Craig Lloyd

ARTIST STATEMENT:

There seems to be a basic human need to experience vast space and natural phenomena. We pause to take it in as the moment strikes us. Light, color, atmosphere and the seasons are all part of what has stopped me at these places. But open space is also a commodity.

The image here is a view after an evening storm, of a parcel of hillside, a small ecosystem that survives in a densely developed older urban neighborhood.

CURATORIAL NOTE:

Lloyd uses an aesthetic approach to painting landscapes rooted in 19th century traditions which were steeped in idealism, romanticism, and colonialism. Yet here he undermines those ideals of naturalism and wildness, rendering a reality that is only a small last vestige of a once expansive land, amidst human development and expansion.

Image : Jungle

Mia Loia

ARTIST STATEMENT:

The year I left art school, I lived and kept a studio in the unheated attic of an early 1930’s home, on Dixon St, in Newport, RI. I spent many days and nights of that very cold year on long walks around Aquidneck Island, simultaneously grateful for the beauty that surrounded my life there and frustrated at the lack of direction graduation had left me with. In between freelance design work and bartending gigs, I tried to paint anything that shimmered at me in the language of hope, often abandoning work half way through, losing the sparkle that drove me to the subject.

The house I shared with 4 other former classmates sat near the end of a street that sloped toward the bay a few blocks west. Most days, I would end my walks headed purposefully in that direction, in order to catch the end of the sunset. Using up all the sunlight to extend my strolls, my favorite time of day was when the pinks, oranges, and yellows have all but disappeared, leaving the slightest hint of green to grace where the sky meets the land.

This painting is a homage to that time in my life, to a twenty-two year-old’s search for meaning, and a reminder that sometimes fulfillment lies within gratitude for the simple beauty of any present moment.