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Guests at the Coutts Museum of Art Brown Bag Tuesday got a look at the newly remodeled museum, as well as a look at the Paint America exhibit now on display and some insight into what to look for in art.

“The first of the year we started a major renovation project,” said Rod Seel, Coutts director.
That encompassed all three floors of the museum, including painting, putting in wood floors and new lighting.

They also added an elevator and new stairway to all of the floors.
“A lot of people could never get up to the third floor,” he said, adding that it also was difficult to move heavy artwork between floors.

“We lost of lot of storage space, but the end result has been really good,” he said.
He also said they ended up with more wall space to hang exhibits than he thought they would have.

That wall space is now filled with 150 paintings that are part of the Paint America Top 100 Exhibit. That includes the 100 full-size paintings and then another 50 smaller paintings.

Seel explained the origins of Paint America, which he started in 2005.
He was semi-retired from his marketing job and after working to bring the Arts For the Parks national show to a gallery in Topeka, he decided to start his own national exhibit, Paint America Top 100.

“The process of working with them and doing that show gave me the idea to start this,” Seel said. “It took off really well.”

The show starts with a competition among national artists to be juried into the exhibit. That is about a six-month process. After he announced the winners that first year, the very next week it was announced the coordinators were shutting down Arts For the Parks.

Seel said he received several calls to take that exhibit over but he had his hands full with his new show.

As the week went on, he kept getting more calls about it.
“I gave it some thought and decided to take over the concept of Arts For the Parks,” Seel said, adding that the organizers of Arts For the Parks were trying to sell the show and everything that went along with it for $1 million.