Mad
For sixty-five years, Malcolm Glass has exhibited his art and photography in exhibitions across the country. His work has won dozens of awards, from honorable mention to Best of Show. Glass’s work has been chosen for exhibitions at many galleries, including Art Fluent, Verum Ultimum, Black Box Gallery, Exhibizone, Northwind Art, Morean Gallery, and the Hilliard Gallery. His photography and art have been exhibited worldwide and even in Times Square! – through exhibitions at HMVC Gallery New York.
My artwork reflects the visual dance of connections, the visual music of relatedness, and the visual play of elements that would seem to be opposites. I see connections everywhere, and in my art, I try to show the intersections and influences of people, objects, and places on each other. I may reveal the emotional connection between two people in a way that a label could not. Or capture the interplay of light and dark mingling in air, earth, fire, or water. Or render impressionistically the basic physical connections in the invisible process of photosynthesis. Nothing achieves these miracles of perception better than art.
According to the Cheshire Cat, happiness may arise from madness. To me, one is happiest when one is being completely and unabashedly oneself. And that is surely the case with my friend Blue, laughing giddily and being utterly her crazy self, un-self-consciously goofy in her Madhatter hat!
Mademoiselle Boissen
Julie Mantis is an artist creating art that celebrates the beauty of everyday life. Born in New York City, she then traveled extensively as the daughter of a naval officer. Julie’s paintings have been exhibited in Laguna Beach, CA galleries and virtual exhibitions internationally. Julie studied visual arts at New York University and was a graphic artist in the pre-digital era. Recently relocated from the Los Angeles area or Orlando, she continues creating original artwork in mixed media and oils.
My paintings of women are inspired by my love of history and my curiosity about the women of the past. Through books, movies, art, and photography, I have studied women throughout the ages. The paintings presented here were inspired by real women from three different countries found in photographs from the late eighteen hundreds. My goal was to bring them to life in my paintings by imagining them at the time of their portraits.
Madison Ave Meets Maasai
Vera Gierke is an artist who grew up in New Jersey, has lived in Michigan, Indiana, and Rhode Island, and seasonally on Nantucket. Living in Rhode Island, she engaged in a range of Continuing Education classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and worked with a few local artists. From having taken a variety of classes, Vera expanded her vision and found that the various areas of art interrelate, support, and broaden each other. She joined the Providence Art Club where she explored a variety of art classes: acrylic, oil, watercolor, drawing, printmaking, photography, photoshop, and collage. Through these classes, Vera discovered a fascination with paper collages and has made them her favorite form of art. Her work is not abstract, rather she looks for a way to make an image or object different than what is expected, to add interest through the material used for the collage.
In speaking about her collages, Vera calls them A Fanciful View of a Realistic Subject. She describes them as more than what initially meets the eye.
“Something catches my eye, a scene, an image, a photo, and I begin to transform it in my mind into a collage, imagining how I would design the new work, what I would want to incorporate into it, and what I want the new art to express. The collage is made of pieces of paper, chosen not only for color and interest but also for the relevance and comment that it brings to the collage subject itself. I love taking one form of printed material and converting it into an entirely new image.”
I want my art to be appreciated up close just as much as from a distance. From a distance, the collages create a charming or interesting picture, but there’s more to it when fully appreciated up close. I invite the viewer in for a closer look, whereupon he sees how the pieces of paper relate to the collage and the subject of the art.
“I want the viewer to continue to explore, to discover more in the collage.
The art is intended to be viewed and appreciated up close as much as from a distance.”
Madison Square Garden NYC
Having a gift of Art is one of my many traits. I’ve always had an eye on the way I see the world! When art comes to mind, I see it as an impression of beauty. It is one of the expressions I use to express & illustrate my surroundings. In my work, I create such pieces to explore that reason with purpose.
What I see is what I convey that is there beautifully.
Madonna And Child
Debra Friedkin studied at the Art Students League NYC and Westchester Art Workshop. She mentored privately Lester Zakarin, an illustrator for Stan Lee Marvel Comics.
Debra is a juried member of the Salmagundi Art Club in NYC, where she serves on the Jury of Awards and the Admissions Committee. Other professional affiliations include the National Association of Women Artists, Audubon Artists, and Williamsburg Art and Historical Center. An award-winning artist, Debra has widely exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the tri-state area.
Her work is held in private collections; and a series of her sculptures are included in the permanent collection at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn, NY.
Debra Friedkin’s narrative mixed media collages, sculptures, and metal assemblages are based on concepts of recycling and repurposing, deconstruction, and reinvention. The pieces incorporate found objects and often depict provocative themes. Her work ranges from whimsical to darkly humorous, informed by sleek modernism, pulp science fiction, and spiritual symbolism.
Madonna Of The Lost
For sixty years, Malcolm Glass has exhibited his art and photography in exhibitions across the country. His work has won dozens of awards, from honorable mention to Best of Show.
Glass’s work has been chosen for exhibitions at many galleries, including Kansas City Stockyards Gallery, Art Fluent, Red Bluff Gallery, Verum Ultimum Gallery, Black Box Gallery, Northwind Art, the Hilliard Gallery, Photo Place Gallery, and the O’Hanlon Art Center.
Often I realize that as I photograph, I am under the influence of other artists. Most of the time, though, I see the influence only after the work is completed. So is the case with these three images. I wasn’t thinking “noir” or even “Veronica Lake” in my portrait of Nichole. The pose was entirely Nichole’s idea (and she didn’t know Veronica at all). All I did was click the shutter. The Madonna is a Madonna but with a twist. My photo is the only one in the world with a broken doll. As far as I know. A person seeing “Rachel” in a gallery said, “It looks like something DaVinci would do.” I eagerly accepted the compliment.
