Artists Describing Their Art:
Rita Levinsohn - Welcome to my world of Other Realities. I am a painter of mystical figurative paintings and abstractions composed of acrylic paint and found objects. My concern is for the future of our planet. The animate and inanimate objects within the paintings reflect many incarnations. The message being that it is possible to create rather than destroy....
Alan Soffer - Alan Soffer began studying sculpture and clay in 1973 transitioning to abstract painting in 1985, through a breakthrough program at Bennington College with Sandy Stone. His abstractions have been in the pursuit of the unknown, unique, and personal depths of the unconscious. Rather than confining his energies to a single medium, he sensitively chooses materials that accommodate the concepts at hand. Early constructions were in clay and found objects, then discovering printmaking and photography, which he learned on his own. Finally, focusing on painting with acrylic, oil, and wax. Encaustics allowed him to marry a sculptural component to his painterly approach, following his studies at Ringling School in 1998. The hot, pigmented wax's inherent translucency perfectly supports his vocabulary for expressing space from the microscopic to the galactic. Whatever the direction, the work is always influenced by Joseph Campbell, the noted mythologist, who Soffer considers his mentor. He organized the first national encaustic conference in the US in 2005 and continues teaching encaustic technique as well as abstract painting primarily through workshops. Major one person shows have been presented at: DCCA, Wilmington DE; Borowsky Gallery, Phila.; Rosenfeld Gallery, Phila.; Widener U., Chester PA; Atlantic City Art Center; Robert Roman ...
Rasheed Amodu - RASHEED AMODU Artist Statement I started as a professional artist in 1985, before adding a Fine Arts degree, specializing in Painting, in 1991. One of my major aims is to wed creativity and artistic rendering in my artwork leading to diverse range of themes in my oeuvre. My graphic art background in Realism and my degree aided abstractions as well as impressionistic and expressionistic tendencies are often reflected in my artwork, which include my drawings, paintings, mixed media, and assemblages. I draw with pencil, charcoal, penink, and gouache on paper or embossed cards. My oil or acrylic paintings are usually on canvas. I do mixed media on paper, embossed card, and canvas. My assemblages are works produced with commonplace objects or personal items arranged and fixed on hardboard before being painted with oil or acrylic for aesthetic finesse. Some of the objects employed in my assemblages are beads, fabrics, combs, watches, straps, chains, cards, belts, spoons, forks, pens, ropes, lighters, shaving sticks, plugs, and bottle covers. The sources of the images I used in my works are from my society, literature on African art and foreign cultures as well as personal synthesis. I employed my artwork to visually document the ...
July Preobrazhencki - My style fully reflects me as a person - it is a tense disharmony, in many ways it is about blurring and fuzziness, about chaos. I use materials that capture a unique moment this is instaX after all, what can be more fragile than a photo the size of a credit card, this is printing on transparent paper and then transferring it to something, this is processing the image with salt and acids, this is transferring the image to scotch tape, giving a psychedelic structure with the help of ebru paints, this is tracing paper - like displaying the strings of the soul and breaking glass. I also do aEURoeghost imagesaEUR with the help of a clerical corrector and cyanotype, followed by computer processing....
Alexander Donskoi - BioStatement Alexander Donskoi- Visual Artist, Toronto Canada www.alexanderdonskoi.com
Carlos Madriz - CARLOS MADRIZ b. 1972 CARACAS aEUR" VENEZUELA Born and brought up in Caracas, in the mid-80s Carlos started experimenting with drawing, etching, silk-screen printing, design, painting and Street Art. It was at this time that he developed the skills and techniques needed to handle the X-Acto blades that became his constant companion for creating stencils, a defining characteristic of his artwork. He began producing small and medium size prints, small, medium and large paintings, and then murals. In the early 90 s, Carlos began studying at Caracas Advanced School of Arts and at the same time became involved in a number of projects born out of the local punk rock scene, including the design and creation of fanzines and posters and band merchandising activities such as designing and printing tee-shirts. In the mid-90,s he moved to San Francisco, California, where he completed his studies in painting and printmaking and took part in various collective mural projects, taught workshops and exhibited his artwork in a number of group shows in spaces such as Balazo Mission Badlands Gallery, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts MCCLA, Atelier Golgotha, SoMa Gallery and City Arts SF. Then in 2000 he ...
Jorge Gonzalez - Jorge R. Gonzalez Artist Statement Why I started, what has and still inspires me, and why IaEURtmm in this Road. Like most visual artists throughout my adolescence, I enjoyed doodling, most classes in school tended to be rather boring to me, which led to my using the side of most composition papers to draw and daydream. As I was entering my high school years, I was inclined to become an airplane mechanic causing my three years of high school to be totally focused on that endeavor. After graduating from high school, I applied my energy into obtaining a degree in the optical field, but halfway through a certain spark of passion awoke in me towards the arts. I started with drawing, which led to printmaking, then photography and at the end of my studies, years down the road I obtained a degree in sculpture. Photography and painting were also my interests, but sculpture was my true calling. After graduation from the university, I started my studio and commenced my career in the Fine Arts in what I thought would be my life for years to come. But life tends to throw you curves and things sometimes donaEURtmt go...
Peter Odeh - My rendition is a blend of the inspiration from the masters,with immense influence my African culture has had on me,which makes me the product of a philosophy.As such every stroke of brush i make in an attempt to realize my visual conception is a true manifestation of my existence.And after many years of painting though i still find myself a traveler with my destiny on the horizon,giving me the notion to believe that the ends of painting are undefined boundaries of the human spirit....
Munyaradzi Mazarire - My quest is to redefine the way we see through unusual approaches to pictorial space, presenting to my audience objects of visual awareness sculpted like how we see them in photographs, drawings or paintings. Like many other contemporary artists, I respect craft skills which enables the exploration of different artistic techniques promoting experimentation and encouraging artists towards problem solving approaches to art. I want my art to reflect social or cultural values or to simply visually excite my audience. ...
Billie Jean - Billie Jean (born in the 80's) is an italian artist and architect. His artistic field is deeply linked to pop culture, which inspired his pseudonym (quoting a famous song of 1983 by Michael Jackson). It's also related to Pop culture the frequent use of symbols and themes already entered in collective imagination. His works deal with various issues, which are inspired by political and social events, but also from the description of very personal moods. His work tries to be a personal synthesis between pop art and street art, since several works are expressly designed to be painted on urban walls. The main characteristic of the works of Billie Jean is the clean and bare style, usually just in black and white. Often lacking in details, his artworks reflect tragedies and discomforts of society through the simple sketch of the eyes. The expressive drama of his works is sometimes underlined by using absurd and twisted perspectives that drag the viewer into an "impossible" and sometimes "dreamlike" world. To get his stroke so essential, he uses the computer drawing, main technical characteristic of his paintings. His artistic influences lie in 80s Pop Art (J.M. Basquiat, Keith Haring) and ...