Despite growing up in the Jim Crow era, Malley was unaware of the racial divide between herself and her tenant farmer and migrant playmates. As an adult, she addresses racial inequality through compelling figurative paintings. As a child, she was immersed in nature on her grandparents’ farm. Today, she expresses her concerns for the environment through intriguing abstracts and advocating for climate change legislation.
Read moreRosa Vera: Painting Narrative Paths to Peace
When hearing about immigration, the word “crisis” comes to mind. Perhaps it’s because so many people are migrating everywhere in the world now. It seems like a new humanitarian predicament, but migrations have occurred in every age and time stirring the human population pot and generating conflict as well as new traditions and cuisines. In the late 1800’s for instance, the multinational population of Peru was transformed by an huge inflow of Chinese indentured laborers.
Read moreRosemary Luckett: exploring the terrain within
In her February 2018 solo exhibition Landscapes: the terrain within, Rosemary Luckett steps back from exploring the environmental landscape to make art about the archetypes she recognizes in her interior landscape. Over time she discovered the inner guides or archetypes portrayed in art, literature, mythology, and religion, heroes that have been with humanity everywhere since the dawn of time. Inspired by female contemporary heroes and writer Carol S. Pearson's book on the topic (Awakening the Heroes Within), she constructed collages about the twelve archetypes, putting herself into the picture. They percolated in a drawer for years until she decided to explore them further in larger format.
Read moreElaine Florimonte: Layering and Balancing
Elaine Florimonte is drawn to the simplicity and consistency of the horizon, specifically the proportions of sky, water and ground in paintings comprising her solo exhibition, The Pursuit of Balance at Touchstone Gallery, February 2018. Through her use of acrylic media and collage, she creates landscape images in an effort to find balance in an ever shifting world.
Read moreLisa Tureson: Curiosity ---> Exploration ---> Creativity
Lisa Tureson
Once Lisa Tureson decided to leave her career in the insurance industry, there was no stopping her from exploring and learning about the many techniques, materials and tools artists use to express themselves. Actually, she probably always did have a curious and exploratory bent. At age four Lisa often watched her artist-teacher mother at the easel. Thusly inspired, her first murals were created out of her mother’s lip stick on her sisters’ bedroom walls. Whether she was chastised for her use of the lipstick medium or praised for her ambitious wall-size art expression, this “project” proved a precursor to the large paintings in her present day solo exhibit Scribbles: An Urban Art Expression at Touchstone Gallery during March 2017.
Read moreJill Brantley: Creating Fresh Surroundings
Jill Brantley
The experience of playing freely during childhood must imprint itself indelibly in one’s psyche. So many artists and writers who grew up in small towns across America seem to have been fueled by these long lazy periods of spontaneity as children. I put Jill Brantley among those so endowed. She was fortunate to live in a small town in New England. No stoplights. Church steeples rising above oaks and maples. The whole nine yards. She remembers walking to school, riding bikes in the dark on summer nights, roaming with friends from yard to yard inventing games as they went along. Imagination sparking imagination. And a mother ringing a special bell at dusk.
Read moreDavid Alfuth: Is This Art Really 3-D?
David Alfuth
Are David Alfuth’s new sculptural collage works really 3-D? Or is the architectural subject matter just fooling our eyes? To find out, you’ll have to see his new surreal collage works, Perspective, at Touchstone Gallery between October 5—30, 2016.
Read moreLinda Bankerd: A Delicate Balance
Linda Bankerd
Riding a bike the way Linda does takes a lot of exertion. That she burns calories as she whizzes through the landscape there is no doubt. But what she gains is more subtle. Forms blur their way into her brain, are stored there and often make an appearance in her abstract paintings. Likewise everyday colorful home objects and special rooms in the interior of her home, also penetrate her psyche and accumulate there until called upon when she faces a new blank canvas. With brush in hand and acrylic paints at the ready, those stockpiled sensations emerge and turn into colorful complex shapes and forms.
Read moreThe Abstract Icons of Paula Lantz
Paula Lantz head shot copy
Paula Lantz always watches people as she goes about her day--in a restaurant, on the Metro, in a park or grocery store. Or at the mall. These folks aren’t doing much; just going about the business of living, but Paula wonders what each one is thinking or feeling, and makes a mental note of her guesses.
Read moreRosemary Luckett: Uncovering Nature’s Dream and Us
Rosemary Luckett
Rosemary Luckett has come full circle this April in her Touchstone solo exhibition Earth House. She continues with a circle of life theme that she started in a Round River series some years ago, probing relationships between the earth, its living creatures and humankind. Through images of the seen, she points to - hints at - what is often unseen. "The apparent visible and the hidden visible... in nature are never separated," wrote Magritte, an artist she admires. The fun in looking at her works is to discover both visible and related hidden.
Read moreGuest Artists: John Blee and Dee Levinson
Washington, DC, artist Dee Levinson learned at an early age to collage imagery and colors together. As a child she began by pasting small museum art reproductions into little booklets her mother provided. This seemingly inconsequential activity instilled in Levinson the notion that one could mix just about anything together to make a piece of art. Today she does this “collaging” by mixing classical forms painted in a linear manner with highly saturated colors reminiscent of early 20th century German Expressionists.
John Blee, a Washington DC artist, explores new spatial and emotional dimensions in Orchard Suite, his latest series of acrylic paintings on exhibit at Touchstone Gallery. While most of his works vibrate with the intense spring blossom hues that are signature to his palette, several other paintings offer deeper, nocturnal shades, reflecting inverse color themes. Playful geometries activate abstract, luminous sky-and-earth compositions and dance with one another to create an unlikely balance and playfulness. The effect in the viewer is usually an uplifted spirit one might call joie de vivre.
David Alfuth: Bohemian Builder
David Alfuth
"You are on your own now," said David Alfuth's father the day of David's graduation from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. David had a double major in drawing/painting and art history, and was equipped with teaching credits, so he was good to go. David took up the role of elementary art teacher in the Sheboygan school district for three years, enjoying the exuberance of children receptive to art - and, contrarily, putting up with the hard winters and enduring small town ordinariness. But the longing to travel finally caught up with him after his Triumph Spitfire sports car got stuck in the snow one too many times.
Read moreRosemary Luckett: Uncovering the Unseen
Rosemary Luckett
Rosemary Luckett has been on good terms with the earth since she was a young girl weeding sugar beets and caring for the animals on her family’s farm in the desert plateau of south central Idaho. These earliest experiences of taking care of the environment that then, in turn, took care of her, were the seeds of Rosemary’s sense of this relationship as vital and mutual. Over time, she has developed a visual language--plastic ducky's, bones, tree forms, maps, and birds to express her love and worry for the earth through her artwork. The techniques used varies with what she is exploring. Sometimes collage. Sometimes sculpture. And more recently photography.
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