Artist Statement

Painting is a way for me to respond to what I see. I’ll be driving along, hiking, walking my dog, or strolling through a garden, and then, wham!, something hits me, and inside I hear myself saying, “Oh, oh, oh, that’s it!” Something about it – a pattern of light and dark, a highlight, a contour, a color, a feeling of balance or rightness – strikes me, speaks to me, sings to me, and I want to remember it. So I’ll take a photograph. Then (or months later) I’ll gaze at the image, speaking to it, letting it speak back to me, trying to discern what it says to me, what about it evoked wonder and delight in me. When that happens, I paint as a humble attempt to express worship, wonder, celebration, and thanksgiving. Abstract is new to me, and different, even though the abstract is often based on a concrete image in my experience. Then the conversation is between me and the painting itself as it expresses what it wants to become, and I express what I envision for it. Sometimes it works; sometimes not.

Artist Biography

I started painting in college as a hobby, and continued to paint sporadically and intermittently during my training and career as a physician. I retired in 2006 to attend seminary, and upon graduating, turned my daughter’s vacated bedroom into a studio and began to paint again. I am self-taught, and kind of like that, because I don’t paint like anyone else. I generally paint from photographs, sometimes from memory, or just from impressions I carry away from a subject that sings to me.

Artist Statement

Visual art has been used to simulate the real, it recorded history visually.  Visual art has also been used to represent emotions, expressions, social environments and political drama.  Art still is simulacra and representational.  The event called modern art began to shift an artist’s way of knowing and seeing realities. The artist’s soul, the artist’s self, became sovereign in their work and the ways of knowing and seeing realities changed as did the way they worked with their materiality’s and media. Art was no longer something that only related to objects art began to relate to an individuals/artists way of seeing and knowing.

My work isn’t afraid to take that journey.  I have no interest in creating something that does not make another think beyond their comfort zone.  I have no interest in repeating / simulating the political jargon of another in my work. I have no interest in creating something that does not allow us to depart from today’s thinking and imaginings and try to create work that is a thing it itself.  I am interested in exploring the media, stretching the media and its materiality’s beyond its traditional capabilities of representing. Art should be like water, fluid, indeterminate, distinctive.  Art should be always changing always moving always flowing in perpetual fluid motions.

I have been an artist all my life always searching, always cherishing a thing in itself. Art has allowed me to take that journey of discovery.  It has always allowed me to travel my own journey and hopefully it allows the viewer to do the same.

The paint in Red Sky At Night is just that, like water, it is fluid, indeterminate and distinctive.  The black lines in the work represent the need to escape from representation and simulacra.

Artist Biography

• P.H.D. (ABD). University of Wisconsin-Madison, Curriculum & Instruction.
• P.H.D. Minor completed: Art History, contemporary issues and concepts.
• M.F.A. Art. UW-Madison, spring 1996.
• M.A. Art Education. UW-Madison, 1994.
• B.A. Art/Art Education. UW-Madison.

Signature member of   6 national watercolor societies – International Society of Acrylic Painters, Philadelphia Watercolor Society, Pennsylvania Watercolor Society, Illinois Watercolor Society, Missouri Watercolor Society and the Western Watercolor Society. To become a member of these societies you have to be juried into their national exhibition for 3 times or more. These national exhibitions are very competitive and artists from all over the world compete in them.

2008 to present.                   9 solo exhibitions around the United States.

2008 to present.                     Curator Howard Young Art Gallery. Minocqua, WI.

2008 to present.                       55 national awards.

2008 to present.                     60 publications.

Artist Statement

My paintings are inspired by a lifelong passion for color and form. I have always been attracted to simple geometric shapes, and the essence of my work is the language of dimensional reduction. I simplify my compositions through the elimination of extraneous information, drawing attention to the core essence and the primal emotion under the surface. I am also fascinated by the illusion of a three-dimensional space that a two-dimensional work creates. I find myself constantly observing my surroundings – the people and the spaces they inhabit – looking for what draws the eye, and I have a visceral longing to express my discoveries through shape and color. Created primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas and panel, my work investigates the underlying structure of the primary forms to allow interplay between the literal and pictorial surfaces. As shapes and colors are flattened and reduced, the dynamics of chroma and value relocates the geometry of the shapes on the actual surface. As an artist, I feel a deep need to interpret the world through my craft, to make it not simply real, but more than real. Art is my prism – making strange and sublime distortions – through which I re-create and re-envision the world.

Artist Biography

The paintings of award-winning artist Haeley Kyong have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States, including including Jacksonville International Airport, Jacksonville, Florida, the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts; the Monmouth Museum in Lincroft, New Jersey; the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Delaware; the Dishman Art Museum of Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas; the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission in North Carolina; Woman Made Gallery in Chicago; the Sarah Silberman Art Gallery of Montgomery College of Rockville, Maryland ; the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Her paintings are in private and corporate collections including the United Medical – St. Barnabas Health & Medical Group in Bayonne and Lyndhurst, New Jersey; and Park Medical Management and Med Magic LLC, EHR Software Services in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Haeley Kyong received a B.F.A. in painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

 Artist Statement

Although I think of my art as extremely personal, I believe the themes are somewhat universal. The subject matter will likely include inequalities pertaining to gender, race, or social status.

I think art should change the world, and the value of such an endeavor goes without question. Yet, the energy and liberation associated with creating spontaneous imagery is just as noble an undertaking.

I am often inspired by things I see on TV. I am delighted with the mere notion that reality TV serves as impetus for art. However, more often than not, my own reality becomes the subject of my work―expelling my darkest fears, revealing pent up frustrations, or releasing my deepest hopes.

 Artist Biography

Tina Ybarra lives a mixed media life. Born in the urban city of Lynwood, California, Ybarra attended Cal State Univ., Long Beach off and on (mostly off) for several years, eventually earning a degree in General Art. Although Ybarra possesses an unfailing passion for drawing and painting, she is not immune to the lure of sculpture or ceramics.

Currently residing in South Gate, CA, Ybarra is a veteran elementary school teacher, a reluctantly-retired softball junkie, a former high school coach (softball, basketball, and volleyball), and—until recently—an undercover artist.

Raised on Motown and Santana, Ybarra is just as likely to glean inspiration from Hip Hop, all genres of Rock, or Mozart. She is mesmerized by TV, fascinated by movies, fanatical about books, and enchanted with theatre.

Ybarra believes that art should change the world, and the value of such an endeavor goes without question. Yet, Ybarra also acknowledges that the energy and liberation associated with creating spontaneous imagery and/or deliberate and calculated nonrepresentational art is just as noble an undertaking.

For the most part, Ybarra’s work deals with issues that are personally relevant such as the hypocrisy of religions, the brutal realities of inner-city education, the relentless despair of poverty, and the inequalities of gender and race.

In Ybarra’s current work there is a tendency towards mixed media and an attempt to bring dimension by cutting into and/or attaching objects to the canvas.

Still, on occasion, Ybarra will return to basics; to something straightforward and traditional; to something as comfortable and familiar as the velveteen texture of charcoal on paper.