A show titled “Leftovers” was held at the Attic Gallery in downtown Vicksburg on Feb. 23. Lesley Silver, founder and owner of the gallery for over 50 years, had 22 artists show never-before displayed work at the exhibition.

Silver said she came up with the theme while thinking about all the art that people create which, for a variety of reasons, never gets shown to an audience.

Most of the pieces at the show had never seen the light of day. Silver said many artists picked pieces that “had never congealed, they had never made the statement they wanted, and they brought it together.”

“And if you look around, there’s nothing cohesive, no thread that ties them together. It’s just what’s coming from this artist’s mind,” she added. “Which can be eye-opening.”

Some artists chose to show their work in its found state, years after sitting in a pile of unfinished pieces, while others took the piece and modified it to try and capture what they were originally trying to accomplish.

The theme was deliberately open to interpretation.

“I felt like it was a broad enough theme that everybody could participate,” Silver said. “Because we all make leftovers.”

Some artists took the theme more literally; as a subject rather than a criterion. One painting in the show by artist Ron Lindsey was a still life featuring an antique coffee pot, various decorative dishes and a piece of fruit.

“These are leftovers,” Silver said. “These are things that you’ve put back into your kitchen and they’ve gravitated to the back of the cupboard.”

Silver said that one thing she liked about the theme was that it got the artists thinking about their work from a different perspective.

“You start looking at what you’ve got at home, you start pulling things out that have already been tampered with, and then you give it a new life,” she said. “And so I really think it gives an energy to people when they start, if they choose to start, (on the piece again).”

Silver has worked with many of the artists for decades, and added that she loves watching them grow creatively over the years.

“People are familiar with the artists that we have,” she said. “And this sounds hokey: we almost consider them family. Because you see how they think, you see how they feel, you see how they project and sometimes, they surprise you.”