Jennifer Ardolino sees art in many things and has a magical way of transforming what she sees into vivid, wonderfully colored images that transport the viewer into the scenes. The rich palette of the tropics and the beauty of nature have provided Jennifer with an endless variety of vibrant subjects. Her chosen media extend from the supple natural beauty of watercolorsto the strong vivid colors of acrylics.
A Native of South Florida, Jennifer’s painting have always reflected her surroundings. Ranging from the vividly colored tropical manicured landscapes of South Florida where she grew up, to the wild unspoiled natural beauty of a remote island preserve where she now lives, to the Tropical Caribbean where she has sailed to and visited many times.
Jennifer self publishes all her own artwork, her many years of training and experience as a successful graphic designer have given her the skills and expertise to produce all of her own Giclee prints. This allows her to enjoy ultimate control over the quality and artistic content in each and every print she produces. Her paintings and Giclee prints are the ultimate blend of nature, art, color and state of the art technology.
A graduate of Colorado’s Institute of Art, Ardolino’s work has gained national and international acclaim, earning her numerous awards on the art show circuit. Her artwork can be found in Galleries throughout Florida as well as in Caribbean hotels, corporations and private collections including: Sandal’s Resort, St. Croix , Paradise Island, Nassau , Doral Resort, Miami Beach , Doral Resort, Miami; Hyatt, Miami Lakes.
Collections: Sandal's Resort, St. Croix Paradise Island, Nassau Doral Resort, Miami Beach Doral Resort, Miami Hyatt, Miami Lakes Shows & Awards: Banyan Festival - Poster Artist - 1996 Coconut Grove Artist of the Year 1996 - "Coconut Grover" Newspaper Shrimp Festival - Fernandina Beach - Isle of Eight Flags Award 1998 Shrimp Festival - Fernandina Beach - Isle of Eight Flags Award 1999 Homosassa Seafood, Arts and Craft Festival - Second Place 1999 Festival of the Arts - Inverness - Award of Merit 1999 Key Biscayne Art Festival - Best in Category 2000 Shrimp Festival - Fernandina Beach - Isle of Eight Flags Award 2000 Meet Me Downtown - Boca Raton - 2nd Place Watercolor 2001 Shrimp Festival - Fernandina Beach - 2nd Place Watercolor 2001 Key Biscayne Art Festival -2002 - Best in Category 2002 Key Biscayne Art Festival - 2003 - Merit Award
Daniel Boylan was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1940. He studied at the University of Omaha before moving to California in 1961. He returned to Omaha in 1984 to paint full time and exhibit his work in galleries throughout the midwest.
Dan’s exploration of painting takes him through the many worlds of nature: the midwestern landscape, the city scene and ultimately to the subject of fhte human figure.
"The decisions I make during the process of painting are mainly instinctive and have evolved over a period of years. I have pursued painting practically all of my life. When I was young, I had other explanations for painting, mostly borrowed from other artists. I still think it’s a hard thing to define, it defies any kind of real logic, especially when you compare painting to other professions. Itremains an unanswered question for me, except that now I am 60 years of age, my work has become my identity. It represents who I am.
These images that I paint are a fragment of the visions I started out with as a boy. Still, they are a chronology of those original visions, influenced over time and altered by N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parish, Norman Rockwell, Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, Willem DeKooning, Franz Kline, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Olivera, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Odd Nerdrum, Van Gogh, most of the impressionists and post impressionists, Goya, Velasquez, Titian, Michaelangelo, Turner, the poetry of Blanke and Milton, Roman Catholocisim, the Irish poets and writers, my father and uncle, 20 years in San Francisco, a year in South America, 60’s music, alcohol, and Billy Holiday."
Artist, Eileen Corse, is accomplished, both as an artist and as a businesswoman," Lesley Long, collector. Corse began following her passion for painting 11 years ago and has accumulated quite a following for her bright, flowing paintings. Painting impasto and alla prima, Corse's paintings are alive with movement. Her most recent series, Water, includes a grouping of paintings of people at the beach or pool.
