Industrialism in the 21st Century

 

Artist Bios

 

Don Eddy

www.doneddyart.com

 

Don Eddy was born in southern California in 1944 and currently  resides in New York City.  A realist artist, sometimes called a photo-realist, the artist works in acrylic on canvas as well as in colored pencil on paper.

 

Eddy’s new work takes him deeper into the explorations of nature, perception and life’s mysteries. Many of the paintings have arched tympana, making reference to shapes used in Romanesque and Gothic architecture, as well as to sacred and religious paintings of medieval and Renaissance times. By association to the tympanum, Eddy’s multi-panel paintings take on a quietly spiritual aura in their contemplative examination of earth’s changes and riches. The subject is as much light and tranquility, ultimate peace, as is the manifest content. Some of his new paintings are triptychs with three sections vertically or horizontally juxtaposed, others are polyptychs, including four or five wooden panels.

 

While Eddy’s earlier works of the ‘80s were object oriented, depicting glassware, silverware and toys on reflective glass shelves, his new paintings (and work of the past decade) have turned outward—to the imagery we behold in the world—as well as inward in their impact. No longer does the artist select images for cerebral, narrative or metaphorical reasons, he juxtaposes images that work in poetic relationship to one another. Eddy calls these connections of structure “echoing ecosystems” which anchor and join the panels together.

 

Eddy utilizes a unique system he has developed over the years, underpainting in

three colors. The first layer is a pthalocyanine green in a series of tiny circles about 1/16th green in a series of tiny circles about 1/16th of an inch in diameter. Eddy meticulously paints each of the eight panels first in tiny green circles, a meditative process of setting the values for the painting. This layer is followed by brown, then purple to separate the warm from the cool colors.

 

He may then add between 20 to 30 layers of transparent color to achieve the radiant final palette of each painting. Eddy does not project a slide when creating his works; he draws a map onto the canvas that only he can read, and then begins to create a universe for the public to contemplate in

its richness, quietness and depth.

 

Education

1969-70  University of California, Santa Barbara, California, 1 year post-grad study

 

1969 University of Hawaii, Honolulu, M.F.A.

 

1967 University of Hawaii, Honolulu, B.F.A.

 

Fullerton Junior College, Fullerton, California

 © 1996-2017 Nancy Hoffman Gallery

 

Allan Gorman

www.allangorman.com

 

Born in Brooklyn, NY,  Allan Gorman is a realistic oil painter who brings his strengths as an internationally celebrated brand marketing consultant and graphic designer to artworks that certainly reflect his own unique and distinctive brand. Soaring towers of industry, chrome exhaust pipes, distorted reflections, a macro trip inside mechanisms and technology – hard angles, strong colors and carefully thought through com-positions permeate works that have been featured in numerous gallery and museum shows and private collections in both the united States

and Europe.

 

Major exhibits have included solo and invitational showings at Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts; CK Contemporary Galleries; The Miller Gallery;  Lia Skidmore Fine Arts; Galleria GUM in Miami, FL, and Howard Rehs Contemporary Galleries in NYC.   Museum and Art fairs include: “Hyperrealism” at The Illinois Institute of Art - Chicago; The Chattauqua Institute (NY) Exhibition 2013; Mid-Atlantic New Oil Painting 2012 and 2014 at the Ritterhoff Martin Galleries; the 2010 and 2016 Arts Annuals at the NJ State Museum and The Noyes Museum of Art; Re-Presenting Realism at the Arnot Art Museum; ArtPrize 2014 and ArtPrize 2015 in Grand Rapids, MI.; ArtHamptons Art Fair; Art Palm Springs; twice on board the luxury art yacht Seafair at Art Greenwich; the International Guild of Realism’s Masterworks Museum Tour traveling to art museums around the country from May 2015 through June 2016, and “Something More Than Realism” at Galeria ArteLibre in Zaragoza, Spain.

 

Gorman’s work has been profiled in Arte Libre X (2016), Manifest’s International New Painting Annuals 2 and 6, America Art Collector (several issues), Transportation Today, Poets & Artists Magazines (3 issues), Steadfast Arte, The Huffington Post, CreativeTime4Talk, about.com, and dozens of other print and electronic publications.

 

Allan Gorman currently maintains a studio practice in Kearny, NJ, and resides in West Orange, NJ.

