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Another beautiful spring in New York City! I truly can’t believe how quickly the last year has flown by. Since April 2022 we’ve had many exciting milestones to celebrate at VAC. These highlights include: opening an office in Brooklyn, launching a podcast, increasing our educational programming for artists, and presenting our first in-person exhibition in Manhattan. Additionally, our reader base has continued to grow and expand! We couldn’t be happier to see more readers from around the world browsing the pages of our publication.
This special issue of New Visionary Magazine is curated by Marina Press Granger, founder of The Artist Advisory. We are thrilled to share a powerful and thought- provoking selection of work that Marina curated into this issue!
On behalf of the VAC Team, I want to thank you for continuing to support our publication. We are so grateful for you!
Xo VictoriaVictoria J. Fry is a New York City-based painter, educator, curator, and the founder of Visionary Art Collective and New Visionary Magazine. Since launching VAC in 2020, Fry has worked with over 200+ artists to help them advance their art careers. Additionally, Fry curates both in-person and virtual exhibitions in NYC and beyond. She also hosts the New Visionary Podcast to further inspire creatives worldwide.
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Blair Beusman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.
She has worked for a variety of cultural publications and organizations, including The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and PEN America.
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Valerie Auersperg is a self-taught artist, illustrator and designer currently living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. Her work ranges from digital drawings to acrylic on canvas paintings which she describes it as a dose of optimism with a sprinkle of escapism. When she is not painting or drawing she works as a graphic designer and illustrator for various companies in New Zealand, Switzerland, Austria and the U.S.
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Rebecca Reeder is a Michigan-based artist, living and working in the Metro Detroit area. She is the Assistant Gallery Director at the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield, MI and is also the Administrative Assistant for Visionary Art Collective and works as an artist assistant. Reeder earned her BFA in 2D media from the School of Art and Design at Eastern Michigan University, where she also completed a gallery internship/assistantship and participated as President of the Intermedia Gallery Group (IGG) student-run gallery organization.
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Erika b Hess is a painter, curator, art writer, and host of the popular art podcast I Like Your Work. She received her MFA from Boston University and maintains studios in Columbus, OH, and Long Island City, NY. Hess’s work has been exhibited nationally at venues across the U.S. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, and she frequently lectures at colleges such as Wellesley College, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, Ohio State University, and more. You can find her writing in New Visionary magazine, AllSHEMakes, and I Like Your Work.
www.erikabhess.com erikabhess
Rebecca Potts Aguirre is an artist & educator whose work explores themes of feminism and gendered labor, memory, and healing. She is a member of Spilt Milk Gallery and is listed in the curated directories AllSHEMakes and Visionary Art Collective. Potts Aguirre earned her MFA in Visual Arts from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe and Australia. She founded and hosts Teaching Artist Podcast and is a K-12 Curriculum Designer for The Art of Education University.
www.rebeccapotts.com pottsart
Taylor Williams is a Virginia-based writer and producer. Recent credits include Movie Night (Syracuse University), Solid 8 - The Webseries (Official Selection: Austin Web Fest, Miami Web Fest, BKWF), and Paint the Line (Gibney Dance Studio). Their writing has been published in Inopinita Journal, Juxtaposed Journal, and Escapist Magazine, and they received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2011. BA: University of Mary Washington. MFA: The Actors Studio Drama School.
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As part of our ongoing interview series, we chat with artists, curators, entrepreneurs, authors, and educators. Through these interviews we can gain a deeper understanding of the contemporary art world.
in conversation with Victoria J. Fry
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Marina Press Granger is a NYC-based Artist Consultant and Founder of The Artist Advisory. Granger launched her company, The Artist Advisory, to empower artists with a fresh perspective and real-world guidance.
You’ve helped hundreds of artists since launching The Artist Advisory. What inspired you to help artists advance their careers?
I’ve worked in Galleries in NYC since about 2004, along with some other cultural institutions, and I consistently saw artists get the runaround. Don’t get me wrongI worked with some amazing people but I also saw a lot of not-so-amazing people in the art world. I just wanted to give guidance to artists since I’ve been working on the “other side” of things for so long. I truly understood that there is no art world without artists & it’s so important to encourage talent when you see it!
One major a-ha moment made me realize that it was important for me to take the leap from working in Galleries to starting a business that would help artists navigate the art world. That moment was the 2016 election. I saw how influential the internet was. Since then, I realized that it’s responsible for a very powerful shift not only in the world but also in the art world. The internet gave artists the power to connect to anyone and everyone. They were now fully in charge of how they chose to present themselves and their work. This is enormous compared to the pre-digital era when artists relied on “gatekeepers” like curators, gallerists, etc to get their work out there. Now, you can really find the audience that makes sense for you as long as you stay authentic to your voice.
What was the best part of working in the New York City galleries for nearly 15 years? Did you face any challenges during this time, and if so, what helped you to overcome them?
I worked in galleries for one year to three years at a time until I found a really good fit where I worked for nearly 7 years. In this gallery, the biggest highlight was writing checks to artists in the mid-high five figures for a single sale. It was amazing!!! Everytime I wrote a big check I secretly thought - “Ok parents! You had it wrong the whole time - you CAN make a livingand a good one - as an artist!” While these artists are great and well-respected by their peers they are not “famous” household names. It made me realize that you don’t have to be a modern day Andy Warhol to make a decent living as an artist. So, on the other end of that was actually making those 5 and 6 figure sales, visiting artist’s studios - sometimes abroad, and going to opening receptions at museums where the artists I was working with were included in exhibitions…also abroad at times! There were many glamorous events but one amazing moment that I can remember well was visiting the studio of an artist who we worked with in Spain along with a major NY based collector! We had the best time and she ended up commissioning him for a portrait of herself. It was epic.
The biggest challenge for me was keeping up with all the admin work while balancing all the creative work. While I am not an artist, I completely understand this common struggle. You’re in your creative zone and you just don’t have the bandwidth to get back to it if you answer emails for two hours. One way I overcame this is - I would answer any critical emails before getting to the gallery, then I would dive right into my creative work (writing, curating, design, etc) and after I had the majority of those creative tasks done, I would then shift over back to the admin work.
In addition to providing programs for artists, you’re also a curator. When did you first start curating, and what do you enjoy most about it?
The first exhibition I ever curated on my own was Three Points Define a Surface at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery in March 2011. It even earned a Time Out Critics Pick!!! I was so excited. I got the opportunity to curate this exhibition because I submitted to an open call…and it made it to Time Out New York! How cool! Never underestimate the power of an open call. Since then, aside from curating exhibitions in the galleries where I have worked, I also curated a handful of other exhibitions and publications (like this one.)
One of the most exciting things for me about curating is being able to highlight the work of an artist. It’s such an intimate experience to be lent work for an exhibition,
to be entrusted with it, and then to be entrusted with interpreting it within a space. That said, the best part is getting to look at the work, thinking about how you can present it, and bonus points if you get to do a studio visit to choose something. It’s an intimate and amazing experience.
If you could offer any advice to emerging artists who are learning to navigate today’s art world, what would it be?
Be true to yourself. Don’t make art you think others will like if you don’t like making it. Figure out how your particular perspective informs your work. The more honest and vulnerable you are about this, the more unique your story becomes and that is what separates you from any other artist. Then, define your audience based on the themes of your work and the perspective you have. Find a way to reach that audience. You don’t have to go through a blue chip gallery to reach your audience. You can go to any institution, publication, or entity that has a similar audience. Get them to amplify you to that audience. For example, do you paint the cosmos because you studied astronomy? Your audience might be into astronomy. There are many podcasts and magazines about astronomy, get them to feature you because their audience will resonate with your work.
In your podcast, The Artist Advisory Hotline, you engage in meaningful conversations with pioneers of the art world to provide artists with valuable career advice. How has your podcast supported your goal to reach more artists?
Not only has the podcast allowed me to reach a broader audience, it has taught me so much! On the podcast, I interview art world movers and shakers. Sometimes these are people who I’ve known for decades. When I ask them questions about advice they have for visual artists, I always learn something! Which is why it’s always good to have an arsenal of amazing experts behind you.
In what ways has your journey as an entrepreneur impacted you on a personal level?
Before I was an entrepreneur, I relied on my job for a steady income. I thought I always had to have a job to keep a steady paycheck. I thought that it’s where
steadiness and money comes from. My job ruled me. It decided when I ate, slept, had fun, and saw my friends and family. But, now I decide this for myself because I started my own business. When I started my business I was worried because I now no longer had a steady job. But after becoming a business owner, I realized that my paycheck was just coming from the consistent and dedicated work of another business owner and their employees (including me). So, I had the steadiness inside me all along and now I bring it to my business. As long as I can show up - I’m good! You know, the same goes for artists - artists are entrepreneurs. As long as you show up, consistent income will follow.
So, now I always weave in special moments into my day like taking my pomeranian on an hour long walk around the East Village with my Matcha Latte with Almond Milk.
Finally, it really taught me the value of time. I am no longer on someone else’s clock. The clock is my own.
Sari Shryack is an oil and acrylic painter based out of Austin, Texas. Her colorful works cover many different subjects and techniques including landscape, still life, portraits, disco balls and even memes.
Born in 1991, Sari attended Drury University and studied under painting professor Todd Lowery; she graduated with a degree in Fine Arts in 2014. Sari lives with her husband and two young children.
How does your work reflect you as both an artist and individual?
My art very much feels like a natural extension of how I interpret the world as an individual. The funny thing about the teenage still lifes in particular, I was learning about parenting techniques before I had my first child, and through that I came across the concept of re-parenting. When my son was little we were very much on a budget and I would shop at thrift stores with him in tow. It was there that I kept stumbling upon all of the things I wanted but was too poor to get as a child; this felt like a full circle moment for me. Sort of impulsively I bought some of these items with no real plan with what to do with them.
Eventually I started painting still lifes and these thrift store items that dated back to my childhood felt very natural to incorporate into the composition. At the time, around 2017 and 2018, it felt very unique as people weren’t painting a lot of things outside of fruit and more typical still life objects. I see a lot more people painting things from their childhood now and I think it’s a very healing way to spend time thinking deeply about the events of your youth. For me, this work has functioned as a way of healing myself and the fact that other people have resonated with this series is a rewarding bonus.
How has social media impacted your art career?
It’s not a stretch to say that the only reason I have an art career is because of social media. Right before I finished my fine arts degree, my college painting professor told us that only about 5% or less of people who graduated undergrad in studio art were full-time painters five years after graduation.
This was very alarming news for me! My professor said that the only way to overcome these odds was to move to a large city (LA or New York in the U.S.) and pound pavement to work your way into the gallery world. Of course, I moved to a tertiary city (Austin), but the real perceived hindrance to my art career was that I had a baby at 23. I definitely had anxiety about my professional career as an artist being over at that point, or at least on pause until my kids grew up.
However, Instagram was shifting at this time from an app for sharing photos of food to a place where you could also sell artwork. So with a lot of time spent on my phone while parenting a newborn at the start of 2016, I started plugging my art into social media consistently. Lo and behold, I found a community of artists and collectors on there and by treating my social media presence with the same fervor and intention of working the gallery world, I have been able to build my career. It’s a different path but I think it’s just as worthy.
Would you say your work has evolved over the last several years?
Yes, tremendously! I’m already someone who craves a lot of novelty in my art practice. But also, a product of being someone who shows a lot of their work online is that my paintings get spread on the Internet very quickly. That’s also true because I’m picking up on themes that are very accessible and speak to younger, often female, audiences. My bodies of work seem to get metabolized quickly and because of this I feel incentivized to always be changing what I’m doing, what I’m painting and my approach. I do this by exposing myself to different ways to paint by taking workshops and by following the tangents that my niche interests take me on.
Right now I’ve felt inspired by my upbringing below the poverty line and I’ve implemented that into my work by painting consumer goods that contain class signifiers to try to alter the narrative around those items.
