Artist Statement

I paint what reaches the soul, bringing light to the darkness and darkness to the light. My use of color in bold, rich, and vibrant hues seeks to spark joy and elevate the viewer’s spirit. I use tones and movement that conversely arrest the viewer: I hope to cause a pause and a ponder, and leave the beholder feeling touched in a tangible way.

Artist’s Biography

I live on the Western slope of Colorado where I am a family practice physician and an artist. This combination allows me to weave my love of art, beauty and healing with those who interact with me as a patient, a friend or an admirer of my art. My medium is primary acrylic on canvas and paper with a bit of graphite, charcoal, ink and oil pastels thrown in here and there. I am mostly a self- taught artist.

I am inspired by natural beauty and by my feelings as I navigate the joys and sorrows of life. I picked up my first paintbrush in August of 2012 while going through chemotherapy for breast cancer. It helped me to heal, to recover and has been a life changer.

I have sold nationwide.

Artist Statement

My watercolors, monotypes and pastels are all based on my love of texture and the play of light and shadow on natural and man-made surfaces. The urban landscape, without question, is my favorite subject precisely because it offers endless opportunities to portray these elements in a painting.

Using various supports for the beautiful, granulating pigments of watercolor such as hand-cast papers, claybord, aquabord, yupo and watercolor canvas in addition to traditional papers further enhances the results. These surfaces lend themselves well to a variety of subject matter and to experimentation, contributing greatly to my enjoyment of the painting process.

When I discovered monotypes I found it easy to fall in love with this unique print-making process. Unlike paintings in watercolor and pastel, which can be carefully planned, the outcome of a completed monotype is very often pure serendipity.

Anke E. Dodson

Biography

 Anke Dodson is a native of Germany and a naturalized citizen of the United States. She is a resident of Tulsa, OK.Her work includes cityscapes, landscapes and marine subjects. She enjoys working in the style of contemporary or painterly realism on a variety of surfaces such as watercolor canvas, aquabord, claybord, yupo, ricepaper and, of course, traditional watercolor papers.

She has studied painting in watercolor and pastels with nationally known artists and instructors such as Steven Quiller, Alan Flattman, Naomi Brotherton, Judy Betts, Christopher Schink and others and in recent years has added the art of printmaking, more specifically monotypes. Taking a workshop taught by renowned printmaker Julia Ayers made her want to learn more about this unique medium and its possibilities.

In June of 2011 she was invited by the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, OK to teach an introductory monotype workshop in conjunction with their “Rauschenberg at Gemini” exhibition. A solo exhibition at the Gallery of the Performing Arts Center in Tulsa in October 2011 included a large number of monotypes, portraying the change of seasons on the prairie.

The Community National Bank of Kansas commissioned her to paint historical works for seven of their branch offices. The large portraits of these communities are now on exhibit in their respective cities.

Her work has been added to a number of corporate and private collections in the U.S., Germany and France, including several commissioned pieces.

She is represented by the Eva Reynolds Gallery of Fine Arts in Leawood, KS (Kansas City) and her work can also be found in the virtual galleries of the Oklahoma Artists Coalition and the Tulsa Artists Guild (TAG).

Artist Statement

The Landscape, Memory and Bone series of digital, ink jet prints shows enigmatic, disheveled, awkward and brooding memoryscapes. Marks and forms organically grow intertwined and unpredictable; creating layers of textural surface that become deeper and richer as they are drawn, then erased, worked then reworked, constructed then deconstructed. Each work has changed dramatically from start to finish. Allowing for serendipity, the compositions were left open and flexible, for as long as possible, as to not force the work in any one direction. This allowed for surprises.

Bio.

Jim Pearson was born in Jeffersonville, Indiana in 1946. He completed a B.S. degree in Art Education from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and an MFA in Printmaking from Indiana University where he studied with Rudy Pozzatti and Marvin Lowe. Mr. Pearson was on the art faculty at Vincennes University in Vincennes, Indiana from 1979 to 2006; retiring in 2006. After retiring, he taught himself how to work with digital media. The many years of teaching college level drawing and printmaking, using traditional tools and methodologies, have transferred well to his study of this new and challenging 21st Century medium. Over the past five years, he has exhibited his digital prints, photomontage prints, photographs, and digital drawings in over 80 national and international juried exhibitions; winning several awards in these exhibitions. Jim was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant for creative research in printmaking and painting. He is represented by Gallerie Hertz in Louisville, Kentucky and Editions Limited in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Artist statement/biography

Did that image just change as you walked beside it? Look again. Yes, it did. Like our ever-shifting visual experience of the world, Howard Harris’s dimensional photographic constructions merge aesthetics and technology to produce an intriguing new way of experiencing photographic art—with depth and the appearance of subtle differences from one moment to the next. Harris’s creations simulate the way we see. They mimic the complex process of perception by engaging the eyes, mind, and emotions in an intricate dance whose other partners are the changing light, our angle of view, and the space in which the work exists. The result is photographic art as you’ve never seen it before.

Harris has long been fascinated by both visual perception and design. The Denver native earned a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and worked in architectural design and space planning before enrolling in Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. There he received a Master of Industrial Design, studying with internationally renowned design theorist Rowena Reed Kostellow. Countless hours of exercises in three-dimensional form and relationship helped integrate Harris’s strong structural inclination with an intuitive, non-linear approach. Exposure to the work of Op artists Julian Stanczak, Yaacov Agam, and Josef Albers, as well as sculptors such as Henry Moore, reinforced his interest in the ways two- and three-dimensional art can trigger unexpected perceptual shifts.

In 1975 Harris returned to Denver, where he spent more than 35 years combining design and technology in the field of direct marketing. Along the way he added to his repertoire with further study in economics, computer sciences, marketing, and graphic arts financial management, and earned prestigious professional awards. His creative energy during this period was in the service of other individuals and companies, but after retiring he turned his attention to his own fine art. This took the form of photography, a lifelong passion. Yet with an iconoclastic streak that had seen him consistently forging new directions in the design and business world, he was bound to approach the photographic image in an unconventional way as well.

Harris’s dimensional photographic constructions begin with whatever catches his eye—from the landscape and wildlife to the human figure to urban structures as simple as a multi-storied parking garage. Always musing on how the mind responds in a non-linear, multi-dimensional manner to what it encounters, the artist uses technology to alter the image to varying degrees. Some remain relatively straightforward while others move into the non-objective realm in which thoughts and emotions are suggested through intense color and dynamic line and form. Each photographic image is then superimposed on a subtle grid structure and mounted twice, effectively on top of itself, on two of the construction’s clear acrylic surfaces.

Because the viewer is looking through multiple surfaces—between four and six, with space between each acrylic layer—refraction causes the light to bend, changing the appearance of the image ever so slightly. Occasionally Harris prints the photograph on aluminum, which bends light in a different way. In addition, he sometimes prints one version of the image larger or smaller than the other, or offsets the two images, contributing to a sense of dimensionality and optical interest. His work has been exhibited in solo and juried shows around the country, and his distinctive mounting system currently has a U.S. patent pending. Limited editions of each photographic image can be created in various sizes.

The philosophical ground beneath Harris’s work draws in part from his study of quantum physics and chaos theory, in particular the proposition that the observer always affects what is being observed. With a minor in Eastern philosophy from Pratt, the artist also finds himself influenced by the Eastern perspective in which reason and logic take a backseat to the more spontaneous emergence of form. At the same time, an inherent need for structural organization is expressed in the faint grid pattern underlying each work. “I’m looking at how to achieve a level of unpredictability and aesthetic value that is pleasing,” he says. “It’s like being a conductor of free-form jazz.”