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Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius

Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius

Lex LuciusOf Comfort and Connection Paintings I live in the Roaring Fork Valley just north of Aspen, Colorado, tucked into the Rocky Mountains. My life is full of family, painting, and horses. My clothes smell of the stable, and on…

To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete

Mario LopreteTO WHAT SURVIVED: Sculpture For my concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin, and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is…

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway

Bette RidgewayLAYERING LIGHT: Paintings Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases that push the boundaries of light, color, and design. Her youth spent in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and her extensive global…

YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: The Photography of Natalie Christensen

Natalie ChristensenYET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: Photographs Photographer Natalie Christensen has an inimitable, and enchanting, focus on the exploration of the more banal peripheral landscapes that often go unnoticed by the casual observer. “I quickly became aware that these isolated moments…

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan

Chris VaughanWEIRD, WEIRD WEST: Collages All of these works are part of an ongoing series of paper collages, collectively called Weird, Weird West. The Weird West series of collages began with a ménage à trois that I found immediately menacing…

FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan

Sherry ShahanFROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES: Collages Feeling shipwrecked in 2020, I began ripping words from the heart of old magazines. My scissors were like me, rusty and dull. The glue, too thick. My collages resembled drawings found in…

Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara

Joe LugaraDIGITAL PAINTINGS These works are from two distinct series of digital paintings, Framework and Dark Oddities. I enjoy the clash of the man-made and the organic, the grids contrasting with the shape-shifting blobs. The Framework series asks one of…

SENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics by Constance McBride

Constance McBrideSENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics “Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” — Chantal Joffe When I was a kid…

Sensitive Skin: Ceramics by Constance McBride

SENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics by Constance McBride   “Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” – Chantal Joffe When I was…

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes

Morgan MotesHEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings  Morgan Motes’ work is a visual representation of the feeling of being alone in nature. It is an expressionistic attempt to return to a sublime and nuanced world often left out of our technologically…

STILL AND YET: Photographs by Richard Kagan

Richard KaganSTILL AND YET: Photographs Born in Philadelphia, Richard Kagan is a photographer and former furniture maker whose artistic career took a curiously circuitous path. He began as a self-taught street photographer while a student at Temple University. However, after…

SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS, Glassworks, Essay, and Poetry by Paul J. Stankard

I was no stranger to poetry. As a child, I was a poor reader; I’m a dyslexic, a term that was barely known at that time. But my mother, who didn’t understand why I was such a poor reader, tutored me daily through my middle-school years. Books were a struggle for my tutoring sessions, but when Mom switched to poetry it was fun. She would read the poem first, and with my good memorization skills the words, rhythms and meter clicked with me, and I – for perhaps the first time—felt that I was comprehending written expression, an idea compressed into words.

MINDSCAPES: Photographs by Denise Gallagher

I consider myself a painter who photographs. I had given up on painting about ten years ago since I didn’t feel I could authentically express what was mine to express. Then, about eight years ago, I fell into photographing what I came to call my “magical landscapes.” These images came almost effortlessly and opened up worlds I never imagined. I credit this experience with giving me the courage to explore the real world. During the last five years, I have traveled around the world twice for extended periods of time. I tend to perceive now that most every landscape has the potential to be a magical landscape, given the right lighting and composition.  

LIVING AS ART by Matthew Courtney

Matthew CourtneyLIVING AS ART: Ceramic Works [click on images to enlarge] To be in the presence of Matt Courtney’s ceramic art is to be embraced by a feeling at once familiar and unanticipated — a sensation that comes not only…

WHAT WE SEE FEELS LIKE THE THING ITSELF by Micah Danges

Micah DangesWHAT WE SEE FEELS LIKE THE THING ITSELF: Photographs [slideshow_deploy id=’31067′] [ click any image to enlarge ] My drive to take photographs is rooted in the unpredictability of such a seemingly predictable process. I use the precision of…

DEFT PERCEPTION by Hannah Thompsett

Hannah ThompsettDEFT PERCEPTION: Works of Porcelain and Paper, Plausibility and Pause [click on images to enlarge] We all accumulate knowledge of our world through experience. Unconsciously, we learn to trust our perceptions as truth. But when this truth is challenged,…

AMERICA UNSPOKEN: Paintings by Tina Blondell

There is no easy way to explain who Americans are. We are a complex accumulation of beings with unique and varied cultures, traditions, and genetic histories. Perhaps this is why I feel most comfortable expressing my thoughts concerning American identity visually. My models are friends, family, and neighbors—all people with whom I have a personal connection. I have tried to capture something of their stories in my imagery.

WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER by Shira Walinsky

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and home of the famous LOVE statue by Robert Indiana, is taking love to new places. If you happen to be in Philly, chances are you’ll catch sight of the 47 Bus. You can’t miss its bright blocks of color or its bold, emphatic message: WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER. This “mural on wheels” is the brainchild of Shira Walinsky, mural artist, and filmmaker Laura Deutch. It runs daily from South Philadelphia’s Whitman Plaza, on through Center City, and all the way up to 5th and Godfrey in North Philadelphia, connecting several multilingual, multiethnic neighborhoods and commercial corridors. Riding the bus through this cross-sectional slice of the city you’ll inevitably hear a cross-cultural variety of languages spoken, while being wrapped in a welcoming collage that represents the patchwork of diverse people whose lives intersect every day. The back of the bus reads “We Are All Migrating Together”—words from the mouth of one of its drivers—and along the way you’ll see murals by and about refugee groups who have recently settled in Philadelphia—the Karen and Chin of Burma, the Bhutanese, the Nepalese.

SPRING STREET: Works on Paper by Thom Sawyer

Thom SawyerSPRING STREET: Works on Paper Unhappy small towns are all alike—claustrophobic, gossipy, dying. —Timothy Egan I have lived and worked in such a small town as this. Quiet, nondescript streets link manicured lawns and well-kept homes; neighbors guard their…

Cleaver Magazine