Maggie Rose Kombucha
Even at an early age, Marissa has shown an enthusiasm for illustration. She can recall spending hours creating and illustrating stories inspired by the many books her parents shared with her. That inspiration has led her to some of her greatest artistic passions, including children’s book illustration and portraiture.
Marissa earned her BFA in Illustration at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut, where she found new inspiration in her professors. While there, she received many distinctions for her work, including the best portfolio in each of her departmental portfolio reviews. She has also had the honor of having her work featured in numerous exhibitions, including the Society of Illustrators Annual Student Scholarship Competition in New York City.
Since graduating from Hartford Art School, Marissa has continued to follow her passion as a freelance illustrator and portrait artist. After completing her first children’s book illustration project, she went on to be featured in numerous publications and television appearances. Her projects have included collaborations with ESPN, as well as creating illustrations for Hartford Symphony Orchestra’s yearly concert production “Tales of Halloween”.
My artwork is very much inspired by visual storytelling. The thing I love most is capturing my subject’s likeness through vitalizing details – both on the surface of the artwork, as well as the narrative behind it.
I often use a mixed media approach combining acrylic and colored pencils. Working this way combines the freedom of laying bold washes with the tight control of drawing. As the piece is built up in many thin layers, I can carefully explore all the details. Quilting these details together as a visual story is where I find my greatest artistic passion.
Magic Canyon I
Subodh Maheshwari was born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, North India, where she learned folk art and classical music. She passionately believes: “In the threshold of my life, my present is the window to the past and a key to the future”. She acquired her degrees and studied art at Agra University, California State University, Fullerton, and the University of California, Irvine. Subodh has won numerous awards, including the regional Fellowship Award at UCI in 1986, the Bharat Gaurav Award in India in 2015, and the 60 Masters Award in 2017, 2018, and 2019. She is also registered in Marquis “Who’s Who in America”, the standard in biographical information. Her paintings have also won awards in a variety of categories, including landscape, open, all women, nature, elements, seasons, and abstract.
Subodh is a diversified artist who enjoys telling stories through her artwork, whether it is through landscape, flowers, or abstract art. Her art is a fusion of Eastern symbolism and Western composition, influenced by 16th and 17th-century Rajasthani and Mughal art, and accented by poetry, passages, and phrases in Hindi, Sanskrit, and English. She admires Georgia O’Keeffe for her floral influence and Frida Kahlo for her courage. Whether it is the serene beauty of nature, her spirituality, or the current political climate, she finds inspiration. Having a life shared between India and America, she sees the beautiful similarities, like love, which transcends all borders. Highly individual in her style, her works are described as emotional, mysterious, personal, spiritual, and humorous.
This mysterious and atmospheric painting reveals a forest scene that blurs the line between nature and spirit. Subtle human faces, some smiling and others solemn, are delicately embedded in the vertical forms of tree trunks, suggesting a quiet fusion of humanity with the natural world. Muted tones of green, grey, and soft blush flow like mist through the layered textures, giving the impression of a forest alive with memory and unseen watchers. The figures seem to emerge and vanish at once, evoking themes of presence, ancestry, and the silent sentience of nature.
Magic Lily
Born in Brooklyn, and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Gwendalin Aranya has been an artist her entire life. She began at a young age by sitting behind her mother drawing as her mother painted.
At 16, Ms. Aranya attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock where she illustrated a field guide to medicinal plants. It was at Rutgers University in New Jersey two years later that she first picked up a paintbrush and learned to paint. Delighted with painting, she quit school to become a painter. In 1989, Ms. Aranya was one of the founding members of the gallery Vox Populi in Philadelphia. After a year she returned to Temple University to complete her bachelor’s degree in Linguistics. While she continued to paint, exhibit, and sell, she also continued her education. After earning an MS degree in Mathematics in 1992, she worked toward a Ph.D. in Art Theory and Practice and Computer Science at the University of Western Australia. She ultimately completed an MFA in Painting at Howard University in 2005.
In her early twenties, Ms. Aranya discovered Zen Buddhism and at once knew that her approach to art was Zen. She had been meditating since the age of thirteen. Since the discovery of Zen, she has considered herself a Zen artist. Simply put, Zen art is created as a meditation in which the artist and subject are one. It is not planned, and it does not come from a place of thinking, but rather a place of being. There is no subject and no object.
A few years after making these discoveries of Zen and Zen art, Ms. Aranya became an ordained Zen priest. She recently relocated to Southwest Florida, where she dedicates her time to sharing Zen through art.
I am a Zen artist specializing in oil paintings and photography with subjects primarily in nature and often containing Buddhist symbolism. I have traveled extensively and have many photos and paintings from around this country and others.
My process is to take photos of an object and paint those photos in the manner of Zen. This results in a highly stylized version of the photo. A fair expression of the Zen painting process is that the subject and object become one. Each painting is also an expression of the artist in the subject. There is an extra vibrant quality to my work where I exaggerate contrast and create my relationships rather than copying what’s there. I do not copy, trace, or measure anything. I am not on the outside looking in, but I am every color in relationship to every other color. My process is completely intuitive, natural, and spontaneous which results in a more painterly rendering of the image.
My subject matter tends to be Buddhist, though, in good Zen fashion, there are no rules! That said, you will find thematic trends in my art. I have painted a lot of images from nature, and with Buddhist themes, such as the water lilies I have focused on now for more than fifteen years! Lotuses and water lilies are important Buddhist symbols of enlightenment. The symbolism is simply that of beauty growing out of mud just as enlightenment grows out of the mud of this thing we call life.
Each painting is a meditation: the process of painting is a meditation, and the viewing is also a meditation. Please enjoy and Rest in JOY!