sarah Master’s iconic series of nests. Other artists included in the show are Ann Davenport, Nancy David, Gordon Gibson, Janice McMurray and Mark Shepheard. “Painterly Prints and Folding Images” is on display through May