What led you to launch an online art school, and what has been the most rewarding part of teaching?
I have always enjoyed teaching. But the reality of being an artist is you often have to find multiple income streams to support yourself if you’re doing it full-time. So, ever the pragmatist, I looked at other ways of making income that I would enjoy doing. Luckily for me, teaching has always been a very rewarding experience.
The teaching started out very simple, people asking me how I made my paintings and then I would explain my
process to them and show the step-by-steps. The natural next step was to do workshops, which I quickly found I enjoyed. I really like the challenge of describing information in different ways to fit where each student is at. It’s really helped my own practice by keeping me really honest with my opinions and technique.
I was motivated to start Not Sorry Art School in part because I couldn’t teach in-person workshops during the pandemic. I also found out in early 2020 that I was pregnant with my second child, so I was looking for a teaching method that accommodated my circumstances. The online format allowed me the space to record my thoughts and teaching techniques in a permanent and evergreen way. It’s been a wonderful project and I’m so proud of the community of artists that make up Not Sorry Art School.
Tell us about the amazing retreats you host for artists throughout the year.
Yes! I just finished teaching a painting retreat in Texas and it’s been a blast diving into this teaching space.
This was something that sort of came up randomly. I like to think of my inbox as a magic portal of art possibilities, and if I just show up and make my art consistently, the opportunities will find me. That’s very much what happened with art retreats. A company called UpTrek reached out to me in 2021 and proposed the idea of teaching retreats in Europe. They really sold it to me because of the beautiful location (I taught my first retreat last year in Spain) and the prospect of teaching beyond the hours of a workshop was intriguing to me.
One thing I like to say at my retreats is “artwork is heart work” and what I mean by that is a lot of what happens on a canvas has its roots in the rest of the way we live and other aspects of our lives. With a retreat, where all the meals are provided and lots of rest and relaxation is built in, artists can make breakthroughs that may not have otherwise been possible in a less accommodating environment.
With this recent retreat in Wimberley, Texas, I ran the event (with help of course) and I was able to put my own personal touch on all the aspects of hosting a retreat. I found that really enjoyable as a creative process in and of itself. I’m hoping to do 1-2 retreats per year going forward.
When I get this question, I always feel deeply motivated to explain how grateful I am to be here and if this is all that I do with my career it would be a win for me in so many ways. That said, I would love to further refine my message of class consciousness that has defined my recent work. I’m not sure what that looks like at this point, but I know that that’s the path my career is heading on and it’s been so healing and exciting to explore themes of poverty with my artwork. I hope to really find some solutions in that body of work for those questions.
www.harryjameshanson.com
Harry James Hanson is an artist and drag performer whose photo series Legends of Drag combines those passions to create what he describes as an “archive of living drag history.” Consisting of portraits of drag queen elders—the performers who paved the way— the series pays tribute to drag’s roots and celebrates the vibrant culture it has cultivated. We discussed the importance of community, what he hopes younger generations can learn from those who came before them, and what’s next for the project.
Tell me about your experience as a photographer and as a drag performer. How did those two creative forms come together for you?
I’ve had a camera for about as long as I can remember. I sort of dissociate from the title of photographer; I moreso think of the camera as a tool that I use. But I’ve been shooting since I was in high school, and I did study photography in college—I have a degree in Photography and Film Studies from Wesleyan University, and I have been working in the commercial art world for the past 10 years, mostly as a creative director, producer, stylist and set designer; my title changes a lot. Since 2018, I have been working on the Legends of Drag, a photo series and archive of living drag history, which was published as a book in 2022, called Legends of Drag: Queens of a Certain Age. That book is comprised of 79 portraits of drag queen elders in 16 different cities. It’s a collaboration with my dear friend Devin Antheus, who is a floral designer. We traveled the country photographing queens, and each of their portraits is accented by a custom floral arrangement. Legends of Drag started as an editorial, which ran on Vogue. The response to it was so positive and overwhelming that we realized there was a much, much deeper well of stories to tell here. Since the book’s release last year, we’ve been on our second national tour, producing events and exhibitions featuring performances by our legendary models.
I’ve been doing drag since I was able to pick out my own clothes, which was at three years old—I’m very fortunate to have cool parents who encouraged art in all forms. I started doing drag in public space when I was in high school; I began going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and winning all the costume contests, and shortly after that I joined the cast. When I moved to New York, in 2012, I pretty much immediately fell into the Brooklyn drag scene, where I’ve been performing for the last 10 years. One of the reasons Legends of Drag is such an exciting and important project for me is that I’d always endeavored for my photography and my drag to intersect, but had never really found the right opportunity. Plus, there is such an enormous historical imperative to preserve these stories, and this wisdom from our elders, that really drives the creation.
As a young drag queen, what was your relationship with your elders and the history of the movement like?
Growing up, a number of my closest friends were also into drag. I was always rich in sisters but never had a drag mother. We were like feral drag children, out there roaming the streets, looking for trouble—and finding it. One of my very first drag sisters was actually Trixie Mattel. We were in the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and she has stated publicly that I’m the first person who ever put a wig on her head, so it’s all my fault.
It’s funny, before starting this project I never would have called myself a “historian” or even felt like history was a particular interest of mine. But then I realized that, when it comes to queer and trans history, I’m endlessly fascinated. Through Legends of Drag I now have an abundance of drag mothers. And in a lot of ways, I think Devin and I produced this book for the kids that we were, these queer kids in the Midwest who were obsessed with John Waters and Rocky Horror but didn’t necessarily have the awareness that we were taking part in an ancient, sacred tradition.
Collaboration is one of my favorite aspects of creating art, and it’s also the most fun. Devin and I work very closely on the overall art direction for Legends of Drag, and for many shoots we’ve been assisted by the photographer Deb Leal, who’s created her own body of work documenting our process. Her shots are on analog film, so they look really different from mine, and it’s been really cool to see that work evolve, too.
When creating our portraits, it’s always a triangulation between the location, the queen’s look, and the floral elements. It can really start at any point: sometimes the queen will tell us she has an outfit that she wants
to wear, and we sort of base the shoot off of that. Or maybe she has a favorite flower. In Atlanta, Shawnna Brooks told us that she loved yellow roses, and so we planned the whole shoot around that. BeBe Sweetbriar in San Francisco told us she wanted to embody a phoenix rising from the ashes, so we shot her in front of a burnt-out building with neon pink and orange blooms. Or in Chicago, Chilli Pepper’s gal pal Oprah Winfrey suggested we use peonies, so how could we refuse? When it comes to selecting locations, we like to try and find a space that is colorful and textural and representative of the city that the queens live in, or that it’s somehow significant to them, maybe the neighborhood where they live or work. When we were traveling to create the book, we always tried to find an opportunity to see the queens perform if they had a show, or to visit their homes, if possible—it was really special and magical to inhabit their spaces. We wrote essays about each queen featured in the book, and some of the richest texts were informed by these visits, which incidentally are also some of my most cherished memories.
One thing I found incredibly inspiring about this project is the sense of community it both conveys and builds—each event for your book is like a happening. Was that initially part of your vision?
As we’ve been expanding Legends of Drag into a live-event series—as we’ve been expanding Legends of Drag, period—we knew that we wanted to create opportunities for the models. I wouldn’t say that we necessarily knew all along that we were going to do a national tour of producing events in 15 cities and counting, but at a certain point, yes. We realized that it was our objective to book these queens to do what they do best, which is perform.
When we were selecting the destinations for the different chapters of the book, we wanted to choose cities that had distinctive drag cultures. It really wouldn’t have been possible to create the book without community support. When it came to casting models for the project, we relied on a whisper network of queens to inform us of who to reach out to in each city. And now, to be able to throw events and cultivate new spaces, new connections, new audiences—it’s been an absolute honor, quite frankly. I almost feel like I can’t take any credit for it, because when you get all the legends together in one room, it’s like okay, go. They never fail. They always deliver. I’m just a catalyst.
In the past decade or so, drag has entered mainstream pop culture. What do you hope younger generations can take away from the stories and experiences of the queens you feature?
The explosion of drag in the mainstream has unlocked incredible opportunities for a very small percentage of drag performers, for the most part. But there are still so many incredible performers doing work on a local level, and there’s also such a deep historical connection between drag and community service that I think a lot of younger queens aren’t necessarily aware of. For example, in the ’80s and ’90s, when the queer community was facing the first plague, the Imperial Court threw galas and fundraisers to raise money so people didn’t get evicted from their apartments while they were dying. When we talk about supporting each other or being in community together, it really doesn’t get much more real than that. When you really harness and tap into that power of community, there’s unlimited potential there.
Beyond that, even since the publication of the book, in 2022, the cultural conversation surrounding drag has completely changed; now it’s being used as this political flashpoint. I understand that a lot of queer and trans people are very upset and destabilized by all of that that we see unfolding in the news, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that there’s actually an
enormous historical precedent for trying to criminalize drag, and there’s also a precedent for resistance and community resilience. Our elders really do hold the wisdom to carry us through this moment. I would hope that people approach Legends of Drag like a codex that can open a portal to beautiful queer utopia.
What’s next—how do you see this project continuing to evolve and grow?
We’re just getting started. We have our first international photoshoot this spring with Gilda Love, in Barcelona. She’s 97 years old, so we’re not waiting around. The grand finale of our tour is in Palm Springs this May, and we’re throwing a massive pride celebration with the New York AIDS Memorial in June. We received a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts to create four new portraits of New York queens. We’re also in the very early stages of putting a television treatment together—we want to find ways to get these queens paid, and we’d love to shake up the format for televised drag just a little bit. We definitely have a Legends of Drag: Volume II in us, and probably a Volume III, too. There are a lot of queens whom I would love to work with—I have a running list of over 100, and that’s just from doing some casual research. There are queens from Honolulu to Tulsa, Detroit to Bangkok whom I’d love to photograph!
Natalie (Estep) Balazovich lives and works in Metro Detroit, Michigan. Early studies in art began at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, followed by a BFA in Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies (2010). Her artwork encompasses ideas of self-worth, motherhood and spirituality through painting and installation. Balazovich aims to connect viewers by evoking a thoughtful look at “self;” perception of our own purpose in relation to the world around us.
Beginning in 2012, Balazovich served as a Coordinator for the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield, moving into the role of Gallery Director in 2021. Her passion for art and people enhances the prime venue for artists and enthusiasts. Her motivations relate back to those in her personal body of artwork, promoting growth, understanding and empowerment between artists and viewers.
How does being an artist yourself impact your work as a Gallery Director?
The experience working with galleries as an artist myself provides a deeper understanding of what is needed (and wanted) in a gallery. Things like communication, clearly defined deadlines and expectations, and respect of artwork/artist is very important to me. In addition, having knowledge of artistic practices, mediums and conceptualization gives a greater ability to fully translate an artist’s intention and process to the audience.
How has working in a gallery affected your work as an artist?
Investing time and energy into my own artistic practice has become more of a challenge. Working to serve other artists is extremely fulfilling and worth the effort, but fulfilling one’s artistic self can motivate growth in every aspect of life. When I invest in my own artistic practice, I am better at my job at the Gallery. It takes constant effort to balance life as a working artist.
What advice would you give people who are considering a career working in an art gallery?
Gallery work is gratifying in many ways, but also poses the same challenges as many other jobs. Your main responsibility is to serve artists, share their work with the world, connect them with new audiences, and make sales. It is often selfless work with long hours and requires a high degree of self-motivation. There is a constant expectation of innovation and creativity to satisfy and maintain an audience. In addition, you must coordinate business practices including accounting, insurance, artwork installation and curating. Learning to do all of these things well can be challenging but offers great reward. There is nothing more gratifying than pulling off a great exhibit opening.
What advice would you give artists looking to exhibit their work with galleries?
