Serenity - Oil on Linen 48'' x 36'' D . Loren Champlin’s dramatic, expressionist paintings capture the emotional textures of landscapes with a passion equal to that with which he paints the human body. For Loren, bodies and landscapes are expressions of a shared universal essence, and he surrounds his subjects within stormy swirls and eddies that evoke a symphony of moods and aesthetic ideas. There is an iconic feel to his works, suggesting that these domestic scenes and landscapes carry in their dramatic brushwork the weight of greater significance. Loren has said that painting is an act of primal communication, and that an unspoken union between artist and subject is created, as they both transcend the moment to create a perfect merger through the artwork. His subjects at times seem about to dissolve into a lava of passion or an ecstatic explosion of particles, and therein lies the tension in Loren’s work: life’s progress seems to have halted in his paintings, but halted at a moment of great significance. His subjects are suspended in the artistic moment. The human condition is Loren’s muse, a vulnerability expressed in his bold brushwork and the emotional tumult it conveys. It is these emotional ties that bind the subject to the canvas and help create the symphony of meaning in his paintings.

Gerard at Work in his Studio Presenting the viewer with striking, incredibly vivid canvases, Gerard Stricher is an abstract artist. Making use of intense complementary colors—inky, prussian blue, acid yellow and white, placid sky blue up against firey oranges and reds—his paintings convey a tremendous energy as the pigment glows from the canvas’ surface. The physical properties of the paint also play a large part in his compositions. The oil paint drips down the canvas creating linear boundaries and spreading the color further, bleeding into other areas. This adds to the tension in Stricher’s work between the controlled elements and those that are arbitrary and free. When balancing these, his handling of light is superb. In many works he layers dark pigments, then streaks lighter colors over them in large expressive strokes. They seem like strobes of light in the darkness, like the light trails of car headlamps in long-exposure night photographs. This lends Stricher’s work a wonderful lightness and sense of immediacy that transcends the paint from which the picture is created. It is this combination of vibrant color, energy and buoyancy that makes his work truly beautiful and arresting. The aesthetic is paramount for Stricher. He sees the world in colors, and his thoughts, emotions, energy and inspiration are drawn from them. His canvases therefore expose to the world a part of his psyche, a visual product of an inner world that he seeks to communicate. His vision is not completely focused inwards—it is his outward vision and drive which have propelled him to take up art full-time after retiring from business. Stricher’s external inspirations are not the cut-and-thrust business world, but rather the people around him and especially the natural world. It is this connection perhaps, that helps him to create such harmonious works of beauty. Gerard Stricher was born in France and grew up in a house that was full of art and where he felt connected to nature. He currently lives and works in Paris.