Evident in each restless, vibrant composition is Donaldson’s strong sense of color and feeling for space and light, which is achieved by her fusion of crushed, powdered natural pigments with oil paint that are applied in a freely expressive manner. Using tools other than traditional brushes she attacks the surface of the canvas in a direct approach that is additive and subtractive—a process one may associate with sculpture as much as with painting. She lays down luscious, pliant marks across the surface, then scrapes areas of the composition back, then vigorously adds and scrapes again to achieve her goal. Hers range of expression comprises the appearance of timeworn erosion of an aging city to the seemingly endless atmospheric depth cloaking a horizon in a hazy light. Sometimes elements of graffiti appear, their looping letters cutting through the roughly layered surface like traces of humanity on aging city walls or an ecstatic cry to the heavens splitting the sky.
Donaldson has attained a signature style that embodies both a sense of immediacy and freshness. One of her favorite subjects is Florida, and the paintings of her home state seem to burst with joy and the bight light of a sparkling Atlantic morning. Then, there are those works cloaked in a more moody and intimate softness of an indefinable depth and locale, which, like much of Donaldson’s oeuvre, have an overall atmosphere that recalls European Romanticism and Impressionism.
A native of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, Amy Donaldson has participated in Art Basel Miami, Atlanta’s National Jurried Exhibitions, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, 6 x 6 Project New York. Her works are in numerous private and public collections. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
“Born into a Wyoming ranch family, I grew up with a deep regard for the natural world. For me the subtle nuances as well as the awesome power of nature's beauty, made the solitude of the isolated prairie sacred. While raising 3 children, I studied watercolor with Edgar Whitney, Frank Webb, Charles Reid and other nationally known watercolorists. In 1985 I returned to college and achieved BFA and MFA degrees in painting from the University of Wyoming. I was a college art instructor from 1990 to 2003 in Cheyenne, WY. And in 2003 I fulfilled a long-time dream when I moved to Taos, NM, to paint full-time. After 8 successful years in Taos, I am now in the Denver, CO area, painting and teaching workshops.”
Stephanie Shank is an abstract expressionist painter who exhibits with galleries throughout the U.S.A. Exposed to the world of painting while a young girl, she watched in fascination as her mother, an oil painter who studied with Max Beckman and Philip Guston, expressively applied vivid hues and bold brushstrokes to the canvas. From those closely observed sessions, the intense passion to paint took hold of her.
Born in the Midwest, she studied painting at Lindenwood College in St. Charles, Missouri and the University of Missouri in Kansas City where she received her B.F.A. in 1976. The following decade, she applied her creative talents practically through commercial art and window display design for department stores. Those years were also punctuated with independent studies with influential mentors and workshops. She relocated to the desert Southwest in 1987 where the stunningly clear light of her Arizona environs illuminates and informs the brilliant hues of her expressionistic paintings. Working in mixed media, largely acrylic, oil sticks, and charcoal, her artistic vision arrives at an imaginary and purely balanced world with every canvas. Her paintings have been featured in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the country and are included in many noted private and corporate collections. She is indebted to the Abstract Expressionist action painters, particularly Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline.
Iggy Sumnik is a multimedia artist working and living in Detroit, Michigan and Omaha, Nebraska.
Iggy creates ceramics, sculptures, prints, and more. His technique focuses on texture and balance, and includes an intricacy and depth that permeate his work. Sumnik’s art is aimed at provoking thought about the environmental impact of modern culture. Hand building identifiable objects, life size or larger, connects me to our culture and the natural world.
Manipulating these objects and ideas represents the human tendency to alter our environment. Through the use of pattern, bright color and familiar objects, the artist is able to connect with the past while documenting the present for the future.
Upon completion of a three-year apprenticeship at Jun Kaneko Studio in 2008, Sumnik has been maintaining his own studio, showing work, and teaching the art of ceramics to youth in both Omaha and Detroit.
In her paintings, Tracey Sylvester Harris presents a dazzling aqueous vision of California that merges the past with the present.
Harris began working with photographic source material as inspiration for her art in 2008. Anonymous snapshots found at flea markets, yard sales, and on the internet provide the diving board for her transformation of black and white memories into dazzling light and color. Her first one-person exhibition inspired by these found images was Lost Holiday at the Campton Gallery in New York in 2009. Following that, she experimented with imagery of women that was derived predominantly from films made in the forties and fifties. Those works depicted women mostly as torsos, or cropped stills. Harris titled that series, Noir, after the film genre. Suspended in time, they have been captured smoking, waking, sleeping, and sitting in contemplation. With the context of their actions removed, the women become mysterious. Dressed in swimsuits or lingerie, they are alluring not for their bodies, but the secrets they hold.
