Orchid
As a photographer by passion and not trade, Elizabeth Kayl is intrigued by both the ordinary and extraordinary. She enjoys traveling and never explores without her camera, poised and ready to provide the next canvas to paint through a lens. She is particularly fond of creating works in abstraction and landscapes and has an affinity for the subject matter of trees, skies, and architecture. Elizabeth has had her work included in juried gallery shows in 35 different US states and in 3 international countries and has many public art pieces and awards. By day, she is employed as the Director of Parks and Recreation for the City of Loveland, Colorado.
Color has always been an important part of a photo’s composition for me. The dominant color sets the tone for the mood that I create through a lens. In this exhibit submission, I use pink to show boldness and vulnerability, or sometimes subtleness, like the petal of a flower in a pond. I also enjoy when the subject and background share the same color palette, which delivers additional interest to the shot.
Orchid
I have been painting all my life. It is a natural way for me to express myself. Although I have a college background in art, I am primarily a self-taught artist. Over the years, I have evolved from an extremely detail-oriented photorealistic painter to a more impressionistic, experimental painter. There is always something new and intriguing to explore and learn. I enjoy teaching workshops to adults and children and help run a non-profit art group that I co-founded in 2003 (Redondo Beach Art Group).
My earliest memory of what I liked to do as a child, was paint. I have sketched and painted all my life. Early on I felt the need to give the most detail possible, to make whatever it was that I was painting look hyper-realistic. My journey at this point in my life is to create pieces that have a somewhat mysterious and more emotional edge. I no longer fret about the details. It’s more important to create pieces that allow the viewer to either feel an emotion or create their own story behind my painting. I have always enjoyed experimenting with new techniques and mediums. Teaching workshops to adults and children is a passion too. It’s pure joy to see someone’s eyes light up when they’re being creative and enjoying the process. Art is as important as the air I breathe.
Orchids 1
I’ve always loved to draw. As a little girl, I would sit for hours upon hours with my crayons and paper, getting lost in the joy of creating art. When the time came to decide what I wanted to “be”, I chose, at first, a more practical route. That of becoming a secretary. I went to school and worked for a few years helping lawyers with the documents they needed to be typed. However, when you are a creative person, this type of work never really works out.
The creativity in me wouldn’t stop coming through. So I listened and followed my calling and eventually graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Surface Pattern Design. I held my diploma in one hand, and my two-month-old baby in my other.
My next few decades found me raising my five children, with my creativity coming out in all different ways. When you are an artist, there is no way to stop that feeling of wanting to make something beautiful. It can be a curse, to be honest. When you are an artist, the thoughts of what to create and how to create don’t stop. It’s a beautiful thing, but such a drive that sometimes feels hard. If that make sense? The artwork I am making from my photographs now comes so easily and with so much joy. I absolutely love the beauty of nature and feel that there can be no comparison to the beauty of nature itself. I hope that when you look at my work, you feel that as well.
I create artwork that reflects the places I, myself, have seen and thought worthy of taking the time to bring to others. It’s strange, but when I feel that I need to take a picture of a flower or a landscape, or whatever it is I’m looking at, I know almost before I take the picture if it’s going to become a beautiful piece of art. Hard to explain, because it’s a feeling inside of me. I tend to want to make the images more graphic and more abstract than they are in real life, which I find interesting. Color, form, and composition are very important to me, as they make the artwork sing. The way a piece is cropped or the tones of the colors bring out the feelings that I’ve had when I view the image through the lens. It’s my joy to bring this to others.
Orchids Amaryllis Spiral Rush
Mary Anne Kinane was interested in art her whole life. Mary Anne has been an art educator and practicing artist for 50+ years. She has won awards for some of her work and had worked in public places (such as the Rochester Airport, MN, Minnesota State Fair, and Courage for Kenny awards). Ms. Kinane’s work is displayed and sold across the United States and Canada. Her work has been accepted in juried exhibitions nationally and internationally. She also teaches both youth and adults painting, drawing, and calligraphy.
I love nature and flowers. I grow a flower and herb garden at every place I have lived. I also grow a few vegetables. I feel one with the flowers because of their beauty and changes during different parts of their life.
Orphaned Moments
Stephanie Bing studied painting in the master class of internationally renowned art professor Klaus Jürgen-Fischer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz and photography in the master class of Professor Dr. Vladimir Spacek from Prague. Born in 1967 in Mannheim, Germany, Bing graduated with distinction from high school in Offenburg. Subsequently, she studied fine arts, painting, photography, art history, German, and literature at Johannes Gutenberg University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz, again graduating with distinction.
Following her education, she worked as an associate professor for the Bavarian Ministry of Culture in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Bavarian Chamber of Architects until 2002.
Bing focused on design, architecture, aesthetic perception, and digital media to promote visual literacy.
Since 1991, her work has been shown in national and international exhibitions.