Prioritize photographic representation of your work. Photos of your artwork can make or break an opportunity to exhibit. To approach a relationship with a gallery, one option is to submit to open calls and group exhibitions. For emerging artists, these shows provide a larger and more diverse audience than with a solo exhibition. Group exhibitions also give you the opportunity to see how your work fits with other artists’ works. They can reveal how a gallery manages artists, how the gallery displays art and how they connect with art buyers. At the Janice Charach Gallery we work with emerging artists often and are accommodating to those who are applying to a gallery for the first time. Most galleries are willing to respond to calls or emails about what is expected when submitting artwork or exhibit proposals.
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janicecharachgallery
The Janice Charach Gallery opened in 1991 and was founded by Natalie & Manny Charach in loving memory of their daughter, Janice. The Gallery continues to host exhibitions featuring artwork of all medias. The Gallery also offers events, workshops and lectures in cooperation with local instructors and artists. Janice received many honors for her work and is included in many private collections, as well as
public displays at the Kresge Foundation and Huron Valley- Sinai Hospital. As a graduate of the Center for Creative Studies (CCS) in 1972, she understood and believed in the concerns of emerging artists. It is thanks to her dreams and love of art that the Janice Charach Gallery was established, and provides a world class forum for the creation and exhibition of artworks for all.
This issue of New Visionary Magazine is curated by Marina Press Granger of The Artist Advisory
Marina Press Granger worked in the NYC Art World for nearly 15 years before starting The Artist Advisory in 2018 to empower artists with a fresh perspective and real-world guidance. Recognizing the transformative power of the internet for artists, Granger provides strategic guidance on how to curate an online presence, build connections, and thrive in a world without traditional gatekeepers. Her four-step method for success, featured in Forbes, includes Articulating Intention, Balancing Mindset, Perfecting Presentation, and Taking Action. Granger curated the forthcoming 2023 Women’s Print Issue of Create! Magazine, showcasing talented female artists, and the second issue of Arts to Hearts Magazine, a new prestigious international platform. Granger’s commitment to sharing her knowledge and empowering artists extends to her podcast, The Artist Advisory Hotline, where she provides practical advice and valuable insights. With a BA and MA in Art History, along with being a Reiki Master and Classical Chinese Feng Shui Practitioner, Granger offers a holistic approach to unlocking the full potential of artists at all levels in navigating the art world.
www.nancyandrukolson.com nancyandrukolsonartist
Nancy Andruk Olson creates variegated, fantastical landscapes in a high-chroma palette. The vividness of the colors she uses becomes a language unto itself; Andruk Olson mixes her own paint to ensure maximal pigmentation, and through the bright hues, she creates a world that is at once familiar and foreign. Her work is both representational and impressionistic; nature is her primary subject, but it is transmuted through her own subjectivity. She captures the beauty of the natural world while calling attention to the act of painting, simultaneously situating
viewers in an imagined landscape and reminding them of its artifice. Andruk Olson lives and works in Bountiful, Utah. She has a B.F.A. in painting from Brigham Young University and a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is represented by Five3 Gallery, Southam Gallery, and Quarry House Gallery, and her work can be viewed in the Sears Art Museum and the St. George Art Museum collections, as well in various private collections throughout the country.
chelseabeaudrie.com
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Chelsea Beaudrie is a self-taught artist living in the Pacific Northwest whose images speak through layered color, expressive lines, malleable textures, and various formulated shapes. Beaudrie describes a feeling of liberation after she discovered painting in the summer of 2020. Before she began her art practice, Beaudrie was concerned about “staying confined within the lines, worrying about making the right ‘mark,’ ” she says. Her work—bold, abstracted shapes that loudly announce their presence—defiantly counters that impulse. An unseen order underlies the seeming chaos of her canvases; each painting is a product of Beaudrie’s intellectual and emotional state at the time of her entering the studio. Rendering symbols, iconography, and motifs that emerge from her psyche, Beaudrie processes the world around her, on both an individual and a global level, and invites viewers to share her own perspective. Through her paintings, Beaudrie makes her unconscious manifest. The resulting work is deeply personal while gesturing towards the universal.
Ava Bock is an artist who primarily works with industrial plastics, a material she explores through sculpture, painting, and photography. Plastic first became her subject after she became ill. “My world immediately transformed into one full of plastic sheets and silicone tubes,” she says. “Spending months in full view of the vast diversity of life-saving plastic became the catalyst I needed to evolve my practical use of plastics from a simple material into a full-time medium.” Her practice became increasingly abstract in the years following; her
current work uses light and color to express emotional experience and the unconscious workings of the mind. Plastics provided a path towards healing for Bock, both literally and metaphorically—through her art practice, she is able to process the stress associated with ongoing medical care—but she is also aware of the global harm it causes, and her work embraces this tension, even as she searches for more sustainable and eco-friendly options. Bock has a B.F.A. in Sculpture and has exhibited across the world.
www.sabartstudio.com sabartstudio
Shaylen Broughton is an internationally collected artist whose abstract expressionist paintings honor nature and her connection to it. Her current series uses water that she has collected—from the Atlantic Ocean; from the Roman Baths in England; from rainfall, rivers, and waterfalls in Virginia, where she grew up—as well as an air gun and a torch (representing the elements of air and fire) to add what she describes as “the element of life” to the pieces. She draws inspiration from the natural
world’s endlessly repeating patterns, and the shapes and swirls cascading across her canvases breathe life into her creations. Broughton has exhibited in group and solo shows in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. Her work is included in private collections all over the world, including Germany, Australia, Spain, London, Canada, and Mexico. She has additionally worked with several nonprofits and led community art projects.
lauracleary.com
lauraclearywilliams
Laura Cleary Williams makes delicate, intricate abstract expressionist paintings. She creates her images from paper, paint, dust, glitter, and language itself—printed words glimpse out from behind her gestural forms. “Throughout my life I have floundered with language,” Williams says. “Art provided me with a visual vocabulary in which I no longer felt restricted. Drawing unbound my voice.” There is a clear sense of release in her work;
marks move like smoke across her canvas, dispelling in a gentle burst of patterns and color. Her paintings are pure expression, a celebration of the act of creating. Williams received a B.F.A. from Tufts University and a Masters in Printmaking from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta. She founded, managed, and co-owned Straw Hat Press in Atlanta’s Goat Farm Art Center, before dedicating herself to making art full-time.
www.emilycopelandartistry.com
e.copeland
Emily Copeland creates hyper-realistic, enlarged drawings of antiques. Through her images, she hopes to create a feeling of nostalgia for a past that might not even be the viewer’s own. Copeland frequents a number of antique dealers to source objects, which she then photographs before reproducing precisely on a larger scale with charcoal. The concept of mimesis is central to her practice; she aims to replicate each item as faithfully as possible. She is inspired by artists from the Baroque era,
such as Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Velazquez, and a similar decadence of detail is apparent in her own work. Set against flat white backgrounds, the vintages she finds seem taken out of time, allowing for them to be perceived anew. The recipient of numerous arts awards, Copeland has exhibited internationally, both in group and solo shows, and been featured in publications across the world.
juliaemiliani
Julia Emiliani explores themes of home, memory, and longing in her paintings. Through her renderings of houses, heirlooms, and interiors, she creates poignance in the spaces we occupy but often overlook. Her work finds significance and beauty from the everyday; through the interplay of shadow and luminescence, and a rich but soft color palette, she casts domestic spaces in a new,
profound light. Emiliani is an artist, designer, and illustrator who llives and works in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has a B.F.A. in illustration from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has exhibited work in Gallery263, Longstreet Gallery, and the Massart Museum, among other galleries, and has had work featured with the Boston Globe, Cambridge Art Association, and Colossal Media.
Anne von Freyburg’s artworks subvert traditional perceptions of textiles and the decorative. Historically, craft and decoration were the realm of women and therefore perceived as a lesser form of art. Von Freyburg reclaims these forms to produce work that is not conventionally pretty or pleasing—she makes brash, complex pieces that defiantly proclaim their own worth as works of art. Recently, she has been translating Old Master paintings into large-scale textile paintings. The appropriated portraits are recreated with acrylic ink then translated through hand-stitched fabrics and sewing techniques, giving them an almost corporeal presence.
The works offer commentary on both the cultural norms reinforced by their source material and the excesses of throwaway fashion, raising questions about taste, high vs. low art, and the constructs of female identity. Von Freyburg received her M.F.A. from Goldsmiths and holds a B.A. in Fashion Design from ArtEZ Arnhem. Her work was displayed at the Tapestry Triennial at the Central Textile Museum in Lodz, Poland, one of the most prominent textile museums worldwide. She won the Robert Walters U.K. New Artists Award in 2021 and has exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London. Her work is held in private collections across the world.
I want Candy (After Fragonard), textile painting: acrylic, synthetic-fabrics, sequin fabric, tapestry-fabric, hand-embroidery, polyester wadding, and hand-dyed tassel fringes on canvas, 43.3x55.1in
Who’s Bad (After Fragonard), textile painting: acrylic, synthetic-fabrics, lace, spray-paint, tapestry-fabric, hand-embroidery, polyester wadding and hand-dyed tassel fringes on canvas, 51.2x114.2in
melissa.gile.fineart
In her paintings, Melissa Gile explores the concept of home and the emotions it invokes. Originally from Seattle, she has been living in Hamburg, Germany, since 2014; the fantasy, and reality, of building a life in a foreign country is the animating force behind her work. She creates what she refers to as “dreamscapes” on circular canvases, evoking the romance of travel by playing with perspective and color. Play is an important part of her process—she gradually adds details on top of an abstract background, creating images that seem at once natural and otherworldly. “My hope is to inspire people to pause and get lost in the romance and enchantment of life, momentarily escaping into a dream of their own,” she says. Gile is a self-taught artist whose work has been exhibited in Hamburg and Berlin and featured internationally in a variety of magazines.
richardglickstudio.com richardglickstudio
Richard Glick’s work addresses his feelings of alienation from technology. Focusing on composition, color, shape, and scale, and using acrylic paint, spray paint, inks, and stencils, he creates celestial patterns and shapes; his pieces often evoke the experience of gazing at the night sky. His canvases are tactile and textured, resisting the anonymizing sleekness of the devices that have become so central to our lives. The paintings in his BLOCKED series are bound by geometrical grids, but beyond these
rigid structures, forms and lines swirl, freely creating their own governing rules. This speaks to his desire to look past the given frameworks of our current reality towards a primordial existence that cannot be overwritten. Glick has a B.F.A. from Ohio State University and has studied at Accademia di Belle Arti di Arti di Perugia, in Italy, and Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, in France. His work has been exhibited and is held in private collections across the country.
www.irahoffecker.com
irahoffecker
Ira Hoffecker’s paintings are populated with flowers and plants, which sprout from and sprawl across vivid blocks of color. Patterns weave around her attentively observed and realistically rendered flora, which lie atop backgrounds comprised of pure shapes and color. The combination of these forms creates abstracted landscapes that are both naturalistic and surreal. Hoffecker also creates abstract cityscapes in which architectural forms overlap and take on an almost organic quality, portraying cycles of revision
and regrowth. The contrast between her floral and geometric forms reminds us of nature’s omnipresence and continual ability to spring up and thrive, even in highly controlled, manmade environments. Hoffecker is a prizewinning artist who has an M.F.A. from Plymouth University and a First Class Bachelor in Fine Art from the University of Gloucestershire. She has exhibited in solo, duo, and group exhibitions in England, Canada and Germany.
www.gallea.ca/en/artists/manmohini-kapoor mkreations_wallart
Manmohini Kapoor has always been passionate about creatively expressing herself. As a child, she was a skilled embroiderer, and she went on to study design before beginning her career at a fashion house in Kolkata, India. This background has deeply informed her career as an artist. Kapoor’s first exhibition, in Grenoble, France, was of her ribbon embroidery. She has continued to experiment and evolve her techniques and is currently creating mixed-media work that incorporates acrylic landscape
painting and hand embroidery, combining her love of nature and architecture with her life-long passion. Kapoor is an arts educator living in Ontario, Canada. She works with children between the ages of 6 and 14, teaching embroidery, crochet, and painting. She says her goal is to “share the beauty of hand embroidery with the new generation . . . and keep this skill alive.” Kapoor’s work is exhibited on the online gallery Gallea, based in Montreal.
