First Friday at The Ware Center to Showcase Local Artists, Musician Alex Brubaker, 8/1

Free music and art exhibitions will be open to the public Friday, August 1 at the Ware Center in downtown Lancaster, as part of Lancaster's First Friday. All are invited to drop in between 6 and 8 p.m. to enjoy the exciting acoustic guitar music of Alex Brubaker and see artwork by local artists Bruce Fry, Richard Huck and Jeremy Waak, as well as meet the artists.

Denver, Pa. resident, Alex Brubaker, is quickly gaining a reputation as an exciting, young musician who has placed himself at the forefront of musical experimentation. As a teenager in garage bands, his music leaned toward rock and heavy metal. After four years of music lessons Brubaker began focusing on developing his own style, based on the percussive fingerstyle genre. Today, his "post-percussive fingerstyle" combines guitar-body percussion, alternate tunings, two-handed tapping, lap tapping, live looping, multiple guitars, and everything else he can think of that enables the guitar to be used in new and exciting ways. He released his debut album, "Deconstructing the Temporal Lobe" on Sept. 11, 2009.

Bruce Fry, a member of the local Echo Valley Art Group, is a former math teacher who returned to college to "realize the artist in me," said Fry. He went on to earn a master's degree in visual art from Vermont College and has exhibited at the Demuth Foundation and the Lancaster Museum of Art. Captivated early on by black-and-white nude portraits by his photography teacher, Stephen Phillips, Fry now concentrates on his "painting beginnings," and is particularly interested in the nude figure along with studies from nature and abstractions. Fry has taught art at Penn State Harrisburg, York College, York Institute of Art and Linden Hall.

Richard Huck, who uses his own photography as a base for his artwork in colored pencil, describes himself as "somewhat of a 'photorealist,' or, more accurately, a 'photo-surrealist.' " Also a member of Echo Valley Art Group, Huck graduated from Millersville University with a degree in art education and has taught art at the high school level in Ephrata for 40 years until retiring last year. Huck has won numerous awards, including Best of Show in the Colored Pencil Society of America's annual international exhibition, and has exhibited worldwide, including solo shows in Paris, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City.

Jeremy Waak was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. As the son of a mechanic, his artistic vision would be influenced by cars, engines and all things mechanical. Though Waak is also adept at drawing and painting, he later studied metalsmithing as both an undergraduate student at Memphis College of Art and as a graduate student at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he studied under world-renowned metalsmith Richard Mawdsley and spent a semester at Surry College of Art University in Great Britain. After moving to Lancaster in 2005, Waak began teaching at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design and is currently renovating a 19th-century warehouse and blacksmith shop to live and work in.