November 5th ~ Dec. 12th, 2016
Artists:
Valerio D’Ospina
Born in Italy and trained at Florence’s Accademia di Belle Arti, Valerio D’Ospina paints the city with refined skill and a contemporary edge.
Whether depicting the majestic cathedral of Milan or the busy skyline of New York City, Valerio D’Ospina re-creates the urban feel with energetic line and a keen architectural vision. Powerful horizontals mimic the hectic pace of the city, and cool gray tones suggest its gritty quality. Perspective plays an interesting role in D’Ospina’s compositions: One scene peers down upon the Empire State Building, and the next offers a street-level view of the unrelenting movement that characterizes New York City.
“In the history of art, perspective was the first representational method that was, so to speak, ‘encoded.’ I’ve always been fascinated by anything in nature that could be demonstrated and verified with math and geometrical calculations, especially if we think about the mystical properties of the golden ratio, the way it is present everywhere, both in nature and in manmade creations. My artistic education was forged in that beautiful city, the city of perspective, ‘la culla del Rinascimento’ — how could I not be influenced by it? It is evident that perspective is one of the persistent elements in my paintings.” ~ V. D’Ospina
Michael Longo
When painter Michael Longo was studying at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, his professor and mentor James McGinley sent him and his fellow students out into the Newark environs to paint whatever inspired them. Longo felt drawn again and again to the massive industrial structures crisscrossing the landscape around the city, over the Hackensack River and around the Meadowlands swamp.
“I’ve always been fascinated with the bridges,” Longo says. “They’re like a giant erector set. As a kid, I was always taking stuff apart and putting it back together: cars, toys, anything my dad would let me.” He admires their classic, hand-crafted solidity, and says, “You can see that things from this era (the early 20th century) were made with pride. New bridges are soulless.” His painting style captures the bridges’ solid and simultaneously airy nature, often showing them rising isolated from the barren landscape, silhouetted against the sky. He adds that a friend of his put it best: “‘They’re like big churches for a forgotten landscape.” ~ M. Longo
Sean Flood was born and raised on the south shore of Massachusetts in 1982. As far back as he can remember, he was always drawing. During high school, he had attended summer classes at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. With the encouragement of his art teachers, Flood decided to further his studies and attend the Art Institute of Boston in 2000.
During his formative training at the Art Institute of Boston (B.F.A. Fine Art 2005), Flood was immersed in traditional instruction including still life and figurative painting, but he found he was drawn to and captivated by interiors and pictorial spaces. By the end of his college experience, his primary focus was cityscapes, perhaps influenced by the first hand exposure to his father’s life work in the construction business. Flood’s approach to painting urban scenes and structures simulates and celebrates the energy of the city and the construction process. The paintings reveal the process from foundation to structure to completed form.
Zofia Bogusz was born in Poland in the ’80s. As a child, she moved with her parents to New York City where she currently works and resides. Zofia received a bachelors degree from the School of Visual Arts, where she focused in oil painting and figurative studies. Zofia regularly exhibits her work, and enjoys doing freelance illustration as well as commissions. Her personal work was featured in Juxtapoz, the leading international art and culture magazine. Her art and interview is also featured in the print issue of a Miami-based art magazine Art Nouveau, as well as the Brazilian art and culture magazine ZUPI.
Zofia paints lone women amid bold animals and dramatic landscapes, often using the contrast of deep black and luminous color to highlight the intensity between the individual and the external world. Through her symmetrical compositions, she strives to render the delicate and interdependent balance between mankind and the environment.
Zofia’s medium of choice is oil paint on hand-cut wood.
Christine Wu is a Los Angeles based artist whose work captures the ephemeral and fragmented body in flux. Wu combines figurative painting, gold leaf and careful line-work to generate fractal visions of her subjects. These works are haunting and sensual, lovely impressions of a visionary mind.
“”I want to create a world that is at once nostalgic, intimate, raw and honest. I depict images of people in some form of growth, but not exactly a physical one of age, but something more cerebral and visceral, and although those two words are somewhat at odds, it feels like the correct description. Sometimes we have bittersweet moments with ourselves, where we have to lose something to move forward – allowing our minds to grow up and mature. My work has a lot to do with metaphorical deaths, and with the layering, I am creating ghost images of things that could be, could have been, and may never be. But the layers do have a multitude of meanings and I am not forcing my interpretation on anyone because at the same time, I see the multiple images as the many faucets of personalities that everyone has, and the faucets that we might not want the world to see.” ~ C. Wu
Emily Thompson attended the prestigious High School of Art and Design and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She spent 10 years working as an art director for the In-house Advertising Department of Bloomingdale’s and after that a year as senior graphic designer of marketing at Playboy Enterprises. During those years and afterwards she also had a successful career as an editorial illustrator. Her illustrations appeared in major publications, books, on greeting cards, advertisements and products.