 © 2017 Allan Gorman

 

Chris Klein

www.chrisklein.com

 

Chris is a British artist, currently sharing his time between Quebec and Ontario in Canada. Exhibiting his own work in the UK, Europe and North America. In 1983 Chris had his work accepted by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, UK for their prestigious Summer Exhibition. Before coming to Canada he was also an associate member of the Guild of Motoring Artists.

 

As well as producing his own work, he is also a scenic artist for film and theatre. For 8 years he was the head of scenic art at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada in Ontario, and presently at the National

Arts Centre in Ottawa. Chris has worked on many sets, creating backdrops and related artwork and has contributed to major productions in London’s West End and Broadway. In Canada, he has painted for many major Hollywood films and many shows for the Cirque du Soleil.

 © 2017 Chris Klein

 

Roland Kulla

www.rolandkulla.com

 

Kulla is fascinated by the built environment. He reflects on what the structures tell about their builders as well as their interaction with nature and the results of time. Since 1998 Roland has focused on the engineering ingenuity that created Chicago’s many bridges. Structural elements are abstracted from their context and painted with a hard-edged realism on a scale that highlights the monumentality of the forms and the creativity necessary for their existence. In 2006 he began to branch out to other ‘bridge’ cities such as Boston, New York City and environs, Pittsburgh and most recently Berlin, Germany.

 

Although people are not the direct subjects of Kulla’s work, they are integral to it. The structures stand as proxies for human exper-ience. Roland Kulla creates places and moods that invite the viewer to enter into the work and form their own relationship to it.

 

As Roland has transitioned to becoming a a full-time artist, he has discovered that the act of making the art, while personally rewarding, is only part of the creative process.  Art is essentially about com-municating, which means sharing the Kulla visions with others. This can’t happen if kept them to himself. From this insight, Kulla has discovered that the more he shares, the more he creates. For these reasons, Roland is very pleased to have this opportunity to share my work with you.

 

Education

1976 Master of Arts, The School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

 

1970 Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude Bellarmine University, Louisville, KY

 © 2017 Roland Kulla

 

Sheryl Luxenburg

www.sherylluxenburg.com

 

Sheryl is a Canadian visual artist living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Best known

in North America for her hyperrealistic acrylic and watercolor paintings, she endeavors to present the objectivity of her subjects, taking advantage of illusionistic depth and emphasizing with paint a flat-tened three dimensional spatial perspective. Capturing this ocular perspective is a hallmark quality of the Photorealism/Hyperrealism movement which began in New York City under Louis Meisel in the late 1960s. Sheryl became fascinated with these techniques almost forty years ago when studying under the mentorship of the famous American painter Tom Blackwell at Keene State College in New Hampshire.

 

Sheryl’s intention within Hyperrealism has always been the suggestion of casualness, her subjects tend to be found in their natural state. In the last decade, Sheryl has streamlined her focus towards subject matter which captures window reflections, situations behind transparent glass and portraits associated with water surfaces.

 

Technically, Sheryl works in dry brush style, striving for tight details and precision, then uses an airbrush to glaze surfaces. Sheryl’s use of acrylic glazes promotes spatial depth in an image. When thin translucent layers of paint are placed one on top of the other onto a canvas, the underneath layers are readily revealed and this promotes a delicate layering effect.

 

Sheryl’s undergraduate fine art education was completed in studio painting at Concordia University and The School of Art and Design of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec. She has also attended graduate studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, The Banff Centre ForThe Arts, Banff, Alberta and Keene State College, New Hampshire, USA. Sheryl Luxenburg’s work can be found in private, corporate, government and museum collections in Canada, the USA and Europe.

Art Statement-

The Elusive Window Reflections of The Ottawa Shaw Centre

 

“From the beginning of twentieth century architecture, North America has been us-ing concrete, glass and steel as favoured construction materials. These materials have become the symbol of development, luxury and affluence in the modern urban landscape.

 

The use of cast iron and plate glass was initially heralded in 1851 by Joseph Paxton, chief architect for The Crystal Palace’s Great Exhibition Hall in Hyde Park, London, England, and as construction engineering technology advanced through the decades, glass facades became widely used in green building architecture due to it’s aesthetic  and energy saving properties.

