By Ed Wismer – Ocean City Sentinel Critic

OCEAN CITY (NJ) – To say Donna Clauer’s fabrications, on display at the Ocean City Arts Center, are a feast for the eyes is not a fabrication.

If you are laboring under the misapprehension art involving sewing is mere quilt making, you are very wrong. Before I am taken to task by those noble people who make quilts allow me to explain. Quilting techniques along with painting are used by Clauer, whose Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors must be proud, to take the art to a new level combining needle and brush.

Clauer comes with an impressive resume, but her work is even more eloquent. There are landscapes, still lifes and figure pieces painted in a sophisticated and subtle style, unified with a pattern of random stitchery that adds to their considerable charm.

Clauer’s work has great appeal and is affordable. This is attested to by her already brisk sales. The little red ‘sold’ stickers are as plentiful as flies around a butter churn. If you are looking for something to enhance the elegance of your home, it would behoove you to zip over to the Arts Center and do yourself a favor.

My favorites include "March Riverside," Charlie’s Horse," "Arizona," "Sunset Beach," "Tulips," "April Morning," "Victorian Interpretation," "Wild Flowers" and "Nicholas." The latter is one of the most whimsical Father Christmas’s you’ll ever see. A trip to Ocean City’s ‘miniature Lincoln Center’ is always worthwhile. The Arts Center is located at 17^th and Simpson Avenue, adjacent to the library and fitness center. Don’t ever say "I don’t know what to do with myself" or you will run afoul of the O.C. ‘culture police’.