Royal Pavilion Brighton
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 are stories of life and travel. Nature, glimpses of landscapes, glimpses of memory, and countries visited, allow me to immortalize my fondest moments, each painting tells a story. Painting shares the opportunity to be amazed by the little things life and nature have to offer.
Ruby
I am a visual artist who firmly believes in the magic of colors. I love to tell stories through my paintings and draw inspiration from my culture, travel, and love for photography. Originally from India, I have been living in the United States since 2007. I lived in sunny California and the prairies of Kansas before adopting beautiful Virginia as my home.
I use different mediums, styles, and techniques to experiment with my compositions. My first group exhibition in the United States was in 2015 at Mook Art Gallery in Milpitas, California. Since then, I have done several art shows, gallery exhibits, and local art events in California, Oregon, Kansas, and Virginia. My art has been showcased in various national and international exhibitions and published in art magazines such as the 30th issue of ‘Artistonish’ by Biafarin. And upcoming magazines are ‘Book of The Arts by Gallerium and ‘Spotlight’ by the Circle Foundation of the Arts.
I have a strong relationship with highly contrasting colors. My paintings tell stories through the calmness and chaos of the compositions. I use combinations of mediums, styles, and techniques to generate a sense of energy and excitement for the creator and the viewer. The subjects of my paintings are often abstract, botanical, landscapes, and mixed-media renditions. However, I do like to experiment and not bound myself to a particular style of work. My cultural roots inspire my creations, reflect my life journey, and showcase my love for bright colors.
Run
Exhibitions:
*Bowery Gallery NYC, 31st Annual Juried Exhibition 2022, Juror: Lance Esplund, Art Critic,
The Wall Street Journal
*New York School of the Arts, New York City- student and exhibitor
*Islip Art Museum-selected to present five paintings/collages
*Huntington Arts Council-work accepted for exhibitions
*Smithtown Township Arts Council, Mills Pond House -a member of the board and exhibitor
Education:
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, BFA
Teacher:
John Dwyer Junior High, Bronx New York
Energy helps push me forward daily. That toughness is visible in each of my paintings. Those energetic strokes, lashes, and blows against the canvas surface represent my resilience, my spirit, and my enthusiasm. And it is with that vitality, stamina, and intensity that I explore my work.
Run Away
I have been expressing my joy in art with paint, shapes, and colors since I was very young. I started as a painter, evolved into a photographer, and eventually began hand-painting on my Cibachrome prints over 35 years ago. Before Photoshop, I found a way to express a new magical reality with the vivid, saturated, and unrealistic colors I painted into each photographic print.
For the past 30 years, I have been scanning my one-of-a-kind hand-painted prints and my library of 35mm Kodachrome color transparencies taken over the last 50 years. I paint, combine, and enhance them with Photoshop, creating my own idyllic world!
My art has been shown worldwide in many solo exhibitions, including:
Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio; Colarinda Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal; MAD Gallery, Milan, Italy; Demenga Gallery, Paris, France & Basel, Switzerland; Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA; Laguna Art Museum, CA; Petersen Automotive Museum, LA, CA; LA County Natural History Museum, CA; Monterey Museum of Art, CA; Nancy Hoffman Gallery, NYC, NY; L’Image Gallery, Rome, Italy; Louis Stern Gallery, West Hollywood, CA; Wall Space Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA.
I have been included in countless group exhibits and Art Fairs around the world. It has been in many magazines, on book covers, and in two museum exhibition catalogs, and two books have been published of my art, Garden Tales and Car Tales. Over the last 15 years, I have had the honor of being asked to install my art in many wonderful public spaces, mainly at UCLA and UCSB, all on exhibit indefinitely!! I installed more than 70 large artworks at the UCLA Law Library and UCLA Anderson School of Management, including a 5’x10′ commission.
In 2018, I had a 4-month exhibition entitled “Jane Gottlieb Photographs France” at the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum!
Vivid colors, altered perspectives, strong compositions, beautiful and unique images: this is my art. I welcome all to a contemporary Wonderland with strong theatrical effects, classic compositions, enhanced with my trademark saturated colors!! As an artist all my life, I have been creating artworks with my lifetime collection of photographs taken traveling all over the world, and the magic of Photoshop. My art has been exhibited in galleries & museums across the US, Asia, and Europe, featured in numerous magazines and books, and displayed in all the main international art expos. My art is collected in many public, private, and museum collections.
Runaway Mind
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.
Running Blind, But Feelin’ Lucky
With over 30 years of experience in art making, Shawn Farley derives inspiration from the surrealist and avant-garde movements and particularly the women artists of those periods – Tanning, Carrington, Varo, Oppenheim, Donas, and Popova. Their work speaks to the feminine psyche, be it nurturing or not. Farley utilizes foundry molds, found objects, and paint to create abstract, figurative symbols and totems. Many of them come together through automatic placement originally, but with constant editing, and are completed with a specific theme or vision in mind. Themes spring from dreams, anxiety, and what she sees as the weight of humanity in this world. Just as with symbols created in the past, her work elicits a feeling, tells a story, or at the very least begins one. Farley lives and works in Florence, MA
My palette of found objects and foundry molds requires being tactile, and playful, and using chance and intentional placement to transform the objects into figurative totems. This is followed by painting them in colors reminiscent of an aging patina that lend a surreal quality. As I create my work, I let the objects guide me. The composition comes first but with editing, a theme emerges. It might be something such as women’s rights, climate change, ignorance of those in power, or more personal themes such as aging, spirituality, or the supernatural. I find meaning in these found objects and detritus from the past. And by reimagining their purpose and giving them personalities, I look to revive and recast their history and for the viewer to find kinship in these haunting shapeshifters. Freed from their destiny as trash, these curious objects assume new identities and evocation something soulful.
