71st Annual Juried Exhibition: Amanda Rombach

THE SCALE, Collaborative mural painted for the Santa Fe Community.
Artists: Natessa Amin, Amanda Dunham, Britt Kuechenmeister, AJ Rombach

I recently returned from a month-long-road-trip across the country. This marks my second trip in ten months, totaling in over 17,000 miles of traveled terrain. In addition to the healthy break I needed from my Philadelphia routine, these two journeys served as business trips in which I painted five independent murals and four group murals in New Orleans, Santa Fe, Minneapolis and Wolfeboro, NH.

The two trips have inevitably informed much of my work.  Many of the spaces and forms that take shape within my paintings and drawings, I have seen somewhere else, out there on the grid, on the field, --somewhere out there.

71st Annual Juried Exhibition: Cynthia Harvey

My art is largely an intuitive process incorporating different textures, colors, shapes and forms. It typically occurs organically with minimal planning and a lot of reactive decisions. They are often made quickly, sometimes only discovered after setting it aside for a period of time, then bringing it out again to look at with a fresh eye.
 

When I bring the painting out again, I can either continue with what I have going, or allow it to morph into new shapes and objects, turning it sideways or upside-down. I’ll often realize it’s not working at all and then paint over a good portion of it. I will still allow small sections of the previous layer to show through, giving me new potential forms to play with.

71st Annual Juried Exhibition: Roger Chavez

Untitled Still life #11, 2012 by Roger Chavez

In the past three years, I have returned to painting the still-life.

For me, the subject matter serves as a point of departure, allowing me to find my own forms through exploring the subject. The immediate accessibility of the still-life facilitates my focus on the objects themselves, their shadows, shapes, and the space they occupy.

In my process, I focus on the same object(s) over an extended period of time. In working on one subject over this stretch of time, the physical arrangement of the subject is not based upon a scheme for a potential source of new visual information, but to confront the subject matter as a whole.  Thus, the placement of the objects rarely changes, and this provides an environment to discover something new within the same objects and the space around them.  Each attempt to paint my subject matter becomes new and different. 

71st Annual Juried Exhibition: Nicole Michaud

What The Past Tells Us by Nicole Michaud

I consider my work to be primarily conceptual, with symbolic and process elements. Since I rarely have a complete vision of the finished work before beginning, I find it important to work in a medium such as oils, gouache, or collage. This allows me to layer and change the work as it progresses and inspires me. 

I work both with and without initial studies and combine painting from life with printed and found reference materials (old photographs, patterns, books, etc.). 

The original imagery is developed over several weeks, and I generally work on more than one painting at a time in order to allow for drying and the next intuitive step to reveal itself. Occasionally, I will work from a completely abstract ground, and respond to the work until the final imagery becomes clear.  Other times, I will begin with a primary reference or set-up and make additions and alterations, adding and removing features as the painting progresses. I also remove paint from the surface by sanding, scraping, or rubbing.

I find it useful to work in groups or a series, which allows me to come at a concept from multiple directions, or explore variations to fully engage in a topic. I often combine organic and inorganic forms, personal narrative, and pattern to symbolize the ways in which our lives, nature, the products of our modern world, dogmas, or other guiding forces collide and interrelate. With this series, I have incorporated landscapes modified from my personal history, representational and abstract spaces, and geometric forms. In these works, the geometric elements represent for me guiding forces, veiled messages, and generational patterns.  

71st Annual Juried Exhibition: Deb Strong Napple

What is a printmaker?

by Deb Strong Napple

A printmaker is someone who makes prints, right?

But what does that mean?

As a fine artist who works both in oil painting and printmaking, I have had many conversations start with these questions. When someone meets a painter they know that they are talking with an artist who applies pigments to a canvas in order to make a unique image. They are often not aware that a printmaker does the same thing but uses wood, metal, carving tools, acids, inks, and rollers instead of brushes, knives and paint.

Let's start with a few things that I, as a printmaker, do not do:

• Make photographic or scanner based copies of paintings or drawings.
• Reproduce works made by other artists.
• Use machines to produce large quantities of identical images.
• Click an icon to make a print.

71st Annual Juried Exhibition: Jeff Gola

Liquors by Jeff Gola

I consider my style as expressive realism. It’s a way of working that approaches a certain refinement in some areas but still does not hide the hand of the artist. Although I’ve been painting and drawing for most of my life in a variety of mediums, I’ve been using egg tempera as my primary medium for about 12 years.  I’m drawn to its clarity of color, its crispness and the meditative process that suits my temperament. 

Egg tempera is really not the medium for the quick, momentary impulse.  The process is slow and requires going over the same area many times, crosshatching the quick drying paint in many layers to develop form and to bring out the optical qualities that the medium is known for. Because of that and my attraction to scenes of fleeting light effects, I work on my tempera paintings in the studio, using my personal photos and often pencil sketches with notes. 

Jury Selects Winners for Take a Seat! On View at Morris Arboretum and Woodmere Art Museum

Tropical Adirondeco by Murrie Gayman

At a reception held at Woodmere Art Museum on May 21^st, winners of the collaborative Morris Arboretum-Woodmere exhibit, Take a Seat! were announced.  Forty artists are included in the Take a Seat! exhibition, and 70 Adirondack chairs will be on display at Woodmere Art Museum and throughout Morris Arboretum’s 92-acre garden from May 31^st through Labor Day, September 3^rd.

The variety of disciplines and talent on display in the art form of the classic Adirondack chair is impressive.

First prize went to Murrie Gayman for his vibrant Tropical AdironDeco chairs and accompanying footstool. Gayman graduated cum laude from the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (now the University of the Arts) in 1958.  After successful careers designing interiors, fabrics and wall coverings, he began a new venture in the 1990s creating huge murals for public spaces utilizing scraps of antique barn wood.  His work can be seen in many prominent Bucks County buildings, at the Pennsylvania Visitors Welcome Center in Susquehanna County, and at the historic Moland House in Warwick Township. www.barnwoodmurals.com