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Iana Khaitarova, who makes work under the moniker Phhsh, creates drawings with a mythical, folkloric atmosphere. She finds inspiration in the physical world— nature, the sea—and in metaphysical realms—her unconscious thoughts and dreams. She sees her images
as discrete, self-contained realities that exclude her emotional and mental state at the moment of creation. “In my understanding, art is always separated from the artist, and the closest they can get is during the process,” she says. Phhsh is a self-taught artist based in Lisbon.
Jessica Libor’s fantastical portraits use fairy-tale tropes, but each adamantly centers its female protagonist, inverting traditional narratives about the roles a woman should play. Her paintings create their own mythologies and allude to the promise of self-discovery that is central to these types of stories. Libor’s subjects are undeniably SUBJECTS, claiming their own agency and forging their own destinies. Nature takes on an almost sacred role, reflecting the power and the vulnerability of the female
figures foregrounding it. Libor uses oils, mixed media, pastels, charcoal, and precious metals, as well as film and installation. Libor is an award-winning artist, curator, arts educator, and the host of the Inspired Painter podcast. Her work has been exhibited widely and featured in a variety of publications; it is also found in many galleries and private collections, as well as in the permanent collection at Chateau Orquevaux in France.
Francisco Magallán is a painter, printmaker, and illustrator whose work explores what he calls our “mental labyrinths”—the convoluted false realities we create in our own minds. He sees these labyrinths as emotional spaces in which we wander aimlessly, repeating the same paths endlessly as we fail to confront our egos, fears, and desires. “We have to fight the mental war with our internal demons, confront them and triumph to escape since, paradoxically, the exit and the liberation will always be towards the inside and only illusively towards the outside,” he says. Only by turning inwards—by coming to terms
with one’s own psyche and deepest self—can a person free himself from the maze, and this is precisely what he believes an artist should seek to do. Magallán was born and raised in Mexico City, where he received a B.F.A. from the Faculty of Arts and Design and an M.F.A. from the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. He has participated in more than 90 shows nationally and internationally and presented 12 solo shows between Mexico and the United States, and his art is held in institutional collections across the U.S. Magallán now lives in New Orleans.
www.artistmolly.com
mollyfmccracken
Molly F. McCracken’s collage art is process-driven and personal, ludic and color-filled. She uses scissors and glue to deconstruct and reassemble paper and other objects, and there is a clear sense of tactility and play in her work. Her inspiration springs from bold color, shape, joy, frustration, and wonder. McCracken seeks to illuminate current events and the emotions they evoke in a way that is sensitive, visually appealing, and often humorous. Her newest series, “Personal Stratigraphies 2.0,” consists of
topographical maps of her subjectivity as she navigates and reacts to our fraught present moment. By mapping her own feelings, she draws connections between her interiority and the natural world; by stripping the scientific imagery of its usual context, she creates a tension between objective and subjective knowledge, gesturing towards the complexity of existence and of seeking to define it. McCracken is an artist and educator who has exhibited throughout the U.S.
I Understand, mixed media collage on paper, 11x14in
Frances Melhop is an award-winning artist, curator, and gallery director whose work explores the tension between the virtual and physical ways we experience the world. She is fascinated with the ephemera we leave behind— how even as our lives become increasingly digitized, our physical traces inevitably remain. Her practice is deeply rooted in tactility and combines analogue and digital photography, embroidery, printmaking, oil painting, and installation. Melhop’s craftsmanship is immediately apparent in her pieces, calling attention to the physicality of creation. Her recent project, “Sum of the Parts,” consists of 25 small oil paintings on torn canvas, dissections of faces from appropriated selfie images. Melhop was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and currently lives and works in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. She holds an M.F.A. and a B.F.A. from the University of Reno (Nevada). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide. In 2020, she opened Melhop Gallery °7077, representing 12 national and international artists.
www.sarahjmueller.com
sarahmuellerr
Sarah J. Mueller is an artist and educator who specializes in portraiture and figurative painting. Observational studies and live sketches are a daily practice for her; she takes inspiration from busy urban environments, which are at once intimate and isolating. Her work explores the theme of social connection, and its lack, through the lens of transit experiences. Her canvases are populated with figures, but they hardly ever interact—perhaps the only person who really sees them is Mueller herself, as she captures
their gestures. “By merging the real and the imagined, the figurative and abstract, I hope to evoke the complexity of being surrounded by others yet often feeling alone,” she says. Mueller has a B.F.A. with an emphasis in painting and has designed and facilitated art programs for hospitals, museums, juvenile detention centers, city programs, and schools. She currently teaches high school visual arts in Montclair, New Jersey and mentors young adults in their creative pursuits.
ramcreates.com
ramcreates
Rashad Ali Muhammad is a multidisciplinary artist who works with collage, a form that breaks down established references and reassembles them to create compelling new visions. As a queer, gender-nonconforming person of the African diaspora, he finds particular resonance with this ability to deconstruct and reform reality—a mode of thinking and creation that offers a way to counter society’s hierarchies and binaries. Muhammad began creating petal collages during the pandemic. In this series, he dismantles flower arrangements and rearranges
the petals to create new, generative patterns. The work speaks to our ability to heal from past trauma and build the world anew. “I endeavor to cultivate open space for healing and rejuvenation from our chaotic world—where individuals can explore their authenticity through selflove, vulnerability, and connection,” he says. Muhammad has exhibited nationally and internationally, and his artwork has appeared in the Washington Post, British GQ, and Kolaj Magazine, among others.
Nasim Pachi’s bold, figurative paintings speak to her experience as an Iranian-German artist who spent the first two decades of her life in Iran—a country she feels both passionate and conflicted about. Through her work, she aims to explore and represent the ambivalence many feel about the culture that shaped them. Pachi’s paintings are deeply rooted in personal identity; her subjects are adorned with traditional or religious patterns, but they are also obscured, dramatizing the interplay between one’s individual and cultural sense of self. In her adult life, Pachi has moved between Europe, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, and she draws from her experiences with the social and political paradoxes she encountered in each location,
as well as from the people she has met. Her work is animated by a fascination with others and the desire to understand how external forces shape each individual. She mostly paints on smooth linen or canvas, rendering skin in oil and patterns in acrylic; subtly layered, the pieces remain visually pleasing while gesturing towards the harsh realities of religious and government oppression. Pachi received her Master of Arts in Illustration from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Her work is exhibited and collected internationally, and she currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
www.dantepirouzart.com dante_pirouz_artist
Dante M. Pirouz is an award-winning artist whose work celebrates the hues of the sky, fields, and lakes of the Midwest. After decades of traveling the world while working as an international executive and professor, she returned to her long-time passion, abstract expressionist painting. Pirouz’s work is inspired by each of the places she lived—Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, China, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Australia— but it is ultimately a tribute to the natural beauty of rural
Michigan, rendering the serene simplicity of bucolic life in vibrant color. “After years living a hectic corporate life in cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and Munich, my goal is to capture to spiritual beauty of the landscapes and skyscapes across the countryside,” she says. Pirouz works as a full-time artist and has presented her work at Superfine’s Art Fair (Wo)man Show, Saatchi’s the Other Art Fair, and the Art Santa Fe show.
Lucy Pike’s abstract paintings are an exploration of presence: how we inhabit each moment and our own consciousnesses. Bold strokes of acrylic ink suffuse her raw canvases, producing organic shapes that overlay and bleed into each other. The interplay of these forms creates an emotionally evocative atmosphere, enhanced by their muted tones. Pike is a process-based painter— she allows her materials to guide the evolution of her work. Like many color field painters, she seeks to create a sense of aesthetic immediacy, calling the viewer’s attention to the materiality of the work and the act of painting itself. The resulting images offer an expressionist exploration of femininity; each is named for a mythological heroine, many of whom underwent transformations or transformed the surrounding world. Pike lives and works near Birmingham, Alabama. Her work has been featured in local and virtual exhibitions, and she has been selected for artist residencies across the country.
www.dianepribojan.blogspot.com
dianepribojan
When she was three years old, Diane Pribojan moved from Zvjerinac, a small village in the former Yugoslavia, to the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. She draws inspiration from this quintessentially American space, and her artwork captures both its particularities and the generic ethos of suburbia. The repetitive geometric forms of the houses and buildings she paints contrast with nature’s unpredictable, curving shapes. This subject—cities, landscapes, and the liminal spaces between—is the lens through which she explores the wider world. Pribojan
vivifies the banality of her architectural subjects through her use of color and shadow; in the tradition of Edward Hopper, she sheds new light on that which we often overlook. The familiar sight of provincial houses and towering skyscrapers becomes slightly surreal through her use of perspective employment of dramatic hues. Pribojan received her B.F.A. at the Cleveland Institute of Art and her M.F.A. in painting at Kent State University, and her work is exhibited nationally.
www.melreese.com
melaniereese
Mel Reese is a formalist painter whose work gestures toward the representational through a complex layering of lines, shapes, colors, and textures. Her recent paintings are influenced by her experience living as a young woman in the U.S., where both women’s bodily autonomy and the natural environment are under threat. The forms she creates through a unique mono-printing, liquid-tape process come to resemble landscapes that, when combined with bold, vaginally inspired and historic patterns, remind us of the complex yet innate connection
between human rights and climate justice. Through the interplay of her abstracted shapes and symbolic patterns, Reese hopes to generate conversation of sustainable choice and the connection between the land and those who inhabit it. Reese is an artist and curator based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She holds an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts and has exhibited widely throughout the U.S.; she is represented by Florence Contemporary Gallery in Italy.
www.monicashulman.com monicashulman
Monica Shulman’s brand of gestural abstraction is a form of storytelling, exploring themes of identity, motherhood, and self-reflection. Her paintings are compulsively energetic, created with both reckless abandon and careful restraint. Her heavily layered technique make her pieces almost sculptural; the physicality of her marks is immediately apparent. Shulman’s work is intuitive and process-oriented. She uses oil paint, pastels, charcoal, pencils, oil sticks, and other materials, each of which she engages as an active participant in her work. Her
current series, “The Storm We Weathered,” is a collection of paintings created in the wake of the pandemic. She counters feelings of chaos and uncertainty with bright, vibrant colors; the smallness of two-dimensional, screenbased existence with a bold impasto style. Shulman is a self-taught artist who has exhibited across the U.S. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Create Magazine, and Popular Photography, among other publications.
