Fiona Viney
B
ritish artist Fiona Viney works under the philosophy that an artwork may have a profound transformative effect on the mood of a room. Her works are decidedly fun while confronting the viewer with radiant colors and delightful subjects, often animals, peering out from the work to meet the viewer's gaze directly.
Viney paints in high contrast with flat applications of color; it is a style that contains childlike idealism while representing sophisticated ideas with artistic prowess. Currently, Viney chooses to work with two separate mediums, which consequently involve two divergent approaches to her art. "My watercolors cross all the boundaries of conventional techniques, they are free flowing images born entirely from my imagination," she explains. "In contrast I have developed a range of acrylic and emulsion work that is distinctive and unique." Viney began painting at the age of twenty-two, highly experimental and unafraid to try different subjects and media. She then traveled abroad, living for a time in New York and Argentina. While overseas, she was greatly influenced by her experiences and by the fantastic colors she encountered in North and South America. Upon Viney's return to England, she was met with enthusiastic interest in her art; she exhibited heavily and completed numerous commissioned works. Viney lives and works in England.
Marga Duin
T
he work of Marga Duin, a native of Zandvoort, one of the major beach resorts of the Netherlands, correspondingly reflects a fascination with light and the sea. Her choice of subjects is dichot-omous, being either abstractions of the sea or gestural drawings of the human figure, particularly female. Duin's abstractions feature forceful yet luminous color application and are largely geomet-
ric, whereas the graceful contours of her female nudes rise and fall, flowing like water. The quality of her nudes is interesting; she selects parts of the figure to render, then stops and chooses another selection of the body to delineate in a neighboring area of the image. Sweeping swaths of color are then applied to bring the divergent sections together, eliminating any conflicting sense of fragmentation.
The exuberance and light of the sea finds its way into "Radiance," a work that exhibits Duin's characteristic expressive stroke while contained in a more geometric framework. The power of this work lies in rich application of color; solid sharply defined geometric shapes combined with wistful strokes that allow the central masses of color to cede into one another. The visual effect is strong; one can sense an ocean breeze flowing in from the waters onto and over the comparatively unforgiving coast.