For Milt Masur, creating colorful bas-relief art works—at once paintings and sculptures—comes from a desire to interpret the world through art. He refers to the book by Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art? in which one interpretation of art is, “continuing examination of our perceptual awareness and a continuing expansion of our awareness of the world around us.” Masur puts it slightly differently: “Creativity in general and art in particular constantly re-shape our perception of our outer environment as it interacts with our inner selves.” Of the many ways to be creative, visual art has the advantage of uniting these interactions by capturing a meaningful moment in time.

The Brooklyn born, Long Island based artist and still practicing physician thinks that creativity is a physiological part of human nature, and credits his medical experience as one of the shapers of his humanistic ethos. His evocative paintings provide a tension between surface and depth, the tactile and the visual, the durable and the fleeting, perhaps in some way, illustrating our constant search into the exterior and interior world. He applies enamel and oil paints on bas-relief collages to create three-dimensional pictures. There is a sense of colorful, dense excitement in his sweeping, elegant landscapes.

There are broad vistas of mountain ranges, coastal cliffs, desert expanses and serene woodlands rendering eloquent, personalized spaces. Masur captures the sheen of moving water and gently swirling reeds, building the textured surfaces with layer after layer of color. The sculptural and collage elements give palpable interpretations of the subjects he paints and provide a powerful sense of identity; the applied color provides nuance and mood; the combination, sometimes a feeling of wonder. He uses a bold, natural palate rife with brilliant hues.

Lynda Pogue in her studio An artist of irrepressible energy, Lynda Pogue creates her pieces with an expertise and verve that imbues her paintings with tremendous force.  Working primarily with both encaustic and water-based media, she relishes the speed with which these media force her to work. It means the pieces develop intuitively on the canvas and the expression is truer, more spontaneous, without the ponderous meanderings and tangents that come with over-contemplation of most kinds of emotional output.  The physicality of the materials feeds heavily into the painting experience, and a large part of creating a work is preparation of paints, tools
and surfaces. Pogue feels a connection to her materials, an empathy for them, a tactile relish – it is this that allows her to work fluidly and mix media on canvas in a way that supports the strengths of each material.

Working with mixed media, including acrylic and encaustic, Pogue’s combination of dynamic surface texture with subtle gradations of intense color, which glows from within, make her work intensely effective.  Her technique produces dramatic plays of light and tone, giving the works tremendous depth.  The radiating atmosphere created lends her paintings a subtlety and emotional openness that allows the viewer to connect directly to the painting.  Pogue wants her viewers to react to the work on a visceral
level, capturing that immediate ‘wow!’ factor that makes her pieces stand out. The directness of creation encapsulates a directness of expression, that is, when showing another person one of her paintings, Pogue stands exposed and vulnerable, the entirety of her expression laid bare for them to read in the painting.