Debi Slowey Raguso’s paintings combine mythological imagery, living creatures, and mathematical principles to deconstruct the idea of beauty. For her, the source of aesthetic perfection is numbers, and she combines formulae and natural forms to illustrate this. In her pictures, animals float over golden logarithmic spirals; a goddess stands beside a string of Fibonacci numbers. She puts living beings—imperfect, ephemeral—in conversation with universal patterns and the divine. Her images
emanate from her own imagination but speak to a higher truth beyond our corporeal reality—the beauty captured in each painting gestures toward the concept of beauty itself. Slowey Raguso has had solo exhibitions at notable galleries such as Chuck Levitan Gallery and the Stone House Museum. Her work is held in notable permanent collections such as the U.S. Embassy in Paris, France, the Printmaking Workshop Collection, and St. Mary’s College, among others.
www.katiesouthworthart.com
katiesouthworth_art
Katie Southworth harnesses the power of color and verticality to promote mindfulness, joy, and mental wellbeing. Her work is inspired by emotions, memory, and anything that makes her feel healthy. Her pieces are informed by color theory and almost synesthesiac— Southworth names each after she has meditated on its colors and decided whom, or what, it most reminds her of. “My pieces are complete when I achieve a harmonious balance of minimalism and captivating color complexity” she says. “Once I achieve that, a color story, memory, or
mood can emerge.” The effect is calming and nostalgic, encouraging viewers to momentarily retreat into their memories or their inner self. Southworth is an awardwinning, internationally collected abstract artist. More than 200 of her original works are in private and public collections in 50-plus cities across the world. She shows her work online, in exhibitions, and in art fairs around the U.S. In honor of Southworth’s mother, a percentage of all her sales are donated to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Lori Solley combines drawing, printmaking, and collage techniques to examine the roles women are often made to inhabit and the impact that has on one’s sense of self. Her work uses traditional and non-traditional materials— found images, thread, charcoal, wallpaper—to explore the gap between inherited values and lived reality. The use of these varied materials, of figurative imagery as well as abstracted shapes, speaks to the illusory nature of the feminine ideal. Solley is an artist and teacher as well as a wife and mother. Hands, a recurrent theme in her work, represent the convergence point of her disparate
identities. It is with her hands that she cares for her family; it is with her hands that she creates her art. Embroidery, a traditional women’s craft, is employed to demonstrate the limits of perfection in any of these roles. Solley pierces her work to add this additional dimension. “Once a hole is made it cannot be undone,” she says. Solley is a full-time instructor at Kilgore college who received a B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Tyler and an M.F.A. from Texas Christian University. Her work has been exhibited both regionally and nationally.
www.sullivanbeeman.com
dsullivanbeeman
Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman is a contemporary surrealist painter whose work is informed by third-wave feminism, as well as the riot grrrl, Queercore, and D.I.Y. movements. Through her paintings, she interrogates the figure of the “girl” and the role it has played in female empowerment narratives. Sullivan-Beeman’s images are populated with young women and creatures; she weaves together the heroine and animal personas to construct fictional, fantastical worlds. Her iconography emerges from someplace subliminal—to explore the collective unconscious, she draws from her own dreams, tarot
symbolism, and pop-culture imagery. She paints in a labor-intensive style called the Mische Technique, which combines egg tempera and oil paint and dates to the Renaissance era—a time when women had little agency. “As a woman living and making art today, I take pride in my technique and my subjects: strong women and their powerful animal souls,” Sullivan-Beeman says. SullivanBeeman lives and works in Los Angeles and Vancouver. She is a self-taught artist whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the world.
www.lookalittlecloser.com lookalittlecloser
Kim Tateo is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores the intricacies of the relationship between the self, nature, and the cosmos. Her paintings—vivid tapestries of bright hues and blacklight-sensitive pigments—are surreal visions of imagined realms, inviting the viewer to contemplate the myriad realities underlying what we perceive, to see the magic in the mundane. “These little worlds are ponderings, meditations, spells, prayers, dreams remembered, portals to the abundant landscapes where I believe our souls
reside,” she says. Through her work, Tateo considers the ways in which we are all connected; she is also the curator of a collaborative art project, Snail Mail Art Collab, which invites artists to collectively create a piece that transforms as each individual contributes. Tateo is based in Troy, New York, and has participated in various exhibitions, shows, and public art projects across the state. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of Iowa.
www.tricialynntownes.com
tricil.townes
Through her art, Tricia Lynn Townes seeks to universalize experiences of discomfort and unease in order to heal them. Her artistic practice began with paintings of her family and friends, rendered sympathetically to capture the subjects in their full complexity. “I think of the family unit as the first and most intimate microcosm of the larger communities that exist in the world,” she says, and even as her lens moves out to address societal issues such as redlining, urban food deserts, and the legacy of slavery, it
remains focused on the communities that matter to her. She also makes work that celebrates these communities by positioning often marginalized people as central to the American experience. Townes has an M.F.A. from UNC-Greensboro. She lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee, and has exhibited in Miami, New York, and Chicago. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, The Fine Arts Work Center, and MassMoCA, among others.
www.nathanwalsh.net
nathan_walsh_artist
Nathan Walsh’s ambitious, large-scale oil paintings capture urban landscapes, using perspective and color theory to create portraits of cities that are dazzling and subtly surreal. Walsh builds an archive of photographs and drawings that inform his paintings, and the presence of these collected materials in his studio suggests new ways of envisioning the metropolis—he combines interior and exterior views, reflected space and flat surfaces, scenes from different locations and viewpoints. Walsh’s work is
hyperrealistic, filled with intricate, observed details, while slightly detached from reality. At once sprawling and claustrophobic, his cityscapes meld geometric forms and create their own laws of physics. The resulting images are immersive, capturing both the chaos and the order of the modern city. Walsh’s work is held in public and private collections worldwide and has been featured in numerous publications. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, and Zurich.
Doug Webb works in a hyperrealistic style but considers himself a classical romantic surrealist. He draws inspiration from Dalí, Pop art, the Photorealism movement, and, of course, René Magritte, whose self-portrait The Son of Man recurs throughout Webb’s work. Webb works with acrylic paint on linen canvas, isolating each transparent wash to create texture and depth. True to his surrealist ethos, Webb draws from his visions and his unconscious. After an idea appears to him, he extensively researches photographic references before bringing an image to life. His work often
features the reconciliation of opposites, contrasting the natural and urban worlds, modernity and history. Webb is self-taught; he honed much of his early technique working in a factory producing paintings for furniture showrooms in the early 1970s. He has had solo exhibitions across the world, and his paintings are in the collections of the White House, the Smithsonian Institute, the University Club of Washington, D.C., Forbes, the Weisman Art Musuem, and the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation.
In this section we invite contributing writers to share their perspectives on contemporary art, education, and other notes of interest related to visual arts.
As artists, we understand the importance of maintaining a consistent studio practice. But let’s face it, during the summer months; it can be a challenge to balance our creative work with the diversion of sunshine and family commitments. Summer is a favorite season for many who want to enjoy the weather but also get work done. Also, for many teaching artists, summer can be a time to get significant work done in the studio. The break from work means they can dive into their practice in a way they can’t during the academic year. Overall, there are a lot of factors that impact your studio from June to August.
When you add the summer factors of wanting to take advantage of a season in the sun and needing to make work, it can be the perfect storm of studio guilt. Have you felt this way? You want to enjoy the summer, and your family, while getting year-long projects completed in just a few months. It is a lot of pressure, so how does an artist navigate it?
Rather than viewing these factors as obstacles to our productivity, I encourage you to embrace them as sources of inspiration. By engaging with the world around us, we can enrich our creative practice and find new avenues of expression. Experiences enrich your practice, and some experiences can only happen when kids and teachers are out of school and sunscreen is being layered on. As a way to mindfully tie enjoying life in the summer with your practice, here are some suggestions:
1 Make a goal to create one five-minute sketch a day! Break out your sketchbook and draw while hiking, on a walk, or at a BBQ or pool! At the end of the summer, you will have a wealth of new imagery!
2 Jumping in a lake? Write about what that feels like and quickly sketch the feeling and experience!
3 Enjoy a summer morning by walking through the city. Write about what you hear and see, and make a sketch about it in your sketchbook!
4 Explore a new location that encompasses a summer activity you love. Some place you’ve never been to before. Draw the space.
5 Read a book, any book, and enjoy it!
written by Rebecca Potts Aguirre
Hello artists! This is part five of a series of journaling prompts focused on navigating dual careers as an artist and educator (or artist and _______________[insert your other career]).
If you’ve been following along, setting aside a bit of time with each issue to reflect on your careers, pull out those lists of tasks and responsibilities from before. If you’re diving in now, start by thinking through the many things you do in each role or check out past issues for more detailed prompts. Is there time for rest in those lists?
If you’re anything like me, your schedule is packed full with juggling multiple jobs, parenting, other care taking, and all those little life responsibilities. There isn’t a minute to spare! Let’s change that.
When I say “rest” you might picture a lovely nap in the midst of a chaotic day, or getting to sleep in without interruption. Rest can be different for each of us. Think about what refills your cup. It doesn’t have to be literal rest - maybe it’s a big party! What does rest look like for you?
My ideal rest includes a combination of mind, body, and emotional rest. I need time for my mind to be less active, for my emotions to be calm, and for my body to relax and rejuvenate.
For me, opportunities for deep rest (like sleeping past 7am without kids or puppies waking me up) are few and far between. But I can build regular moments of rest into every day. Some of these look like:
– Sitting on a bench at the park and watching clouds while my kid plays
– Reading at the beach and listening to the waves (while my kid plays)
– Vegging out on TV after bedtime
– A 15-20 minute stretch/breathing/yoga break between meetings
– Taking a bath with a glass of wine after bedtime (as cliché as it sounds)
– Listening to music in the car while waiting for school pick up
If you don’t already have little moments of rest like this built into your days, think about what that might look like. Where can you shift your schedule to fit in brain or body breaks?
Finding time for the deeper rest is more difficult and may require us to adjust our focus. It has been helpful for me to think about seasons in my career(s). It’s impossible to be 100% artist and 100% educator and 100% parent (and wife, sister, friend, etc.) all of the time. I think most of us feel guilty for not doing each career 100% (not to mention the feeling of failing our families when we do prioritize our careers). Let’s work on overcoming that guilt and moving forward with balance. First, don’t compare yourself to artists who don’t teach (or have a dual career). Second, give yourself grace to have seasons - more and less productive times in the year and in your life.
The idea of seasons for me means many things. It means letting go of the feeling of failure when I see a gap on my CV during a difficult pregnancy and my daughter’s first 2 years. I stared at that gap with frustration and disappointment in myself for too long before realizing that those were the years when I created my most incredible masterpiece: human life! I should feel proud looking at that gap in my exhibition record. I spent those years honoring my body and my child. That should be normalized and applauded, but our society does the opposite. I won’t get into the ridiculous lack of parental
leave in America. One step I took to help myself feel proud of that CV gap AND to help normalize taking that time was to add The Pregnancy Pause to my CV.
Seasons also mean allowing priorities to fluctuate throughout the year. Sometimes, I might need to prioritize my studio practice in preparation for a show and let other things slide for a day or a week or a month. Sometimes, I might have a lot of family events or activities going on and need to pause or slow down on studio work. When teaching, August and September might be totally focused on preparation for the new school year.
Maybe this year, you’re fully teacher and in the future, you might be fully artist. Or maybe you focus on lesson planning for a few weeks to get it all done for the semester and free up studio time later. You have to figure out what works for you.
Here are a few examples of focusing on one aspect of your dual careers for a certain amount of time:
– Attending an artist residency (this could be restful or intensely focused)
– Taking a day to visit museums/galleries
– Focusing on my studio practice for a day/week/month
– Attending an education conference or professional development workshops
– Focusing on my teaching practice for a day/week/month
Once we’ve found those moments of rest within our everyday lives, and embraced seasons in our careers, we can also figure out ways to expand our time. Am I talking about time travel or doubling up on tasks a la
Hermione? NO! I’m talking about finding ways to do more with less time. Things that have helped me include: using technology to automate whatever I can, re-using lessons, hiring help when I can, scheduling and re-using emails, getting organized to make finding things quick and easy, and delegating responsibilities in my home and classroom. It has also helped to decide on a focus for each week/month/year and put other things aside, knowing that they will have their time of focus later.
We need to be whole people and give ourselves grace in order to keep making amazing art and sharing our passion with students.
JOURNAL:
1. What does rest look like for you?
What refills your cup?
How do you recognize when your cup is feeling empty?
2. When do you rest?
Where is there time for rest? What steps can you take to make more time for rest?
We’ve chosen careers that can be so fulfilling, but also can become draining. You’re passionate about art and about education. You deserve to feel that passion and feel joy in what you do. Without rest, we burnout and the passion turns to ashes.
REPEAT TO YOURSELF:
I prioritize rest.
I give myself permission to NOT be 100% artist or 100% educator.