I compose bright, surprising settings like a luxury jewel box and assimilate my interiors to unknown sanctuaries with high vibes. Everything in my paintings is playful, ambiguous, and multi-layered. I love variations within a theme and image quotations. My artwork is more than an assemblage of colors and patterns to please the eye. I build new environments that relate to nothing seen before. My pure aesthetic energy flows out of my artwork and brightens the viewer’s mind with pure buzz and excitement. I love to break the traditional methods of spatial visualization and the three-dimensional physical illusions of a room to make the viewer’s perception of reality absurd. I want to allow my audience to look behind the bare, well-known pictorial sphere by leaving behind the classically taught composition and inventing more layers within the two-dimensional canvas. By breaking the classical view, I can generate a new experience for my audience, pointing them to emotional reality. I turn my motives into bright, cheering works of art, like an explosion of colors and organic shapes. Creating is like breathing. Painting is surviving. The painting process itself is of the utmost importance in my daily life. I like to plunge into my painting process as others fall into a pool. Creating a new image is an effort to balance between visualizing and reflecting on my surroundings and emotions. The subjects of my work reflect a myriad of daily impressions from traveling and being in motion. While painting, I get an extraordinary sense of personal and creative freedom. I capture detailed and precise moments that bring a fresh and intriguing perspective to the world’s reality. As the viewer sees now existing in a different light, context, or resolution, familiar objects appear as something new.
Otherness
Elizabeth Gorcey has devoted her life to the pursuit of art that intrigues her, stories that compel her, and the elevation of authentic voices that must be heard. In her personal and professional lives, she has pursued a number of outlets for her boundless creative energy, focusing on those passions which best allow her to entertain, support, explore, and nourish. Acting, directing, producing, painting, working in documentary, narrative, and multi-media…Gorcey has followed her instincts to become a true creative force to be reckoned with. As she simply states, “Creating is nourishment for my soul.” This genuine, creative imperative has led to Gorcey’s newest adventure—the children’s book series LIV ON LIFE told from the perspective of her own daughter, Olivia!
Art inspires and lifts us up as humans. Creating is nourishment for the soul. I am so grateful for art in any form. Especially now, in the state of our world, it’s more important than ever.
Our Lady
Sarah Rieser is a former interior designer who turned her mid-life health crisis into a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been exhibiting in fine art galleries since 2012, including a solo show through The Art House Chicago. In 2022, Sarah’s work is on view at Stola Contemporary Art Gallery Chicago, DragonFLY Gallery & Creative Spaces Chicago, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts California, Site: Brooklyn New York, San Fernando Valley Arts & Cultural Center California, Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton Community College Des Plaines, and the 12th Annual Going Dutch Festival Elgin, Illinois’ celebration of female voices in the arts. Her piece Our Lady has appeared in Werks Issue 3, Artistonish Issue 8, Residual Believers Issue 2, and Quaranzine Volume IV contemporary visual art magazines. She can be found online at Sarah-rieser.tumblr.com or contacted directly at sarahrieser@comcast.net. And Sarah hates having to refer to herself in the 3rd person for artist bios.
My practice is a thematic exploration of consumption-related dysthymia, currently focused on the misplacement of adoration. I create mixed media soft sculpture ornamented with repurposed novelty refuse that engage the fetishization of religious imagery while introducing questions of taste, feminine labor, and prescriptive reliance on the nondurable. My pieces convey elements of humor & irony by using traditional, labor-intensive processes to reinterpret disposable, mass-produced materials with the notion of reassigning value to nugatory consumer goods. Building upon the foundations of my background in craft, interior design, and fine art, I am investigating the duality of my relationship to the conventionally accepted hierarchy of art & craft which positions women’s work as the lowbrow province of a hobby. I intend my work to reframe a contemporary idea of the inferior homemade as the elevated handmade. And I owe S.A.I.C. a whole lotta dough for learning how to sound that pretentious.
Our Precious Twins
Born in Hungary in 1941, From 1980 living in the US, working in the space industry, and Retired from Let Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, California. Live in Colorado, since 2018.
I am an amateur artist working on all media, even on leather.
Hungarian, from Romania, participating in exhibitions in Cluj, Romania, Budapest, Hungary
California, Colorado, USA. Lately because of my age I do commissions.
Our Voice
Karen Rothman was born in Melrose, Massachusetts. After graduating from Connecticut College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, she spent a summer studying woodcut block printing at the University of North Carolina. She briefly worked in the insurance industry before discovering her passion for art education. She completed courses at the Massachusetts College of Art to become certified to teach art in the Massachusetts public school system.
After a fulfilling career as an art teacher at the East Somerville Community School, her focus shifted to her own artistic pursuits. She has taken courses in color and design, figure drawing, mixed media, monotype printing, and abstract painting at such art institutions as the Massachusetts College of Art, DeCordova Museum School, New Art Center, Danforth Museum School, and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
Rather than seek a signature style or body of work, what characterizes my work is the unexpected in terms of medium, subject matter, thinking process, and style. I enjoy each piece being somewhat disruptive and different from anything that has come before it. This approach reminds me of how each dream I have is always in an entirely new location, and I enjoy this element of surprise. I draw from nature, the man-made world of architecture, still life, the human figure, and the inner musings of my mind. Although I mainly paint abstractly on canvas and wood panels in oil, I also use acrylic, charcoal, wax pastel, watercolor, collage, and found objects. For the most part, the process of creating is more important to me than the end result. John Murray, my teacher at the New Art Center, states: “Painting is about paint.”