Lavender
Kate Wurtzel (PhD) is an artist, art educator, and researcher who currently works as an Assistant Professor of Art Education at Appalachian State University. She has a background in making and teaching art for many years in museums and public schools. Dr. Wurtzel has a passion for exploring the creative process with her students and considering how we, as artists and creative humans in the world, can merge art with the gesture of care for the environment and for one another. Her work includes abstracted landscapes, naturalistic and fantastical creatures that blur the line between reality and imaginary worlds, and the play between that which is perceptible and that which is in im-perceptible (yet always present). Her work is informed by philosophy and theory, contemporary artists focused on distorted realism and abstracted landscapes, and most recently time spent in the northern part of Iceland. She employs body movement, ritualized practices, and meditation as a means to connect with her environment and creative practice.
This work is part of a larger collection where I am focused on the idea of emergence and considering the space between canvas and artist as one of co-inquiry and co-creation. Influenced by the writings of French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as the writings of psychoanalyst and artist Bracha Ettinger, I am interested in how the subject-object relationship becomes blurred through the painting process as “objects” appear on the canvas through repeated gestures and through the negotiation of bodies, materials, and surfaces in the painting process. Lavender, as an imagined bear-bunny character, was never pre-determined. Lavender showed up, or emerged, as a result of many layers of work and a continuous coming-to or being-with the canvas and materials. This repeated movement towards allowance, where I intentionally approach the process with an openness to all the contractions and expansions that will inevitably occur, ultimately created space for this endearing, yet slightly menacing and possibly even a bit of a trickster, bear-bunny to come into existence.
Lavender Field
Stanislav “Standa” Riha
Visual artist, photographer, and writer
Member of CARFAC
Born in 1952 in Prague, former Czechoslovakia. He grew up in Lesser Town (Malá Strana), surrounded by great medieval and modern art and artists that caused his desire to create. From early childhood, he enjoyed drawing and later painting; as a young man, he focused mainly on surrealism. His artistic attitude was shaped by many art courses in childhood, followed by art training by MgA Milos Saska and work in set production of the Realistic Theatre.
In 1980, he lived for a year in Grinzing, Vienna, Austria, and then moved to Vancouver, BC, Canada. Enchanted with the natural beauty of British Columbia, he dedicated the first few years to realistic nature themes and then switched to Surreal and later Surreal-abstract creative work.
In the last three decades, I have been creating wall-mounted, cast resin, and aluminum sculptures combined with canvas and gold leaf and exploring the computer as an art tool for creating digital artwork.
All my life, I have loved to create art full of emotions and feelings, “soul,” with the satisfaction of fun. I am interested in the balance and composition of colors and objects rather than the reality of the items.
The direction of the last two decades has been aimed at understanding and, through artwork, expressing the human struggle of emotions and adaptations. For the past ten years, I have been polishing my creative work in the Surreal-abstract style.
The main motto of my artwork is: Just as in a good story, the readers have space to create their image; in a good picture, the viewers can form their account.
Leafscape 20
Douglas Wolters has become known for his unusual abstract photographs as well as his close-up portraits of flowers. This year alone, he participated in numerous group shows, both at local galleries and online shows. Two of Mr. Wolters’s images were selected for the Cape Cod Art Center’s “Black and White” 2023 online photography exhibit, in which 142 photographers entered and only 35 images were selected. One of Mr. Wolters’s images was selected for Exhibizone’s “Curves 2023,” an international online exhibit in which 15 countries are represented. He is also represented in HMVC Gallery’s “Flower Power” and the Artistonish International January 2023 exhibit. He has won numerous awards, including first place in B & H Photo Video’s 2021 Optic contest (which came with over $1000 worth of gear), and Best in the Macro Division in the 2020 Mid-Atlantic Photo Visions exhibit. For four years, he won a Special Award in the annual Joe Miller Abstract exhibits. In addition, he won 3rd place in the 86th Annual Wilmington International Exhibition of Photography, for which there were 2900 entries.
With a background as a professional musician, I bring a somewhat unusual set of perceptions to my vision in photography. Line, rhythm, harmony, and structure in music find their counterparts naturally in images — in nature, the built environment, and in abstract photography. How all this is expressed in macro photography particularly fascinates me. To me, these images resemble a theme with endless variations in detail, color, form, and beauty. In abstract photography, I have developed a technique that always starts from an actual photograph, which I then manipulate in software. I may start with an image of clouds and then create a dazzling symphony of exploding color. From a single photograph, I often create dozens of different abstracts.