Running Through Life Together
Mary Anne Kinane has been an artist most of her adult life. She has a teaching degree in Art Education, MA Ed, & MAA. Mary Anne has shown her work in the Midwest and nationally. She has owned a public open art studio/ shop in St Paul, Minnesota, taught Art to people K to 85 in a variety of places, and continues to explore. She loves nature’s diversity: colors, textures, shapes, and patterns.
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Mary Anne Kinane’s journey has been a perseverance balance because she found her own way through college. But making art was & is her passion. Mary Anne believes that all nature as with people is diverse. What we choose to do with diversity is the question. Diversity can make something beautiful. That is why Mary Anne sees the earth as the place for growth and its people and creatures as the garden.
Rustic Magnolia
Leslie Clark is an artist who became an adventurous explorer searching for exotic subject matter. She never set out to change the world but wanted to learn about it and paint what she saw. After discovering the nomads of Niger, she turned from artist to humanitarian, focusing on helping the nomads improve their lives while respecting their traditions.
Earning a Master of Fine Arts from George Washington University, she graduated with highest honors and the first prize in painting. Her first exhibition was while she was painting her master’s thesis in the south of France. The success of this show in Monaco set the pattern for her life as an artist. She traveled, painted what she saw, and sold it to earn enough for the next trip. Each voyage was to a more and more exotic location until she landed in the Sahara Desert, where she found her place in the world.
As her expertise grew in a region little traveled by the rest of the world, she was sought by travelers as a tour guide, by US ambassadors for her knowledge of the forbidden north of Niger, and by National Geographic as a guide to making films about the cultures she had adopted.
Although her focus was the Sahara Desert, she visited over 50 countries on five continents and painted along the way. She operated Nomad, the Leslie Clark Gallery, for twenty-three years, where she exhibited her paintings alongside the arts of the cultures she visited. Each painting was to tell a story. She is a member of the Ojai Studio Artists, and her studio is open during their annual tour and by appointment.
I was born on a cattle ranch near Ojai, where weather, seasons, and the daily movement of animals shaped my life and my way of seeing. The rural, agricultural landscape of this region—its dust and creek beds, sycamores and open sky—was my first studio and my earliest teacher, training my eye to notice quiet moments: a horse’s head at dusk, a heron lifting from pasture, the unhurried rhythm of work and rest.
Over the years, my painting has carried me far beyond California, into more than fifty countries and, most profoundly, into the Sahara. There I lived and migrated with nomadic herders—the cowboys of their land—whose lives, like those of ranch families here, are bound to animals, weather, and an often unforgiving terrain. My work moves between these worlds, finding visual and emotional bridges in shared values of resilience, hospitality, and an intimate bond with the land.
My paintings are rooted in observation: I work from lived experience, sketching on site and translating impressions into narrative, often atmospheric images that are fragments of daily life. I am drawn to people whose lives are intertwined with animals and weather, whose sense of identity is inseparable from their landscape.
Visually, I balance realism with a painterly, expressive surface—using layered color, textured passages, and shifting edges to suggest memory as much as description. I use earth tones, strong light and shadow, and atmospheric transitions to convey not just what a place looks like, but how it feels to stand there, to belong there,
I paint local ranch life, western riders, California landscapes, and the nomads of the Sahara. Seen together, they create a cross-cultural conversation between two rural, working worlds—inviting viewers to recognize the kinship between our own agricultural communities and distant herding cultures, and to reflect on what it means to belong to a place.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
JJ Gonzalez Acosta is a visual artist from Valencia, Venezuela. He started his artistic journey back in 1990 when he was just 5 years old, learning beautiful techniques from his mother and aunts who are also artists. He began studying art formally at the age of 8 and later earned his B.A. in Arts Education and a master’s degree in management from Universidad de Carabobo in Valencia.
In 2017, he decided to pursue his American Dream and moved to Orlando, Florida. There, he developed a project teaching different art techniques and origami to adults and children to help promote their talents and discover their inner artists.
Gonzalez Acosta also has experience in curating and has worked with local theater in the cities of Orlando, and Kissimmee, Florida, as well as teaching art with Central Florida Community Arts.
In 2022, he relocated to New York City to keep writing stories with color and paintbrushes. He has had solo exhibitions at the New York Public Library in Hamilton Heights, and Morningside Heights respectively while working on a Broadway Portraits Collection that highlights the actors who tell stories on stage.
My artwork explores the intersection between the tangible and the intangible and is about telling stories. Colors, shapes, and textures converge to evoke emotions and stir the imagination. Through my use of mixed media, I seek to create experiences that invite viewers to contemplate the complexity between existence and beauty. Each piece is a colorful journey that invites viewers to discover not only new perspectives but discovering new meanings in a world that is full of color.
Through my art, I want viewers to discover their artist within. In the canvas, my brushstrokes weave a tapestry of emotions that invites viewers to a journey of imagination. With every painting, I strive to capture the essence of life’s moments.
The In-Between Lines Collection highlights the beauty of art through vibrant colors, single lines, and floral motifs. Featuring iconic visual art images and important historical personalities.