 

Today cities are strewn with these giant glass clad structures, the spatial phenomenon of this material is ubiquitous in everyday life; as their reflective quality is intentionally used to broaden space and multiply views. Pedestrian traffic is easily drawn to it’s illusionary representational nature which represents a myriad of opportunities to delight upon.

 

The paintings selected for this exhibition are a small sampling from a series called ‘The Elusive Window Reflections of The Ottawa Shaw Centre’.This body of work celebrates my relationship with Industrialism’s modern day trend which uses reflective glass in building construction, and celebrates my artistic interaction with our city’s most recent architectural wonder and objet d’art, The Ottawa Shaw Centre. The reflective grandeur of this building’s glass enclosure is breathtaking and has inspired me for the past five years.

 

The focus of this work is to study how the surfaces of The Shaw Centre and adjacent Westin Hotel interact with one another aesthetically and operate as an art installation. In each canvas, I capture an unexpected perspective of the reflective quality of these two buildings, and how sublime patterns are created on the surface of and deep within the glass. This project enabled me to participate in and savour the idea of aesthetic ephemerality at it’s finest, with a beloved Canadian monument of major regional importance.”

© 2017 Sheryl Luxenburg

 

 

Stephen Magsig

www.smagsig.com

 

Stephen’s paintings capture scenes of daily life and reflect a distinctly American landscape where industry/urban and nature collide. They are a visual record of the quiet beauty in the everyday scene. Portraits of forgotten and neglected spaces, their patina, the fingerprint of time. Places that exist in silence, unrevered and waiting to be discovered. Scenes of vanishing industry, urban ruins, sunlit houses, storefronts and the urban prairie.

 

Magsig works oils on linen canvas and linen panels in the simple and direct Alla Prima method.  Although painted represent-ationally, he is more interested in the “Story” of the scene and the “Plasticity” of the paint than in creating an exact representation of the subject.

 

He has been recording the Detroit vernacular in paintings for more than 30 years, currently involved with an ongoing conceptual project of documenting the city in small oil paintings having completed more than twenty-one hundred since 2007.

 

Clearly, Stephen Magsig enjoys the physical act of making work using the tools and techniques that have been utilized by artists for centuries. His urban landscape paintings are portraits of how we as a society have affected and continue to alter the environment around us. They are the language he has developed to communicate things he cannot otherwise articulate. Stephen feels that his painting is a process in search of answers to the questions that do not have answers.

 

Education

1985 Center for Creative Studies-College of Art and Design, Detroit, MI

 

1974 Bachelor of Arts, Ferris State College, Big Rapids, MI

© 2017 Stephen Magsig

 

Jan Anders Nelson

www.janandersnelsonart.com

 

Born July 18, 1952,  Houston, TX, Jan lives & works in Gig Harbor, WA.

 

Artist Statement-

“I am drawn to the relationship between nature and man, the dance that plays out over time as the forces of nature exert themselves, bringing changes to things made by humans and vice versa. This manifests as a series of photographs of machines or structures in environments where the passage and effects of time are evident or implied.  Other compositions might be comprised of imagery where juxtapositions of natural and man-made elements provide the desired contrasts I want to express. My drawings and paintings are based on and inspired by my photographs.  In the context of the exhibit ‘Industrialism in the 21st Century’, the works are certainly a reflection of the industrial efforts of the previous century as seen today.”

 

Education

1970 -1974 Midland Lutheran College, B.A., Theatre, Art

 

1974 - 1977 University of Wisconsin, M.A., Art

 

1976 - 1977 New York University, Independent graduate research, drawing

© 2017 Jan Anders Nelson

 

James Ritchie

www.jamescritchie.com

 

There has always been a thread of art and photography throughout James Ritchie’s life. When he was very young, his toy of first choice was paper and anything he could use to draw on it. In later childhood he practically lived in the town library during the summers immersed in cartoon and art books. (Andrew Wyeth was - and still is - an all time favorite artist.)

 

His father had a fully-equipped 4x5 Crown Graphic camera which dazzled him. But sadly, his father had to sell the camera before he was old enough to learn how to use it. There was, though, an old Kodak bellows camera (and later a Kodak Brownie and Instamatic) that he frequently used for snapshots of parents, relatives and friends, and even his pet alligator.