This past February, Miami played host to hundreds of artists across three popular events: Art Wynwood, Superfine Miami, and Coconut Grove Arts Festival. The exhibitors I spoke with across these events said the right preparation was key to a successful art fair experience. Here are the three biggest suggestions I heard for artists at all levels:
Miami is no stranger to expensive art stunts—this year’s being the destroyed Jeff Koons sculpture at Art Wynwood1—but insurance isn’t an ideal way to make a living. For nearly every repeat exhibitor I spoke to, the primary factor in determining success at an art fair was sales and artists made this financially sustainable by selling art at multiple price points. Having smaller, impulse-buy pieces such as prints along with larger, expensive works helps generate both revenue and interest for a wider range of buyers.
Those artists were quick to say that, after outright sales, commissions2 in the weeks or months after the fair were another mark of success. These leads are caught and
kept by making communication easy; artists use paper and digital business cards, as well as QR code linked to email opt-ins or their social media. Capitalize on the momentum you create during the show by announcing your commissions are open at (and after) the fair.
Art fairs are an immediate financial cost3 for an artist, but there is also a physical, mental, and emotional strain that comes from exhibiting for multiple days. Bring support if you can, especially if they’re able to discuss your work with prospective buyers. If you plan on attending solo, be prepared to make friends with your boothmates; they’re your safety net as you grab food or go off networking.
www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/visual-arts/ article272539097.html
theabundantartist.com/8-tips-artists-acceptingcommissions/
www.magazine.artconnect.com/resources/participating-inart-fairs
Our studio visits in New York City provide us with a deeper understanding of the work in which we are viewing. Through this ongoing series, we travel to artist studios in Brooklyn and Manhattan to meet contemporary artists who are creating powerful, thought-provoking work.
demarcusmcgaughey.com demarcusmcg
Texas native and Brooklyn-based mixed media artist Demarcus McGaughey captures the beauty, strength and vibrancy of people of color with both insight and passion. In the early days of his career, the artist employed his talents in the worlds of graphic design and advertising but it was through painting that McGaughey discovered an avenue through which to tell stories in his own visual language.
A lifelong student of human nature and psychology, McGaughey assumes the role of narrator in his paintings, telling heroic stories of his subjects’ self-actualization and determination. A certified life coach as well as an artist, McGaughey empowers the viewer to believe that life is what you create it to be and his portraiture work reveals triumphant tales of African American subjects who manifest their destinies, their eyes revealing their souls. The artist also pays homage to cultural influences using elements of pop art, mass media, comic books and advertising – and the through line found in all the work of this exciting young artist is, indeed, the illumination of inspiring stories of Black resilience and triumph. McGaughey received his Bachelor of Arts from Prairie View A&M University and his work has been featured in numerous galleries and publications in the U.S. as well as in Spain. In addition, he has completed art residencies with Mas el sigols in Barcelona, Nfinit Foundation Arts
Residency in Brooklyn, ArtCrawl Harlem in New York City, Chateau Orquevaux in France and Ma’s House in Southampton NY.
Art is a narrative. And the stories in my work reveal the resilience of my subjects.
I uncover the beauty of their scars; the strength of their vulnerability; the wonderment of their excellence. As a mixed media artist, my work delivers an intimate look into each individual’s soul coupled with nods to cultural influence.
Each piece, a blend of my passions and real-world experiences colliding on canvas, represent my love for colors, pop art, advertising, graphic design, life coaching, and storytelling.
Inspired by Barkley Hendricks, who famously captured Black people in all their coolness, I create my subjects in visions that are larger-than-life. Drawing inspiration from Andy Warhol’s esteemed artistry in pop art, I combine painting, photography, mixed media, and graphic design. This exploration of styles, techniques, and color combinations on canvas allow me to express the spectrum of moods among my subjects. I paint victorious overcomers, highlighting a thematic narrative of Black triumph over tribulation.
www.kimhopsonstudio.com kimhopsonstudio
Kim Hopson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. In her work, she explores themes of motherhood, disability and identity. Experiencing life with a limb difference has given her a unique viewpoint that is reflected in her paintings, drawings and collages. She focuses on the body’s relationship to the world, both physically and emotionally. Motherhood has made that difference a more central part of her art, and her work has expanded to examine those experiences in the context of parenthood. Her intention is to create dialogue around these topics in order to spark a larger conversation.
My artwork includes figures being overtaken and trapped by knitwear- a reflection of how I feel trying to wrap myself and my children in winter clothes but with all the snaps and sleeves and buttons and zippers that make my onehanded life feel constricting. I am exploring this series
through painting, drawing and mixed media collage. The paintings examine the body being wrapped and bundled in fabric, while the collage pieces display figures engulfed by patterns, textiles, and knitwear. The viewer cannot tell if the figure is being enveloped by fabric, or emerging reborn through the layered material.
My latest series, Sweater Weather, is an autobiographical study of frustration, toil, resilience and all the ups and downs that come with parenting. The figures in my artwork illustrate struggle through twisted and bundled knitwear constraining the figure, but there is also beauty, hope and love illuminated through my use of bright colors and haloed light surrounding the figures. Sweater Weather is about the ever-changing landscape of motherhood. I illuminate the societal norms lain within the Mommy Hellscape that have most parents treading water, layered with the complexities of navigating caregiving in a disabled body.
In February 2021, we opened our digital library on the Visionary Art Collective website. This library houses free downloadable resources for artists and educators around the globe.
visionaryartcollective.com/educational-resources
Artists of all ages
Pressed for time? Here is a list of activities that can be completed in 30 minutes or less, and will keep you engaged with your creative practice.
A large part of an artist’s studio practice is feeling inspired, and staying inspired. On days where you don’t have enough time to hit the studio, spend 30 minutes gathering inspiration for future work.
– Visit your favorite online art websites, blogs and magazines. Save images of work that stands out to you. Keep an “Inspiration” folder on your desktop to store these images. Pull them out when you feel stuck or need fresh ideas.
Keep a sketchbook to visually brainstorm ideas for your work, and to jot down notes for future pieces that you plan to make. Utilize your sketchbook for quick drawings on days when you can’t make it to the studio.
– Complete a 30 minute sketch of an artwork that you’d like to create in the future. Tip: include notes about materials, composition and subject matter.
– Sketch a person, place or thing you find inspiring.
– Sketch a room in your home (easy to do on the couch or while laying in bed!)
– Keep a list of “sketchbook ideas” for when you’re unsure of what to draw!
Keeping an organized studio space will allow your work to flow eaiser. On days where you don’t have enough time to work on your art, spend 30 minutes organizing your space.
– Clear out & organize the materials and supplies in your studio
– Prep your materials for when you’re ready to return to the studio (prime a canvas, wash your brushes, set out the paints or materials you’ll use)
– Make quick and easy changes to your physical studio space (move paintings around, put old work in storage, hang up new + inspiring images)
visionaryartcollective.com/educational-resources
Updating your website is a great activity to do when you just don’t have enough time or energy to work on your art. Your website is it’s own work of art, and should stay as up to date as possible.
– Take 30 minutes to update your website with new images of recent work
– Play around with the layout of your website, consider re-organizing certain pages or categorizing your work in a different way. Update any pages that may need to be freshened up - such as your bio, artist statement, or selected press.
– Send a quick email to your subscribers to update them with any news or announcements you may have!
Submitting to art opportunities on a consistent basis is a great way to build your artist CV and get your work out into the world.
– Take 30 minutes to submit your work to an opportunity that sparks your interest.
– To save time, make a list at the start of each week with new opportunities that you’d like to apply to and be considered for. Better yet, have all of your materials ready to go (images of your work clearly labeled, artist statement and bio) so that submitting your work is a breeze.
Reflecting on your art practice is just as important as making the work itself. On days where you don’t have the time to visit your studio or create work, take 30 minutes to reflect.
– Journal about your art practice; what you’ve created over the past few years, what you’re working on now, and where you’re headed.
– Set goals for yourself! Take some time to plan out your next week. Pinpoint which day’s and times you’ll spend working on your art. This will help you to be proactive even if you can’t get into the studio right away.
Victoria J. Fry will provide you with targeted support in key areas of your art career, foster meaningful connections with fellow artists, and build a strong foundation from which you can reach your goals.
The program includes:
10 group sessions with Victoria in a supportive environment, 90 min each
Proven tools and strategies to increase visibility & sell your work
Opportunities to share your work and receive specific feedback
Private Facebook group to ask questions and receive additional support
Email support in between sessions
Victoria will focus on strategies and tools to grow your collector base, increase sales, exhibit your work, and move through creative blocks
SPOTS ARE LIMITED!
FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO SIGN UP GO TO visionaryartcollective.com/artist-glowup-program
Visionary Art Collective showcases work by artists from around the world in our diverse in-person and virtual exhibitions.
How do our memories and experiences impact our work?
As artists, we often create as a tool for visual processing. In turn, our work becomes a culmination of all that we have experienced in our lives thus far. Our memories, dreams, and perceptions are woven into narratives that are deeply personal and yet still universal. In this exhibition, we are showcasing that explores the connection between memory, experience, and perception, and how those elements inspire the creative process.
I was so honored to be the guest curator for the Visionary Art Collective exhibition, Inside a Memory. The works of art included in this virtual show represent the range in style, subject matter, and media from the reviewed submissions. When making these selections, I strove to identify works that spoke directly and metaphorically to the concept of memory. Similarly, I paid equal attention to all the various media —drawing, painting, mixed-media, and more. As a result, the included artwork explores ideas of memory in diverse ways, engaging the viewer to explore the subject matter in depth. The aim of the resulting exhibition is to showcase the various contemporary art practices found globally that explore the topic of memory.
72 Warren St, Manhattan
Curated by Victoria J Fry
Visionary Art Collective is thrilled to announce its first inperson exhibition in NYC, The Lens Through Which We See, featuring the work of six contemporary landscape painters: Bri Custer, Colleen Gleason Shull, Julie Avisar, Ekaterina Popova, Amanda Hawkins and Sarah Boyle
Each artist captures the beauty of the natural world while conveying a deeper truth, filtering what she observes through emotion and memory. The resulting paintings are both a celebration of the land and of each artist’s interiority,
providing a locus for the interplay of perceived reality and personal understanding. While deeply tied to a physical place, the work is transcendent, gesturing beyond what is seen to what is felt; through particular attention to each scene and what it evokes, the artists meld the observable universe with individual experience.
Artwork from The Lens Through Which We See will be available for private viewings at 183 Lorraine St in Brooklyn, NY from April 29 - May 21, 2023.
We are proud to feature a wide range of talented artists in the Visionary Art Collective Directory. Coming to you from numerous states and nations, our directory artists work across a wide range of mediums and disciplines.
visionaryartcollective.com/directory
ashleyblanton.com
faint.as.fog
Ashley Blanton is an Asheville, North Carolina-based artist who creates mixed media works on paper that explore the liminal spaces between internal and external experiences. Inspired by psychological states, archetypal narratives, and biological morphologies, Ashely creates imagery that examines themes of fallow and fruition, isolation and connection, descent and emergence, burial and excavation, secrecy and visibility, fragmentation and cohesion.
Ashley holds a Bachelors of Art in Studio Art from the College of Santa Fe and a Masters of Professional Studies in Art Therapy and Creativity Development from Pratt Institute. Her artwork belongs in many private collections and she has exhibited throughout the United States.
My artwork examines the body as a site of trauma, transformation, and healing. I utilize watercolor, gouache, collage, and image transfers to create layered works on paper that are evocative of emotional residue and visceral felt senses.