Harris states, “The exciting challenge is to keep the paintings relevant and current even though the subjects come from another era. To avoid sentimentality, I keep the compositions bold and cropped, the paintwork loose, drippy and rough, even pushing some areas into abstraction…”.
The paintings are colorful but bittersweet in their depictions of fleeting moments of summer captured almost a lifetime ago. The leisure time of the past in these paintings is an elegant era – one of stylish red swimsuits, flowered white caps, and scarlet lipstick. Looking closely at the paintings however, reveals Harris’s true theme.
In one painting, a woman in a red suit and white cap contemplates the ripples encircling her. Like all of Harris’s female swimmers, the woman betrays no sense of vulnerability. She is a master of moving through the metaphorical waters of life.
Harris dates her fascination with the subject of water, to childhood in Las Vegas where most of her summers were spent at the pool or on vacation to a lake or beach. If she wasn’t in the water, she was sitting close to it, watching swimmers, color, splashes, and patterns. She began drawing what she saw at an early age, choosing as one of her first subjects her own feet in the pool, distorted by the movement of rippling water.
Raised by two professional artists – her father was a commercial graphic artist and her mother was a popular impressionistic painter – Harris’s art career began at an early age. Harris’s parents moved to California when she was a teenager and opened an art gallery featuring her mother’s work. Far from being an “easy in,” Harris worked hard to create an artistic identity separate from her parents’, and to hone the quality of her paintings to earn an invitation to exhibit in the family gallery. Since that time Harris has been represented by galleries nationwide, exhibiting in group shows from San Francisco to New York City. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in New York, Santa Monica, Carmel and her hometown of San Luis Obispo.
The work of Tracey Sylvester Harris took an exciting twist earlier this year when her paintings were chosen to star in a film about the relationship between an artist, played by Ed Harris, and a widow, played by Annette Benning. Over twenty of Tracey’s paintings appear in the movie as artworks created by the character played by Ed Harris. Face of Love was released in March 2013.
Since leaving the corporate world to focus on his art full time ten years ago, the self taught Van Fossan has come to command some of the highest recognitions in realism. His 2012 painting, Magnum Opus, claimed the coveted Chairman's Choice Award in the 2012/2013 International Art Renewal Center Salon, as well as the Best of Show prize for the The Collection Beaux-Arts Réaliste International Competition (Montreal, Canada) in 2014. He is sought after by corporate and private collections worldwide and his work has been featured in American Art Collector, International Artist Magazine, Southwest Art, Western Art Collector, LUXE Magazine as well as other art and lifestyle publications.
"I paint because it is a language of beauty, a simple and instantaneous manner in which I can communicate my heart clearly. This is the only occupation that has made me truly happy and can bring happiness to others at the same time. I will never stop."
Van Fossan was born and raised in the ski town of Vail, Colorado. She went on to study Art and Art History at the University of Colorado, and spent her junior year living abroad in Florence, Italy. She studied under some of the best art historians and fine art professors of our time while traveling Europe and visiting countless master works; from Caravaggio and Giotto, to Michelangelo and Leonardo, to Monet and Degas. It was during this time that her love for art deepened more than ever.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art, Van Fossan spent the next 7-8 years working in galleries in Colorado and Arizona. She also completed a Masters of Arts degree in Education with a focus on Art Education. While in Arizona, Leigh Ann met her husband, internationally renowned figure painter, James Van Fossan. They spent their first few years together building James’ career, before having a daughter and moving back to the Vail Valley.
Now settled in their home studio, and with James’ painting career at full-speed, Leigh Ann has recently decided to revisit her own painting abilities, putting brush to canvas for the first time in nearly a decade.
“At first the idea of painting again was very daunting. But now that I’ve reacquainted myself with the practice, I find each painting to be an exhilarating experience, an adventure. I am always nervous, and sometimes frustrated, but overcoming challenges is truly one of the best parts about painting. Each successful piece is a unique accomplishment.”
