Local artists show off talent at the Forge

First published Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024 in the Dundalk Eagle.

Two Dundalk artists, one a high school rising sophomore at George Washington Carver Center for the Arts and Technology and one a special education teacher in Harford County, displayed their vivid art at the Forge on Thursday.

Nuro Wooters, the sophomore, created sculptures and a human-sized fursuit based on characters in his self-published book “The Death of Azeroth Fikor: The Beginning.”

Wooters said they made the suit by making a pattern and cutting out fabric, then sewing all the pieces together. As they tinkered with the suit and clay and fabric for the sculptures, they thought it would make a good book.

“So I started planning up ideas, other characters, a basic storyline that I could build off of,” he said.

Wooters started the process at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year when The Forge came to him with an offer of putting his art on display.

“I wasn’t even expecting for them to come forward and ask me if I wanted to do an art gallery in the first place,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh, all right.’ And it ended up working out pretty well.”

Courtney Tonelson’s art, meanwhile, only took a week to make since she takes two hours for herself at the end of every day to paint. At first, she planned on including only nature paintings, she said, until the Francis Scott Key Bridge fell.

“The Key Bridge is just so important to the community,” she said. “Everyone wanted that Key Bridge picture, so I made prints. The prints have been going really fast.”

In fact, that painting was the first to sell, she said.

The gallery gives both artists important exposure. Tonelson said the gallery netted her several new commission requests. Usually, she said, she makes portraits, but she’s gotten many new requests for animal paintings.

Part of her success could be her low prices — a print of one of her paintings can go for as little as $7.

“Everyone should be able to afford good art in their home,” she said. “Everyone should be able to afford a portrait of their family or a portrait of their animal.”

Wooters, too, wants to open up commissions.

“I’m planning on making fursuit commissions just to pay for college,” he said. “Because MICA is expensive and I need that college money.”

A professionally made fursuit can go for upwards of $7,000 — though it’s possible to get “lucky,” he said, and get one for $3,000 by a less well known creator. Purely the fabric for the fursuit depicting Maisey, one of the characters from his book, cost $500, he said.

“It’s sometimes outrageous, but it’s kind of self-explanatory because the process that I went through trying to make this was stressful,” Wooters said. “It took a lot of hours of sewing. My hands were cramping by the end of making the costume.”