By situating female forms within biomes of fungi, microbes, neurons, circuits, arteries, and roots, I reimagine a connection between body and environment. I depict female bodies as beacons and conduits that absorb, digest, and transmute the energetic residue of the interconnected ecosystems of which they are a part. The repetitive mark-making in my paintings is akin to swarms, murmurations, and masses that are made up of smaller parts moving together. The resulting images conjure a speculative, science-fiction future that exists in the radioactive afterglow of the Anthropocene. I created my current collection in an attempt to fend off dystopian despair with visions of emergent connection, sensitivity, and empathy.
www.mixdmediamashup.com
Susan Lerner is a New York City based contemporary hand-cut collage artist. In her prior profession as a Certified Flavor Chemist, Susan “collaged” chemicals into unique flavors but now she uses paper as her medium. She loves the collage process, finding joy in the hunt for imagery, meditation in cutting paper and delight in creating nostalgic compositions. Since 2017, she has shown her work in five solo shows in New York City and Northwest Connecticut and over 30 group shows including in Chelsea and Brooklyn, NY, Wiesbaden, Germany, the Scandinavian Collage Museum in Norway and most recently in Paris, France. Her work has been published in numerous periodicals including “Collage Care: Transforming Emotions and Life Experiences with Collage” by Laurie Kanyer. Susan is the co-founder of the New York Collage Ensemble, which promotes a supportive community of like-minded analog collage artists in NYC. Her most notable sales are to restaurateur David Bouley and the Kanyer Art Collection and her work has been licensed with Jiggy Puzzles.
Do you remember a time before GPS, when your next destination was discovered through a road map and sheer luck? I am intrigued by the physical and metaphorical connection of the map. How a map both literally and figuratively connects us to a place or a time from the past and brings us to the present. Using vintage imagery and found photographs in my hand-cut collages, I aim to conjure up nostalgia through location and memories. As a form of visual storytelling, I communicate my personal experiences by literally traveling down memory lane, uncovering the hidden gems of our lives by carefully dissecting and removing “land” from the page. Like an archeologist, I track the winding paths of the map’s topography gently digging into the layers and sediment to unearth what lies beneath, both physically and emotionally. The process of deconstructing the past helps to explore and understand ourselves and the possibilities for the future.
www.jaynandersonart.com
jaynandersonart
Jayn Anderson is a North Carolina based abstract painter. Her work is inspired by life experiences, emotions, music and how they all relate to fundamental humanness. She creates to uncover the deeply personal and at times, uncomfortable parts of life. Through her work, she strives to present a visual language that we can all relate to on a deeper level. Jayn’s desire is to provide a safe space for others to feel the freedom and vulnerability to connect to their innermost thoughts through art.
www.phyllisandersonart.com
phyllisandersonart
Phyllis Anderson is an award-winning artist who divides her time between Colorado and New Jersey. She received a BFA at the University of Texas, and later studied at the Art Students League in New York. Her current multi-media paintings are landscapes which invoke dreams and memory, where a threatened wilderness has become an idea, mythic, legendary, unreal. Fantastic color, image fragmentation, and scribbled lines create romantic, mysterious works. Phyllis’s paintings are shown regularly in Philadelphia, and at RGallery in Boulder, CO. Her work is available at Framewerx Gallery in Winter Park, CO, and is in several private & corporate collections.
www.rebeccaannanart.com
rebecca_annan_art
Rebecca Annan is a Fine Artist from London, England who returned to her art practice at the start of 2021. Working in a variety of mediums, Rebecca takes what resonates with her from the natural world and creates art that captures the temporal and impermanent. Her latest body of work is The Comfort Collection, a series in graphite and charcoal. The series explores everyday fabrics and objects that we associate with comfort captured in a moment in time and elevated as the focus of our attention.
www.pamelajblack.com
pamelajblackart
Pamela J. Black is a painter who lives in a town outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Black is currently represented by The Millworks, which is a local and sustainable restaurant, brewery and art gallery with 17 artist studios. She spends her days juggling the roles of mother and artist while painting from her in-home studio. Black’s paintings are interpretations of what she sees around her and what she has discovered through sketches along her travels. She often begins by creating a random mark on canvas and responds to it by bringing order back to the surface. Her creative process is fueled by a need to find a sense of balance between chaos and control. Ultimately, her paintings serve as reflections of her soul’s landscape - they are visual records of her emotions, findings, and her everyday thoughts.
saraheboyle_painting
Sarah E. Boyle is a Chicago-based painter who explores place and memory through landscape – alluding to narrative, symbolism, and the tension between knowing a place and translating it with oil paint. Her “Firescapes” series captures the transformation of familiar American West landscapes after recent wildfires. Sarah studied fashion and design at Syracuse University and Ringling School of Art and Design before receiving her BFA at the School of the Art Institute.
www.paulettabrooks.com
PBWearableArt
Pauletta Brooks is a jewelry artist who also branches out into other mediums. Her designs, under the label Pauletta Brooks Wearable Art, involve the use of raw minerals and gemstones set in unique and unusual ways. She is known primarily for her inventive use of thermoplastic resin, creating meshlike sculptural webs that house the minerals and stones. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines, journals, and galleries throughout the US and abroad. She resides in New York City.
www.heidibrueckner.com
heidi.brueckner
Heidi Brueckner is an Oakland based artist and has been a professor of art at West Valley College for over 20 years. She holds a BA in Art and a BA in Art History from University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Painting from University of Kansas. Brueckner writes, “People are in interested in people, whether because of personality traits, actions, or appearance. My work is inspired by this curiosity and allows the viewer to be part of the observation. The work often inspects the under-revered, and appreciates the subject’s presence and dignity, giving pause to honor them.”
natcann.com
natcann
Nat Cann (he/him) is a Canadian printmaker focused upon the climate impacts, and the haunting of lands—relentless industries keeping afloat Canadian notions of colonialist heritage. His has exhibited across Canada in both public galleries and artistrun centers, and has gratefully acted as a mentor, instructor, and technical assistant to numerous students and professionals unversed in print. Nat now resides in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada on the traditional lands of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaq Peoples where he currently instructs workshops in all things printmaking.
I like working with materials that are a little rough, grungy, maybe a little dirty. I juxtapose feminine images from vintage magazines or antique photos next to found material like cardboard, vintage paper and deconstructed book pages. I have been drawn to artistic practices most of my life, even though I have had an eclectic professional life. I have a degree in Art History from the University of Michigan but am mostly a self taught artist. I was born in Detroit, but have lived in Traverse City for 23 years.
Florence D’Angelo was born in the Philippines in 1982. She is a self-taught visual artist living and working in Peekskill, New York. Although artistic most of her life she began publicly showing work in 2019 throughout her local community and sharing on social media. Her current work focuses on colorful, abstract landscapes inspired by the river towns along the historic Hudson Valley and the spirit of travel. Turning moods into landscapes, her work responds to the hero’s journey of traveling to the unknown in search of what makes us complete.
www.jacquelinediesing.com
jacquelinediesing
Over the past 10 years in Chicago, IL, I have come to realize I process my feelings and heal myself through my mixed media artwork comprised of detailed, freehand micron ink and soft pastel drawings. My journey began with a desire to restore crumbling, architectural masterpieces in my hometown of Detroit to their former beauty by surrounding them with colorful life. Since then, I have been drawn to examine my own health and healing by digging deeper into issues stemming from childhood. The art I am working on now depicts my path towards wellness.
Andrea Ehret is an abstract expressionist and art therapist based in Prague, Czech Republic. The creative process for me starts with conscious presence, observation, and the recognition of your feelings. I find that my visions are sometimes so intense, I can start to obsess about the idea of how to transform them into a painting. The power of dreams is unlimited. I know my subconscious mind can show me amazing colors, symbols and connections. Perhaps they even reveal new things to accept about myself. No matter if I daydream, visualize or dream through the night. I dream my art and I create my dreams
www.thomasflynnii.com
thomasflynnii
Thomas Flynn II is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. In his acrylic paintings, he explores the perceived connection between plants, celestial bodies, and human bodies. Seeking to ultimately delve further into the ancient relationship that humans have with their environment and how that informs our current lives. He has exhibited in Texas, Georgia, and curated into virtual group and solo exhibitions internationally. Flynn received a B.F.A. in painting and a minor in art history from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2016.
jaimefosterart
Jaime Foster is an interdisciplinary artist, living in the Chicagoland area. She is interested in the relationship we have with nature and our environment, both positively, negatively and how this affects us on an emotional level. Her work taps into our collective subconscious and the emotional connection we have with our environment. From a distance, her paintings will simultaneously resemble vast glacial landscapes and intricate microscopic patterns. This acting complementary, as well as contradictory to each other, in an encircling game.
erinfriedmanart.com
erinfriedmanart
Erin Friedman is an abstract artist just outside of Washington, DC in Bethesda, Maryland. Using acrylic paint and oil pastels, Erin’s work is an accumulation of feelings and experiences over time that transfer onto the canvas. Inspiration comes from moments and reactions to everyday life and my emotions. Erin will make marks, alter her ideas, add layers and change directions. We all experience conflict, change, joy and sadness. Erin does her best to embrace this process and allow those feelings to be revealed throughout her work.
www.walltowallsecrets.com
Lucy Julia Hale is a Georgia feminist / social activist artist and art educator. She often selects scenes from our cultural archives of mass-produced publications or vintage vernacular snapshots to which she adds drawn, painted, and/or collaged images to portray a deeper history. She serves as an advocate supporting the dignity and wellbeing of vulnerable populations, which unfortunately now include all inhabitants of Earth. Her work has been selected by prominent jurors for numerous national exhibitions. She holds an Ed.S. and an M.Ed. in Counseling and Educational Psychology, and a B.S. Ed. in Art Education.
www.heatherheitzenrater.com
heather_heitzenrater
Heather Heitzenrater is a figurative oil painter from Pittsburgh, PA. Her work incorporates the figure with reflective Mylar. She uses the Mylar’s reflections to create a world full of chaos and curiosity that lure the viewer to come closer. Heather received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 2015. Along with making and selling her work, Heather instructs figurative workshops at Pittsburgh Center of the Arts and is a Scenic Artist for ScareHouse.
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shabnamjannesari.wixsite.com/portfolio
shabnam.jannesari
Shabnam Jannesari is an Iranian artist who received her MFA with distinction in Studio Art at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Most recently she had a solo exhibition, The Carpet Grew Like a Garden, in Cambridge, MA and participated in the group exhibition Crossing Cultures in Boston. This spring her paintings and drawings were included in Fidelity’s corporate collection. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Art Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, Canada (2020).
