Carolyn Adams
Carolyn Adams' poetry, fiction, photography, and illustrations have been published or will soon appear in the print and on-line journals Conspire, Small Spiral Notebook, Yellow Bat Review, Eclipse, Out of Line, Poetry Midwest, The Pedestal Magazine, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, and RiverSedge, among others. She currently co-edits and co-publishes the monthly poetry magazine Curbside Review.
Email: Carolyn Adams
Anna Held Audette
Anna Held Audette began her career as a printmaker and later evolved into a painter. She taught at Southern Connecticut State University for many years and her book, The Blank Canvas (a guide for young artists published by Shambhala), came out of that experience. Her main studio is in New Haven, CT. During the summer, however, she works in southern Vermont in a studio near the old farmhouse handed down from her family. She is currently working on a book about interesting drawing assignments.
"My paintings comment on the melancholy beauty found in relics of our industrial past. Both the literal and evocative meanings of these subjects strike a responsive chord in me and provide variations on a theme that has been central to my paintings for a long time. The relics remind us that, in our rapidly changing world, the triumphs of technology are just a moment away from obsolescence. Yet these remains of collapsed power have a strength, grace and sadness that is both eloquent and impenetrable. Transfigured by time and light, which render the ordinary extraordinary, they form a visual requiem for the industrial age."
Website: Anna Held Audette
Michelle Feder
"My inspiration comes from nature and most natural objects. The harmony I try to convey in my work has grown through my interests in gardening and occassional birding.
Though nature has been a huge influence other factors have contributed to my evolution as an artist. Such as various Journals written by artists and their own expriences with self expression. Gauguin's, Noa Noa, is a documentation of his visit to Tahiti in order to uncover the raw part of the artist within. Kandinsky's, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, expresses the vulnerablility of an artist surviving the modern world, Edvard Munch's constant exploration of the psychology of relationships and authors, such as, Virginia Woolf have impacted my creativity tremendously. Woolf had the talent to internalize the world around her and make everything more enriching. These artists looked inward for creation and let creativity unravel as a natural process. The closer I get to the essence of who I am the more my art continues to change.
Through this process my most recent departure has been oil paintings of clouds. The clouds are expansive and free, unlike my very focused and controlled pen and ink drawings. The clouds have allowed me to strip away any boundaries that were there before."
Website: Michele Feder
Marty D. Ison
"Each of us views the world in both unique and universal ways. All of us can look at the same sky but each person's preference for sunlight, night, clouds, red or yellow, rain or snow affects their appreciation of that sky. I appreciate the primitive power of abstraction, of how an obscure scribble focused by an experience or memory takes shape and finds its symmetry in simple forms and fragments. I refine and enhance these fragments into essential symbols as if trying to pull text from pieces of shattered typeface. Sometimes this shreds my brain and leaves its frays dangle. If you have ever shared the same sky as me, its sadness and debauchery, its ecstasy and madness, then perhaps you will recognize those frays in my paintings."
Email: Marty D.Ison
Wesley Keil
"The most important thing to me when making a work of art is to create a mood that will carry over into the viewer. I want people to feel the presence of my paintings on a subjective, intimate level rather than to view them objectively. There is a poetry to my work that is meant to inspire an emotional connection with the viewer. I hope to bring my viewers to a state of mind that is halfway between trancsendental enlightenment and a sad longing. My work lies somewhere between Existential Realism, Romanticism, Expressionism and Impressionism or rather a mixture of all these. I strive to find a balance between being representational and abstract, leaving my work understandable enough to ceate a sense of place and content yet vague enough to have a sense of mystery that allows the viewer's own imagination to wander throughout the piece. The subject matter of my work does not come from any direct source, rather each idea comes from a combination of sources. My landscapes are created from my own mind but are related to places I've been or things I've seen that have lefter their presence in the back of my mind. Poetry, movies, novels, music and other artrwork are all sources of inspiration. My landscapes can be seen as metaphors of the inner psyche or rather the mysterious depths of the subconscious translated into landscape.
The true content of my work is the atmosphere. Light, texture, and color are the key elements to giving my work a heavy, brooding life of its own. Light takes on the role of a storyteller in my paintings; illuminating the scene at the same time it veils it in poetic ambiguity. The texture of things that have been weathered throughout time and hardship has always fascinated me. I see an aspect of myself in the twisting trunk of a tree or the crumbling stones of an old building. The long years of endurance that these things carry instill in me a bittersweet sadness but also a profound nobility. It is a metaphor of how the experiences of life shape and scar us. In the way I apply paint I create a surface that feels as if it has been through long years of endurance. the colors I use are usually somber and muted to help create a deep and rich atmosphere. There is a feel of heaviness to my work that weighs down on the viewer. i would say my paintings are a delicate balance between being grotesque and beautiful."