Today she focuses mainly on graphic design and fine art. As an award winning graphic designer, she works for clients all over the U.S. specializing in the design of printed materials.
As fine artist she has been recognized both regionally and nationally for her paintings. Her work is about the beauty of design, atmosphere, mood, color, the application of paint and texture. She is influenced by the landscape both rural and urban. She has exhibited at The Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Sketch Club, The Trenton City Museum, The Monmouth Museum and other venues in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and California. Her work is part of private collections throughout the U.S. Emily and her husband, fine artist George Thompson live and work in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Johannah O’Donnell, a Florida native, grew up in Sarasota, where she graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design with a degree in Fine Art. She is currently a full time painter/art instructor, and has exhibited work in numerous shows around the country, including a solo show at Bold Hype Gallery in NYC.
Influenced by the American Pop Art movement, Spanish Surrealism, and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Art, Johannah O’Donnell’s paintings use natural and figurative symbolism to comment on the ever-evolving human condition.
Chris Guest is a London based Artist.
His work focuses mainly on painting heavily tattooed people, utilising classical oil painting techniques, learnt at London Fine Arts in Battersea. Chris creates paintings in a classic figurative tradition, coupled with a contemporary twist.
He began painting and drawing from a very young age, and first started making money from art aged just 14, drawing portraits of music icons for other pupils at school.
At age 18, Chris began showing his work in galleries in Cornwall, and has since exhibited extensively throughout the UK and the US.
His originals and prints are collected worldwide, and his art has been featured in many magazines and publications.
Chris also teaches painting and holds regular workshops around the UK.
Joseph Crone graduated from the Herron School of Art and Design the summer of 2010 with the intention to explore, through the realistic duality of technical drawing and sculptural framework, the recesses and storytelling of the human mind. These elements help to compose his vision of an altered viewing environment, which he aspires to further develop and capture with each subsequent work of art. Recent accomplishments during 2011 include the Robert Beckmann Emerging Artist Fellowship as well as the Stutz Artist Association’s Residency Program. Crone also was recently published in Strokes of Genius 2: The Best of Light and Shadow, BLUECANVAS Magazine #8, and Studio Visit Magazine soon to be released this fall. He continues to show locally while looking forward to future opportunities that will further his artistic vision as an emerging artist.
Victor Grasso’s works grab your mind, spirit, senses and childhood simultaneously and immediately. It’s all of Jules Verne, Tim Burton and Lucian Freud at once. It’s dark and it’s whimsy. It’s sensual and childlike. Andrew Wyeth with fisherman’s muscles. It’s a jocular and hallowed family. It’s based in reality, but vivid with alternate universes suffused with reverence for the body. There is juxtaposition of the beauty and noir that inhabit recesses of our minds. Objects, people, events, contexts that should not exist together nor imagined to our eyes are evident on the screen of Victor’s mind duplicated in oils. He rediscovers the ochre, blacks and whites of the past and reimagines the future. Panoramas, wind blown skeletonized trees; seascapes, octopi and bald men. Kitchens filled with zoo creatures and creatures of the deep. His models are the village and family – never more flattering or at risk, and bravely exposed.”
“A ride with Grasso is a ride in the hidden areas that inhabit our unconscious, and remain repressed and denied until so provocatively exposed as natural world order in his art. It is both our fear and our lust. It is fulfillingly appealing, while revealing our most hidden secrets now well exposed – seemingly as natural as Disney – gone Louvre.” ~Jacob J. Steinberg, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Professor, Dept of Pathology
Ellen Stagg
Though Stagg found success in the world of commercial photography, her true passion was to be considered fine artist. After years of struggling to connect with models who would understand her vision, Stagg met Justine Joli in 2005; the award winning adult actress quickly became Stagg’s muse. Through Joli, Stagg was able to connect to other women from the adult industry. Stagg found it easy to create nude art with these “pros;” feeling inspired, she dusted off one of her old film cameras and some left over negative film and began working on multiple exposure images.
This current body of work blends Stagg’s love of nature with her love of the female nude form. Shooting with a Holga 120 film camera, Stagg photographs her models, making multiple exposures on the film. This process is repeated with elements of nature, as Stagg shoots images flowers. The multiple exposure images are flipped, creating kaleidoscoping images that mirror each other like a Rorschach test. And showing nude polaroids, that are one of a kind.
Rob Leecock
Born in 1971, Rob Leecock rose to young manhood in the fetid backwaters of the New Jersey shoreline. He scanned the barren terrain for righteous ammunition with which to load his artistic blunderbuss. He found it in comic books and album covers. He found it in paperback books, movie posters and the psychic dystopia of teenage life. His chosen weapons are graphite and oils, although if he dipped his stylus in poison, fear, or blood, the results would be the same. A deceptively simple vision of idealized notions and accentuated forms.