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www.modandart.co.uk
andrea_jones_art
I am an artist from Liverpool, England and for the past eleven years I have worked as an art teacher in a prison. My artwork has featured in several magazines of art and literature in the US, UK and Berlin, Germany. One particular style that I work in is based on my alter ego, this is inspired by wanting to be somebody else, taking elements from different people to create new characters, I call these characters my alter ego people. The images are painted in acrylic on canvas or drawn onto paper.
www.michellejonesstudio.com
Michelle Jones explores themes of chance, beauty, claustrophobia, and escape in parallel to her experience of the world. Her methods juxtapose precision and pandemonium, leaning on the medium of painting to transcribe a dance between intention and loss of control. Through an exploration of the relationships between predator and prey; big cats, snakes, and water birds are metaphors in a narrative of belonging and solitude; rest and risk. Jones creates tiny worlds that allow the beast, both inner and outer to pause, and find stillness. Jones resides in Mobile, Alabama, which is a direct influence on her most recent works.
www.zarakand.com
zarakandart
Zara Kand is an oil painter based in Southern California. She has exhibited throughout numerous venues within the US and has been featured in many online and print publications across the globe. Her work is often highly symbolic and focuses on figurative elements within dreamy environments. She currently lives in the hi-desert, spending her time painting, art writing for various art magazines, and dabbling in curatorial projects. She is also the editor of The Gallerist Speaks, an international interview series focusing on gallery directors, arts organizers and curators.
www.alexkarpa.com
alexkarpa
Alex is an artist and educator living in Astoria, Queens. Over time, her practice has grown out of interests in design, record-keeping, nature, and a need to work with her hands. Alex’s drawings and paintings map out a visual world - one that considers relationships between land, built environments, and human experience. Through abstraction, her use of shapes, soft tones, texture, and line describe where these different terrains begin, end, and meet. Her practice is informed and continually reimagined by her work as a teaching artist in New York City.
www.divineny.com
DivineNY
Rekha Krishnamurthi is a printmaker, illustrator, and surface pattern designer based in Jersey City. Her artistic journey started with fabric painting and hand-dyeing of textiles. Today, she designs with a variety of materials and techniques. She still loves designing textiles, but equally loves painting with watercolor, block printing with screen print ink, illustrating with pen or designing digitally. Rekha is always learning and exploring, constantly adding to her repertoire methods to produce unique patterns and designs.
www.sandylang.art
sandy_lang_art
Creating is like telling yourself a tale of the world you feel. Born 1980 I am a self taught artist located in Germany. I mostly work with oil colours since I love their brightness and texture. It allows me to explore strong dark and light effects and to express the themes my paintings deal with. Being a lover of symbolism, I am working with allegories in a figurative manner of painting with a very personal approach to themes such as shadow and light, memories in time, and love – or its absence.
www.amyclaskin.com
amylaskin_
I was born in Philadelphia but my artistic journey led me to the rural Blue Mountains of Jamaica where I rented a studio to practice my art. Here I found a deep connection to nature’s treasures and mysteries. In my practice, I archive images and collect artifacts from nature. I combine and compose disparate images to re-imagine and re- contextualize their meaning. I often combine images from women’s historical fashion and the botany observed from my surroundings. My entities are feminine bursting with abundant blooms, and the snippets of clothing references bring my focus to our past and present, our blended identities, gender and the human/ nature interface.
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www.taraleaverart.com
taraleaverart
Originally from London, Tara Leaver is a contemporary landscape painter living by the sea in Cornwall. She is happiest near - or preferably in - the water, and her paintings on wood panel and canvas express her sensory experiences of wild swimming and coastal exploring, reflecting a deep love for full body immersion in the natural world. Tara’s work has been exhibited in London, Sussex, the Cotswolds and Cornwall, and is owned by private collectors around the world.
monalerch.com
monalerchwallart
Mona Lerch is a contemporary visual artist and founder of Art Mums United and Women United ART MOVEMENT, residing in the Czech Republic. Mona began her art journey as an abstract oil painter; however, her creative passions and love for experimentation led her into watercolor botanical illustration and portraits, linocut prints, collages and acrylics. In her current body of work, Mona steps away from abstract landscapes and focuses on the female form. Natural elements play a vital part in many of these pieces. It’s her means of emphasizing the connection with our surroundings that enables us to stay grounded.
www.karamcintosh.com
karamcintoshstudio
Kara McIntosh is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist who explores the rhythms and patterns of the natural landscape in an abstracted style. Her creative practice begins with a deep curiosity about place and reflects upon the multi-layered connections between communities and their physical environment. A hallmark of Kara’s visual language, her bold mark making with oil paint or hooked wool and silk fibres, offers a refreshing and engaging take on traditional landscape matter. Kara lives near Nottawa, ON and her work is found in private and corporate collections in North America, Europe and Australia.
www.jodimillerfineart.com
jodimillerfineart
Jodi Miller is a Canadian prairie-based contemporary, impressionist painter. Her work explores connections with our roots, our stories and our surroundings. Drawing on her childhood on a family farm and years spent in the Royal Canadian Air Force across Canada, her landscapes are familiar yet fictitious. “Each painting begins with a memory, then evolves to tell a story of its own.” Jodi’s work focuses on human connections as observed through our environment using the metaphor of our imprints on the land as an entry point for personal narratives.
www.andreamindell.com
andreavisionarte
Andrea Mindell Cohen is a Spanish-Canadian visual artist based in Barcelona. Once a fashion and textile designer, Andrea is now a diversified artist working across disciplines. She combines printmaking, drawing, painting and textiles to create immersive installations. Andrea´s artwork is deeply influenced by her Spanish/Moroccan heritage. Through her work, she pursues to challenge the traditional identities and gender roles ingrained in the Sephardic (Spanish/Jewish) culture, and seeks to construct new meaning in the images she creates. The women in her work become archetypal representations telling their stories through layers, revealing hidden truths.
stephaniemulvihill.com
A New York City based artist and educator, Stephanie Mulvihill works primarily with the drawn image on paper, attracted by paper’s fragility and impermanence. Drawing is part of the larger tradition of investigation and analysis of our interior and exterior environments, and a connection to the past as well as an exploration of the present. Her current series of drawings uses the body as a storytelling device in which to process personal tragedies and moments of shared experience. The body is a lens and a metaphor in which to explore the connection of our individual stories to those of our ancestors, and of the comfort we find in our shared histories. Her work seeks to visualize the physical and spiritual sense of loss, grief and acceptance of change.
www.kasiamuzyka.com
kasiamuzyka
Kasia is creating intuitive, abstract artwork. She collects water from around the world to use in her paintings. Believing that water holds memory, Kasia begins her creative process by pouring water onto canvas to create a starting point in which she can begin her work. Kasia’s artwork aims to take the viewer beyond the ordinary in an individual transformative experience. Her influence includes mysticism and in-depth exploration of human nature, while also including elements of transcendental philosophy and modern-day alchemy.
lulumi0620.wixsite.com/eunjoo
seoran_parkeunjoo
Eunju Park lives and works in South Korea. She received a BFA from Dongduk women’s University in Korea. My studio practice is focused on traditional Korean painting and it’s called Minhwa. The term Minhwa means painting for the people. So, my work deals with family happiness. Especially in my own work, I focus on family happiness which I think is a significant part of emotion in human relationships. I try to dissolve them into my own work through the symbols of Minhwa images such as animals, flowers, and nature elements.
www.artbydperlman.com
deborahwperlmanart
Deborah Perlman has exhibited her art virtually, regionally and throughout the U.S. She has won several awards and has been featured in a number of art publications. She creates mixed media wall-mounted sculpture interpreting the dynamics of form in three dimensions. Her spaces are ‘almost but not quite’ real, somewhere between authentic and imaged, inviting the viewer into the scene to discover where they find themselves. Her influences include 19th and 20th century African sculpture; the Constructivism, Geometric Abstraction, and Cubism art movements; Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘illogical perspective’ works; Louise Nevelson’s bas relief works; Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes; and Frank Stella’s metal reliefs, among others.
www.joannapilarczyk.com
joannapilarczyk
London based and Poland born figurative artist and art educator Joanna Pilarczyk found herself inspired by the energy of London when she moved to the city over a decade ago. Her vibrant paintings from the latest series ‘Intimate Times’ are inspired by the time of isolation. She says “In my colourfully decorated flat filled with plants, and isolated from family and friends, my surroundings and my partner became my only world, more intensely experienced and observed than ever before. Much of my recent work focuses on self-portraits and what I found in our relationship during this time together.
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michellereevesart.com
michellereevesartnashville
Michelle is a botanical/floral artist who lives with her husband and son in Nashville, TN. She began painting at the age of 52 after a gentleman asked, “What are you passionate about?” during a job interview. This question led Michelle back to school to pursue an Interior Design degree, but through coursework she started to paint. Her latest paintings are inspired by pages from her childhood coloring books. Bold outlines of brush strokes and intricate backgrounds fill the canvas.
brittanymreid.com
brittany.m.reid
Brittany M. Reid lives and works in Rochester, New York. Reid’s creative process was supercharged when she began working with collage, leading her to create over 200 pieces within only two years of adopting the new medium. Blending the feelings that different images hold into one artwork creates both a story and an experience. Her own experience as a queer, Black woman and mother flows into her work, imbuing her work with both individual and universal layers.
www.maddiereiss.com
maddiereissart
Maddie is a landscape painter based in Greater Philadelphia. She works primarily in acrylic but enjoys sketching in ink and watercolor. Nature and wildlife are her main sources of inspiration, but she also relies on words, song lyrics, and poetry to guide the look, feel, and mood of her visual work. Her current collection of paintings is centered on western landscapes from her travels, featuring scenes from Arizona, Colorado, and Big Sur.
www.viksam.art
viksam.art
Viktoriya Samoylov is a Ukrainian-born American living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Her formal education and day job lie in graphic design, but she has always been drawn to an artistic and “imperfect” human touch in art. She generally creates figurative work with acrylics, though enjoys learning and mixing other mediums such as epoxy, glass, and other mixed mediums. Recently, she has been inspired by moments of long shadows, and late afternoon light. Choosing to keep the style loose and painterly, the viewer is invited to fill in the details with their own emotions and memories.
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www.brookesauer.com
biminy
Brooke Sauer is a Los Angeles based artist and an avid hiker that spends much of her time learning about the natural world first-hand and reflecting on our symbiotic connection to it. Her unique prints are created by combining a very old photographic printing process, called cyanotype, with her background in painting and her love of botany. She relates our human relationship to landscape as both a physical and metaphorical terrain to contemplate and protect -- one that inspires feelings of joy, renewal, and reverence. Brooke hopes to inspire viewers to go outside and explore their own internal landscape as they interact with and observe nature.
www.ajschnettler.com
ajschnettler
AJ Schnettler is a nonbinary, multi-racial photographer and printmaker born and raised on Long Island. They decided to get a new perspective on life and education by moving to pursue their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography with a minor in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2019. Their work is based around what one does to provide self-acceptance. Working through identity or the space surrounding them; how to feel at peace overcoming negative, social, and cultural pressure.
www.petra-schott.de petra.schott.art
Petra Schott studied Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Frankfurt/Germany. The intuitive, abstract use of color, lines and shapes is her way of processing daily experiences by transforming this conglomerate on the canvas into her very personal, visual reality. She absorbs human longings, and visions giving them a new urgency and substance. This sensualemotional act creates something new, illuminating the little secrets of life, without which this world cannot exist. Her art opens a space beyond the words, thus creating a new freedom of immediate knowledge.
Justin’s paintings are personal meditations on the environments we shape and inhabit, and that shape us in return. He embraces a spirit of celebration and curiosity in his art, asking us to pause and reflect on how we relate to the natural world, to our built environment, and to ourselves. Justin synthesizes direct observation, photographic reference, and a variety of other pre-existing images into digital drawings that become the source for his boldly-colored and expressive acrylic, gouache and oil paintings.
www.spiritisaboneart.com
Naomi Thornton is a mixed media artist and psychotherapist living in the expansive beauty of Northwest Montana. In her art, she highlights the historically undervalued stories of women while emphasizing a connection to nature as a life-giving resource. Vintage portrait photographs are the inspiration of her work. She uses collage and paint to evoke a textured layering of desires, hopes and dreams using found images, handmade papers, and text from old books. Through her art, she intends to create a new narrative of empowerment, resiliency, and connection to the natural environment.
zoetoscanoart.com
zoetoscanoart
Zoe Toscano works in a range of mediums from installation, watercolor and oil painting. As a figurative artist, painting the human form allows her to contemplate and explore the complexities of human relationships through visual language. At this time, Zoe’s work is centered around the female experience. She strives to reclaim the female gaze through depicting women in moments of strength and vulnerability. Another key component of Zoe’ work is the complicated relationship between humans and nature — exploring our differences, similarities, and human’s ability to separate ourselves from nature.
www.yahelyan.com
yahel.yan.art
Yahel Yan lives in San Diego, but she was born and raised in Mexico City. She specializes in oil, acrylics and copper etchings. Her palette and compositions lend life and spirit to inanimate objects which are often overlooked. Yahel is always seeking to express the unexpected, unseen hidden magic of “thing.” She gives her imagination full freedom to pursue this mysterious journey. Yahel strives to create colorful happy art that brings joy to the viewer; a recurring theme in her art are chairs, which have become a staple of her work.
