SHELLY PORTER
SARA SCRIBNER
The message of Shelly Por­ter’s watercolors are absorbed through the eye and transposed to the heart. Her imageries ref­erence a mandala-like focal point which aims to speak to the viewer in a “conscious and unconscious whisper”. Porter acknowledges the dichotomy between the over-stimulation
Art is a vessel for un­derstanding, based upon the visual dia­logue between the artist and audience. The paintings of Sara Scribner aim not to educate but to share an integral part of the
processes of life. The artist incorporates a sense of fleeting move­ment accomplished by the blurring of the subject to necessitate change and flux. She aims to capture the delicate balance between the eventuality of time and the temporal nature of life, painting from a place of honesty and truth. She exposes rawness by weigh­ing the human experience against the “shortness of an instant”. Her paintings seek to activate a feeling by presenting the viewer with a subject, a visage, metaphorically referencing a mirror. Scribner’s depictions are the antithesis of a graven image, with a message that is inherently compelling. She does not reflect on the cynical, but instead asks the viewer to quietly pause and examine the ubiquitous nature of change common to us all.
Website:
http://scribnersgallery.com/
one experiences on a day-to-day basis versus the spiritual need to seek solace and connectivity to a higher power. Her forms emerge as undulating organic shapes interweaving a pure vibrant color palette. They imply simple body-oriented mandalas such as the eye, the cells, or the organs employing various pattern­like motifs in the center. The mandala is understood cross-cul­turally as a focus for healing. Porter’s methodologies coalesce with those of Carl Jung, offering the mandala as a meditative device to seek inwardly as a means to self-actualization. Porter’s paintings offer the viewer a sort of reprieve; her forms are an archetype of wholeness offering sustenance to the soul by means of inner reflection and sanctuary.
Website: http://shellyporterartwork.com
ÅKE JOHANSSON
TERRI
Amig
Åke Johansson’s pencils muse playfully across the smiles and shrugs that he pulls out of memora­ble movie moments and press pho­tos. His keen, detailed obsessions with the weight of his subjects’ finely articulated eyes and place­ment of their attentions fleshes out their mortality beneath the glossy surfaces of the glamorized Holly­wood headshots that he translates
The artwork of Terri Amig is al­most familiar—not because of the specific images or style, but because it seems to evoke collec­tive traditions of the people we humans are. With her oils, Amig captures the seminal artistic in­stinct: the desire to communi­cate universally. It’s the instinct that informs the cave paintings
from the dawn of history; it’s what drives the choice of iconogra­phy employed by those who design the flags of nations.
But Amig’s compositional techniques are not as simple as they first appear. A true eye for proportion and subtle gradations of hue bring shadings of light and shadow into her worlds of rudi­mentary portraiture, breathing into them an otherworldly life. In Tangled Up in Beige II, for example, the basic lines of a com­pletely silhouetted crow seems to announce its sentience amongst a nerve-live bundle of denuded branches.
Terri Amig studied Fine Art at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. and at the California Institute for the Arts in Los Angeles. She is currently represented by several galleries throughout the US
Website: www.terriamig.com
into textured scrapes of line and shadow. Johansson gracefully layers the drama of the actors he analyzes atop the potentially mundane human faces which rise into the fantastic forms of the characters they portray.
The balance he finds along the line between the common man and dramatized role synthesizes sharp, curious looks into very public celebrity faces. His choices of recognizable photographs and film stills further echo the public nature of his models and frame their personalities like found art filtered through his own compassionate and nostalgically attentive lens as a portrait art­ist. Johansson lives and works in his native country of Sweden.
Website: www.akesart.com