Judith Christensen

mixed media

For me, an artist’s book has content, often text, and sometimes image, but not necessarily pages in the traditional sense. Tactile, three-dimensional surfaces—the side of a miniature house or an origami paper dress hanging on a string—function as pages. My interest lies in the significance of the everyday concerns of life—from baking bread to pruning a rose, to conversations at the breakfast table. And my curiosity extends to the framework in which our daily life unfolds, the home. I have been involved with building and remodeling as long as I can remember, so my artwork often explores the house as a physical object as well as a container for the functioning of our lives.

Becky Cohen

photography

The pandemic has given many of us time for reflection, and though global warming has been a longstanding worry for me, this past year my thinking more deeply about climate change has led to the beginning of a new series of image of the sky, the part of our atmosphere that we can see with the naked eye. 

Ellen Dieter

mixed media

When I paint, I throw caution to the wind, letting it out, expressing from the inside, deliberate, yet free… arbitrary, yet intentional. Moving paint around, mixing colors, trying new ideas thrills me and I can not not paint. My work is about the process. The image often comes secondary to the actual art making. I tend to work a lot in the abstract world of shape and color, line and form, painting intuitively, one brush stroke leading to the next. I find that there is a poetic spirituality in the process. Figures or landscapes may appear, even animals or food. Lines cross the canvas, words pop up out of nowhere. What happens next can be surprising and exciting. There is a definite chaos through which each work evolves. What is left behind my be visible or not, but I always know it is there. Creating, destructing, recreating….Figuring it out, as in life. I always hope the take away is an experience. That the viewer can see and relate to a story or a memory, whatever that experience may be for him or her.

Kaori Fukuyama

multi-disciplinary

Some experiments result in paintings or drawings that attempt to capture a particular radiance, some develop into three-dimensional objects whose form and surface emerge through direct engagement with the surrounding light, and others evolve as site-specific installations where viewers are invited to experience the spatial and temporal effect of light from multiple perspectives and at different times of the day. My work brings to light what is all around us in our everyday life yet often taken for granted, reminding us to contemplate the wonders of light through our perceptual process that makes us who we are.

William Gullette

painting

I paint a lot “en plein aire”, a French term for painting outside on location direct from your subject. The physical act is fraught with problems like changing light, weather, wind, bugs, people –  you get the idea. But nature is always the best teacher and the lessons learned are brought back and applied in studio paintings.

Paul Henry

wood

As a furniture maker, I know that the story often begins with me. As a craftsman who also works with antiques, I am aware that the story is already there, embedded in the objects that I am asked to restore. I delight in discovering the marks of the original maker, the evidence of the owner’s love or neglect, the impromptu repairs, the record of everyday use. Good furniture lasts for generations, carrying with it the visible memories of all who have used it. I have great respect for the tradition that created these objects.

Anne Mudge

sculpture

Process has always been important to my work. By linking my labor to a close collaboration with materials, I often feel privy to an act of emergence. The work often starts with a kernel of an idea, frequently forgotten, as the piece slowly builds through one action following another and another, until an intelligible form finally coalesces out of continual unfoldings and revelations

Norma Pizarro

mixed media

What we bring into our home becomes part of our being whether we are aware of this or not. The images we see daily become part of our subconscious, affecting our mood and sometimes even redirecting our energy. I trust intuition to be my guide and the beauty and sacredness of nature to be my inspiration. In my furniture and sculptural pieces, I use wood as my primary medium that I carve and shape mostly using hand tools. This approach allows me to carve intuitively, allowing the work to bring out an inner voice that would otherwise remain dormant.

Gail Schneider

mixed media

My present work is influenced by ancient Babylonian friezes of brick which often depicted animals and the violent conquest of nature and how these records of extinction and control come forward to us in our own time of trouble. Those first city experiments were based on mining, primarily soil and water, for the first large crops which depended on slavery and, at such an astonishingly early stage, conformity. I feel that civilization has so vastly expanded and made extraction the central issue of its survival that disappearance itself must be and will be dismissed. My desire is to bring a novel tension to these issues if we are going to have the multiple awarenesses necessary for the foundation of future alternatives.

Lynn Schuette

painting

Lynn is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, drawing, and mixed media. She often explores the body and nature, ranging from classical figurative and landscape painting to anatomical/medical imagery often laced with contemporary social issues.

About Still Life #2 (for Uvalde)

. . . maybe I wind up with fierce little intense paintings – a vitality that was taken away . . . still innocent and childlike . . . these paintings are for the children not the adults who failed them.

This piece is the second in my Still Life series which started in 2019, it attempts to use painting as a way to speak to issues of violence and develop work that upends what still life painting can be. The Still Life series was born out of the frustration I feel about all of the memorials for too many mass shootings of children. ..Still Life #2 is for the nineteen children who were shot and killed on May 24, 2022 at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas. Out of anger and sadness I again started my process by burning candles and pouring wax as well as researching the various aspects of the shooting. I was trying to find answers to my many questions and some insight into imagery that might speak. I struggled with how to create something for these fourth graders. I discovered that the children and their teachers from two different classrooms were together that morning to see a movie after attending their end-of-school-year awards ceremony. They were watching Lilo and Stitch (2002) about a young girl in Hawaii who befriends and adopts an extraterrestrial she mistakes for a dog. These nineteen paintings are spirit creatures* who will guide them back to the last time they laughed. Discover more about Lynn’s Still Life Series

Cheryl Tall

sculpture

Cheryl Tall’s sculpture uses metaphor and myth to create a surrealistic ceramic world. Her work touches on social and environmental issues, relationships, belonging and displacement, nostalgia, inherited histories, and our search for meaning and place. Myths and dream imagery have been a recurring theme in much of Tall’s work. By combining contemporary references with ancient stories, Tall seeks to explore the nature of being human.