Leap To Freedom In The Middle Passage
I am a retired professor from Howard University, where I taught undergraduate and MFA students filmmaking. My undergraduate degree is in Advertising and Design from the University of Cincinnati. I wanted to be a fine arts painter, but as an African American, I faced radical racial discrimination and felt advertising was a more promising career.
After UC, I taught art at Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School in Dayton, Ohio–my hometown. Dunbar is an underserved all-black school where students knew very little about the power of art and the careers it offers. I enjoyed showing the students how art could change their lives. Perhaps I was too good at my job–during school desegregation, the Dayton school board ordered me to leave Dunbar and move to an all-white school. When I refused, the board fired me.
Drawing is fun and rewarding–learning proportions, perspective, form, texture, and the mysteries that light and shadow play in how we see the world.
My interest is in educational, entertainment, and gaming industry experience designed for equitable distribution of social and political justice, artistic creativity, and cultural inclusiveness in American society. Its mission is to spread the seldom-articulated true meaning of democracy through storytelling, fine art, entertainment, and the gaming industry both nationally and internationally.
The main objective of my work is to uplift the consciousness of the privileged class and the disenfranchised communities to recognize and embrace organizational and economic powers inherent in the collective consciousness. To encourage disenfranchised communities’ engagement in telling of their history in the different forms of literature, media, and entertainment; and to galvanize community awareness, putting an end to the self-censorship and self-policing which binds residents of poor communities to a long lifestyle of compensatory deprivation.
Leave The Past Behind
Svitlana Bulichenko was born in 1983 in Oleshky, Kherson region, Ukraine. As a child, she loved to draw with a pencil, depicting everything that surrounded her: people, flowers, and her impressions from the books she had read. After graduating from school, Svetlana enrolled in college at the Faculty of Economics. After college, she received a higher education at the academy. In connection with the study, Svitlana abandoned her passion. In 2006, she married, and only with the birth of her first child in 2009 she returned to painting. Since then, she has painted oil paintings on canvas. Svitlana learned to work with oil paints on her own. Thus, its first survivors and marine landscapes appeared in 2009. She has always been impressed by the beauty of the surrounding world—the bright colors of the sky at sunset, the sun and its reflection in the stormy sea, the majestic mountains, and many other beauties of the world.
Later, Svitlana began to write female figures with elements of fantasy—girls with butterfly wings, and angels. “The spiritual world is always so mysterious and inexplicable—it is what impresses and gives inspiration for writing new paintings,” says Svetlana.
In 2016, her first solo exhibition was held at the local art museum in Oleshky. After this event, Svetlana was awarded the title of master of folk art and was accepted into the union of masters “Dnepr Palette” in Kherson.
Svitlana has participated in many international exhibitions and competitions. Her artworks were repeatedly noted by members of the jury and received prizes. In 2021, she entered the TOP 100 TALENTS OF THE WORLD, according to the results of the International Online Art Competition, UK. In 2022, Svitlana published her work “Sky” in Spotlight Contemporary Art Magazine.
I love our world and its colors. Through my paintings, I want to convey to people the beauty and perfection of our world. I take inspiration from the nature that surrounds me. I paint with oil on canvas, I also draw with a pencil. My works are marine and mountain landscapes, survivors, and flowers, as well as works in the style of fantasy. I really like to write the sun, sunsets, and sky in different shades of colors.
I work with oil paints, brushes, and mastiches. In my work, I often use bright colors, sometimes difficult to combine. I try to harmoniously place them on the canvas and give some shine to the sunsets in the landscapes, bringing the depicted landscape as close as possible to reality.
I am interested in meditation and believe in the spiritual world, in what we do not see but feel. The spiritual world is necessarily connected with everyone, and it depends only on the desire of the person himself: he will allow this spirituality and connection with God into his life, or he will remain deaf and silent, caring only about the physical.
Leaving The City
Sara Victoria Sandberg is a photo composite artist based in Stockholm. Sara has always had a great love for the arts and has pursued the medium of watercolors for many years. Sara developed her skills in digital photo artistry through attending various courses and has developed a personal style in her work where she combines photography and digital painting with her artistic vision. She works with light and shadow to mold the scene she visualizes into a finished piece adopting a combination of photo-realism and painterly style.
Being an artist means for me bringing one’s artistic vision into everyday life. It means harnessing the moments of inspiration and creativity that are right in front of us but likewise trying to embrace all aspects of the process, both the artistic and technical aspects of photo artistry.
