Artists Describing Their Art:

Youri Messen-Jaschin - Youri Messen-Jaschin is an artist of Latvian origin, he was born in Arosa-Switzerland. His artistic studies brought him to the "Ecole Superieur Nationale des Beaux-Arts". He was a pupil of professor and master Robert Cami and also attended the Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne University, which included, History of Art, with professor Pierre Francastel from the Ecole Pratique, in Paris. From 1962 to 1965 he returned to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, where he worked with the engraver and painter Ernest Pizzotti. He debuted his creations at the Lausanne EXPO, in 1964 (Swiss fair), where he presented his kinetic sculptures of glass and acrylic resin. Youri was searching for new forms of art. He worked two years in "The Center of Contemporary Engraving" in Geneva. But it was in Zurich that he expanded his pictorial perspective with the experience of the circle above the face, influenced by the Swiss painter Friederick Kuhn. From 1968 to 1970, he studied at the University of Hogskolan for design & Konsthantwerk of Gothenburg, where he made kinetic objects of textiles. In 1967, he met Jesus-Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Julio Le Parc during an ...

Rachel E Heberling - I walked up the dirt road before leaving the mountains. Fall was creeping in. I thought a car had driven by, but there remained a strange banging and rattling noise. I turned around and listened, yet nobody was there. I looked again; it was just a 25 mile-an-hour sign caught up in a tree. With the winds kicking up, I ran back down the hill. There were always strange machines in the basement. A Victrola, oil lamps, and car transmissions sat in the dark, collecting dust by the coal furnace. I grew up in a log home on a mountainside in Pennsylvania's coal regions, where black slag piles were poised to swallow one-street towns: a landmark of the Industrial Revolution's demise. When I would pass just over the ridge and wander through abandoned factories, I could feel the heavy air inside: damp and laden with an eerie silence. My childhood existed at the tail end of an era of typewriters and rotary phones: forms of communication that demand a physical connection. These fragmented memories still exist in the tactility of ink embedded into a surface, whether rolled through a press or fed through a typewriter. ...