Website: Wesley Keil
Jennifer Linton
"My work is informed by a number of ongoing investigations into such subjects as gender, spirituality, abuse, redemption, joy. I identify myself as a postmodern feminist, therefore it can be argued that my art is shaped by this particular world view. I love figurative drawing to the brink of obsession. I don't take commissions. All of the above information is subject to change without further notice."
Website: Jennifer Linton
Bruce Lowney
"I have sought all my life to push my imagination, to articulate visual ideas that have a personal meaning for me. The image has always been more important than the art of it."
Website: Bruce Lowney
Salvatore Ventura
The first thing the perceptive viewer notices about the monumental watercolors of Salvatore Ventura is that the medium of watercolor is being coaxed to do something outside its usual domain. Watercolor has come to be associated with ephemeral nature because of its ability to record the effect of light and delicate subtleties. One thinks of the heroic watercolors of Turner.
When it has been used in conjunction with urban life or architecture, it has been primarily to record, to make notebook sketches. Ventura convincingly gives watercolor the task of delineating a stolid subject matter. The latent irony in his choice of medium, and the straightforward way in which it succeeds, adds to the power of his work. Imperfect details crop up: Ventura permits his translucent medium to bleed occasionally and selectively. This declaration of vulnerability only serves to call attention to the heroic use to which the artist is putting his medium.
Ventura understands the power that can be gained from compression. He works from photographs of entire facades but rigorously goes over the photograph with a framing device to isolate parts of the whole. By capturing only parts, Ventura confounds our usual expectations somewhat; though subject matter is omnipresent, there is a reduction to pure form, to geometry. In many respects Ventura is a geometric abstractionist.
But that there it a tie to reality cannot be gotten away from and this is the hidden strength of the work. This isn't abstraction but, as Ventura puts it, "cold hard reality." He goes on to say as a general philosophy, that "to some extent we're all involved in the hyper real," a phrase which captures the hard-bitten temper of our times. This uncompromising attitude works against the nostalgia that inevitably accompanies the use of grand edifices as exclusive subject matter. Ventura's cropping, using only a part of the whole, assures that the paintings won't drift into picturesqueness, but will have above all an elemental dynamism.
Letting part of a building stand for a whole is a very contemporary attitude. The emphasis is thus less on the recording of a particular building than on the artist himself controlling various ineffable but dynamic forces. Most of Ventura's paintings are titled, but tellingly when there are titles they hint at physical sensations. A painting which features the capitol of an ionic column is called Gravity; the supports of a balustrade of a stairway, highlighting an insistent modular arrangement are Rise and Fall; a prominent yawing arch with a deep interior shadow is enticingly called Threshold #1.
Strengthening the elemental force of the work is Ventura's treatment of shadow; he considers it, in his own words, as a separate object. It doesn't adumbrate the architectural detail but is on par with the solid masses. But there is an ineluctable de-stabilizing that goes along with giving insubstantial shadow so much weight. It underscores a primary point Ventura makes about his work. He declares that he is not painting utopia.
The most intriguing parallel for Ventura's art is the visionary art of the enlightenment in France. Architects in the 18th century envisioned remarkable buildings that exploited sheer geometry. By reducing spheres, cubes, and triangles to their essence, the architects were aiming at a sort of utopia, one far above the humanity of the day but something for humanity to aspire to. Ventura's work superficially resembles Enlightenment schemes, but it is clearly based upon the past and not in some envisioned future. His trick is not to make the viewer think of some romantic past but in his fortunate phrase to give "visual CPR to his subjects."
To resuscitate geometry is not the same as designing utopia, but it does aim high. Ventura will forgive the viewer who senses excitement when looking at his work; who senses that it more than cold, hard reality.
The buildings from which Ventura abstracts his compositions are actual buildings, mostly in St. Louis where the artist has a related job, recording architectural details for a preservation firm. His first work in watercolor, "Art Museum" is the St. Louis Art Museum building designed by Cass Gilbert, so began with a very high pedigree. He aspires to returning to a museum as subject. The well-known curves of Frank Loyd Wright's Guggenheim are ripe for Ventura's treatment.
Ultimately, Ventura's work is important because it participates in a major, current art world dialogue. For the entire twentieth century the development of art has meant abstract art. Returns to representational subject matter have had the effect of refreshing abstraction when it became too theoretical. These days there is a genuine appetite for narrative content, which on the surface, would seem inimical to abstraction.
Above all artists know how to meet challenge innovatively.
Ventura provides all the pleasures of a rigorous geometric abstraction tied to a subject matter that at bottom carries great emotional weight. And his watercolor medium rivets attention as a kind of tour de force. Yet for all the diverse streams that feed it Salvatore Ventura's is exceptionally single-minded art. It knows what it is about and communicates with great poise and intelligence.
William Zimmer, Contributing Critic
New York Times
August, 1992
Website: Salvatore Ventura