In my art, I strive to go beyond the boundaries of the real world and to create imaginative scenes where animals are often the vehicle to shape a story. I want the viewer to find a place of respite in which to take a break from everyday life and perhaps be carried away by the thought “What if?” I strive for beauty and mystery combined. Mood and atmosphere are central to my images. I start in the real world only to transcend into the imagined.
Lenny Lying
Leedy Corbin has been drawing, sketching, and painting from a young age, but it was only once the pandemic hit that she got the chance to expose her art to a larger audience. She became the artist in residence at an online comedy club. She then was offered a job touring with a standup comedy show. She would live-draw the show and project her art on the stage to end the show as a recap. She then was offered the opportunity to hang 25 paintings in a permanent gallery at the Steel City Arts Foundation.
These acrylic paintings are part of a series concerning the ways creators must twist and contort in order to pursue their art. Every painting centers around a different creator who has had to scrap in order to do what they love. The subjects I paint have had to sacrifice and risk their reputations, their safety, and their livelihoods, all to express themselves and do what they find enriching. I have been an artist and a performer my whole life, paying rent by appearing on stage, and screen, selling paintings, fulfilling commissions, and anything to continue do what fulfills me. As the daughter of two drummers, the idea that you work hard in order to support your passion has been instilled in me from a very young age. I would like to capture the tenacity and grit that it takes to be an artist.
Leopard
Deimante Bruzguliene, originally from Lithuania, came to the United Kingdom in 2004. She is breathtaking realistic wildlife paintings of animals. Deimante works in a variety of media including acrylic, oil, pastel, watercolor, graphite, and mixed media.
I have drawn with pencil for longer than I can remember. I love painting. I work with passion and love. It is like second nature to me. My painting is a kind of therapy for me. It lets me say things that I cannot express any other way and at the same time allows me to populate the space around me with artifacts of myself.
Major achievements
Awarded with The 2018 American Art Awards Awarding 25 best Museums and galleries 4 the Places – Tie.
Awarded with The 2021 American Art Awards Awarding 25 best Museums and galleries 4 the Places – Abstract.
Awarded with The 2022 American Art Awards Awarding 25 best Museums and galleries 3 the Places – Abstract.
The 2021 Finalist Circle Foundation for the Arts.
I have been a lifelong artist. I’ve been drawing since I can remember. Art class has always been my favorite class. I have always loved animals. I find inspiration in all kinds of creatures, both domestic and wildlife, big, small, or in between. My favorite subjects are wildlife. I love drawing animals as it is a way of accessing the secrets of the natural world. Animals are as individual as humans, but for me, they manifest a purer and more genuine spirit to the outside world than do human beings.
Out of the many materials available for artists to use, I particularly like to use pencils. Pencils give me the chance to make mistakes and correct them.
Lepidoptera
Stephanie Navon Jacobson has exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and internationally, including the Center for Contemporary Graphics in Norwalk, CT, National Arts Club in NYC, Islip Art Museum in Islip, NY, HeckscherMuseum in Huntington, NY, Nassau County Fine Arts Museum in Roslyn, NY, the Shenzhen Art Institute in China, Port Washington Library in Port Washington, NY, the Shelter Rick Gallery in Manhasset, NY, and the Alfred Van Loen Gallery in South Huntington, NY. Exhibits include the International Biennial Miniature Exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Graphics, Expo 30 at B J Spoke Gallery, Huntington, NY, “Then and Now” at Manhasset Public Library, and “Landscape: Real and Imagined” at the Art Guild of Port Washington. She has also participated in some online exhibits including Biafarin, Grey Cube, and Art Space. Her work is in the permanent collections of Queensborough Community College, New York University School of Law, the American Paralysis Association, and private collections throughout the United States, Canada, England, Norway, and Israel. Stephanie has been a juror and a guest artist for various art groups many times.
Stephanie has been an assistant to master printmakers Ruth Leaf, Dan Welden, and Susan Rostow. She is currently on the faculty of St John’s University, Queens, NY, and the Art League of Long Island, Dix Hills, NY. Although her first life is printmaking, Stephanie also works in oils, mixed media, and jewelry. She finds inspiration in nature and organic images, sometimes realistic, sometimes abstract.
Nature has always been a source of inspiration in my work. I try to capture a feeling, an emotion when I am involved with a piece. There is a dialogue between the piece and myself. I enjoy experimenting with various images and various mediums- oil, printmaking, drawing, collage, etc because I feel different images can be better suited for different mediums, and pushing those limits opens up many possibilities.