 

In high school he took the only two general art classes offered. He doodled on everything, and diligently tried to copy the work of his MAD Magazine art heroes Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, Frank Kelly Freas, Wallace Wood, and the guaranteed-to-put-him-in-stitches, Don Martin, along with so many more from the 1960s like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

 

In 1966, a year after high school, he was classified 1-A by the Draft Board, which was a death warrant in his mind. Determined not to pound ground in Viet Nam jungles for two years, he became a draft dodger - and enlisted in the Navy for four years. It was then that he made his first investment in more serious photographic equipment. While at sea he was able to buy, even on Seaman Apprentice pay, the then-prestigious Nikon-F 35mm camera, and assorted Nikkor lenses at bargain prices from the ship’s store, in Japan, and SE Asia.

 

After his enlistment, art and photography took a back seat to the realities of adult life for the next several decades. Drawing fell by the wayside, but at one point he took some night courses in graphics and advertising design at a community college. He continued to shoot, but usually only at family gatherings, and occasionally on weekend excursions to the zoo, or to chase trains. It wasn’t until after he retired, that he was able to devote himself to more serious photography.

 

He has since taught himself photography on the fly, and progressed from snap-shooting to pursuing it as art. During the last ten years he has shown locally at art fairs, juried exhibitions, art associations, and sold at co-op galleries, small shops, and an independent store in a major mall. Some of his Bodie, California ghost town work has been published in calendars, and on the cover

and dust jacket of a book.

© 2017 James Ritchie

 

Joseph Santos

www.joesantosstudio.com

 

Joseph Santos was born in Los Angeles, CA, in 1965 and was exposed to art at a very early age by his father, artist, Phillip Santos. It was his father who bought him his first set of watercolors and he has been obsessed with the medium ever since. Joseph lived in Los Angeles until the age of 5 when his family moved to Eastern Washington. After graduating from High School, Joseph, returned to Southern California where he attended Golden West College (1984-1986) and studied art technique and design while also working in his fathers art studio. Joseph started working exclusively in watercolor in the late 80’s and in 1999 started to paint the steel and industrial subjects that he is known for. He has exhibited his work in over 35 national exhibitions, and has been included and won awards in some of the nations most prestigious watercolor exhibitions. Joseph is a signature member of the American Watercolor Society.

 

Art Statement-

“Working in watermedia I focus mainly on urban and industrial objects and the effects of time and wear on these objects. Industrial machinery, neon signs, vehicles and other rusted and worn objects are some of the things I paint. Working around industrial equipment for many years I often found myself looking and searching for the abstract patterns and beauty created by the rust, dirt, steel and other weathered and decaying materials. Exploring composition, particularly shape and value, is a central focus, but I am also fascinated with the juxtaposition of rendering these sturdy urban and industrial objects with the delicate and fluid washes

of watercolor and I am also driven by the idea that these structures are manifestations of nature.”

© 2017 Joseph Santos

 

Mark Cervenka

 

Born 1959 in Austin, Texas, Mark lives and works in Houston where he is Associate Professor of Art and Director of O’Kane Gallery, University of Houston-Downtown.

 

Art Statement-

“‘There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.’ This statement written by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko in 1943 asserted that despite the directions their paintings would take toward abstraction, content would not leave their canvases.  Without narrative structure, their paintings were capable of expressing human exper-ience, emotional states and meditations on the natural order.  My early foray in art making embraced this notion.

 

For the last two decades, however I’ve tried to counter-balance that sense of the universal with a need to recognize the unique path of each human life. The resultant works, contrary to Rothko and Gottlieb, has been highly representational.  While I have never felt divorced from the Abstract Expressionists and their ability to create mood and suggest broader underlying expressions of individual points of view or universal truths as they saw them, finding voice in individual lives beaconed.  Many paintings may seem dark or somber, but, for me, there is always an element of exploration, seeking out, perhaps tenuously, an engagement of the present circumstance and environment, or a stillness reflecting meditation.  If that environment is new, assumptions about what is important are difficult creating mystery and humility and stereotype is replaced by an exploration of the natural and human constructed world with eyes wide open.”

Education

1987 MFA, Claremont Graduate University, Sculpture

 

1985 BFA, The University of Texas at Austin, Studio Art

 

1983 BA, The University of Texas at Austin, English

© 2017 Mark Cervenka