Bloom

November 4 ~ December 12th, 2017

Artists:

Emily Thompson
As fine artist she has been recognized both regionally and nationally for her paintings. Her work is about the beauty of design, atmosphere, mood, color, the application of paint and texture. She is influenced by the landscape both rural and urban. She has exhibited at The Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Sketch Club, The Trenton City Museum, The Monmouth Museum and other venues in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and California. Her work is part of private collections throughout the U.S. Emily and her husband, fine artist George Thompson live and work in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Inga Kimberly Brown
“My recent works are oil paintings on sewn canvas panels and unsewn canvases on which a hybridization takes place through the implementation of three-dimensional objects that are either sewn on or attached with adhesive, threads, and paint, along with organic materials such as eggshells and holy water. I combine seed beads, faux grass, and 24-karat gold leaf, as well as oil on wooden extensions of the canvas. The work shows elements of ritual and tradition.

For inspiration, I use family photographs as well as non-photographic references from my imagination and intuition to paint what my mind sees and wants to convey in the painting. The focus is an abstract dialogue with my mixed tri-racial heritage, taking place in the antebellum and postbellum South as filtered through my mind and vision. In some of the paintings, I subtract color to add a past, or create mythical visions of a bastardized culture, juxtaposed with the saturated color of the present. The compositions explore conflict and isolation, while sharing narratives of the African-American, European-American, and Indigenous American heritage I embody. The hybridization of the materials in the work becomes autobiographic.” ~ I. Brown

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, painter Inga Kimberly Brown received her BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and is currently working on a MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Jared Flaming is a visual artist living and working in New York City. He attended the University of Oklahoma where he received a BFA and the University of Kansas where he received an MFA. He has spoken and exhibited at multiple universities and has been featured in several publications including Juxtapoz. Jared has shown both domestically and internationally including a 2008 collaborative exhibition in Reykjavik, Iceland titled “The Princes of Royal Blood.”

Flaming’s body of paintings involves placing both significant and banal images in an indeterminate space which, rather than offering up a coherent predominant interpretation, allows for a proliferating chain of meaning. Art historical touchstones mingle with nondescript kitsch motifs in a reciprocal undermining of identities. Oversized wet paint strokes are deceptively rendered in a flat illusionistic manner that toys with perceptions of origins and authenticity. Quick digital mark making is counter intuitively recreated tediously by hand. The result is a hall of mirrors where nothing seems definitive and precepts are suspect.

Martin Landau
“Most anything is worth contemplating. Even a cardboard box.
Art should concern itself with beauty, otherwise it’s research.
The more there is of something the less value it holds.
I’m looking for something.”~ M. Landau

George Melton 

In his work, George Melton attempts to capture the tension between past, present and future, myth and reality, the indifferent and the engaged, the familiar and the unknown. All these elements compete for space in a paradoxical way as frozen glimpses of non-existing time. They represent a system of beliefs that contributes to our evolution or keeps us trapped in the pa

In his attempt to challenge such belief systems and illustrate how extreme certainty in these systems is devastating to our evolution, he invents whimsical creatures and sometimes combine them with universally recognizable fictional and mythological characters in order to create a surreal narrative. “As children, we are encouraged to believe in irrational characters such as the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and the Devil.  As adults, our beliefs become more sophisticated, complex and dangerous.”George’s current works are acrylics and oil paintings on canvas or board. His inspirations come from artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Henri Rousseau, Frida Kahlo, Mark Ryden, Todd Schorr, Arthur C Clark, Stanley Kubrick, to name a few.George was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1954. He received a bachelor degree in art from Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey in 1979, where he studied abstract painting, conceptual art and minimalism.

Robert Preston
A Lynn Massachusetts native, Robert Preston focusses his artwork on pastel and oil painting. Preston studied in Chicago at the Art Institute and then in Boston at the Boston Architectural college. Currently Robert Preston is living and creating controversial pieces in New York City.
Art is my way of exploring the world. I carry a deck of Tarot cards I got when I was 13 and they have always been a mysterious but unexplored presence in my life. The Tarot deals with arch-types so I thought it would be fun to plug in pop stars and celebrities as these are the modern American arch-types and see what happens.
My original Tarot deck is the seminal archetypal one – the one designed by Arthur Waite and illustrated by Pamela Coleman Smith in 1911. I used Arthur Waite’s instructions as the basis for my paintings. Since I began this project I began to take the subject more seriously. I began working with a young scholar in Brooklyn named Stuart Südekum who teaches a class on the Tarot based on the work of Arthur Waite. This has been a mind-blowing experience as there is nothing arbitrary about any of the imagery in these cards. It is a deep and fascinating subject – one I will to continue to explore.

Chris Guest is a London based Artist. He creates paintings in a classic figurative tradition, coupled with a contemporary twist, utilizing classical drawing and oil painting techniques, learnt at London Fine Arts in Battersea.  He began painting and drawing from a very young age, and first started making money from art aged just 14, drawing portraits of music icons for other pupils at school. At age 18, Chris began showing his work in galleries in Cornwall, and has since exhibited extensively throughout the UK and the US.His originals and prints are collected worldwide, and his art has been featured in many magazines, publications and galleries around the globe.Chris also holds regular painting workshops around the UK and US.

Victor Grasso
“A female body surrounded by the ocean helms each piece. Adorned by the presence of looming, lurking creatures that inhabit the deep, a coastal landscape provides an environment where the work connotes the offset of reality by the quirky improbabilities brought to life through precise realism. By utilizing friends as models, the pieces exude an undercurrent of innocence. Call it an uncanny engagement with a highly personal moment, captured in oil.~ V. Grasso
Victor Grasso is a self-taught artist from Cape May, NJ.

Victor’s works grab your mind, sprit, senses and childhood simultaneously and immediately. It’s all of Jules Verne, Tim Burton and Lucian Freud at once. It’s dark and its whimsy. It’s sensual and childlike. Andrew Wyeth with fisherman’s muscles. It’s a jocular and hallowed family. Fusion is a word that comes to mind. It’s based in reality but vivid with alternate universes suffused with reverence for the body. There is juxtaposition of the beauty and noir that inhabit recesses of our minds, and never see the light of day until Grasso puts it on canvas. Objects, people, events, contexts that should not exist together nor imagined to our eyes are evident on the screen of Victor’s mind duplicated in oils. He rediscovers the ochre, blacks and whites of the past and reimagines the future. Triptychs, deserts, deep sea creatures are all found not in their neighborhood nor habitat. It’s as if Spielberg found Mallarme. Fellini found Tim Burton may be more apt. Gorgeous women, tentacles, business suits and archaic deep sea helmets with apparatus that find their way comfortably into his canvasses. Oceans, skulls, bathtubs, crocodiles and bikinis – fully sensible and natural in Grasso’s world. Panoramas, wind blown skeletonized trees; seascapes, octopi and bald men. Kitchens filled with zoo creatures and creatures of the deep. His models are the village and family – never more flattering or at risk, and bravely exposed. A ride with Grasso is a ride in the hidden areas that inhabit our unconscious, and remain repressed and denied until so provocatively exposed as natural world order in his art. It is both our fear and our lust. It is fulfillingly appealing, while revealing our most hidden secrets now well exposed – seemingly as natural as Disney – gone Louvre.

Valerio D’Ospina
The series of the Blurred Icons is not only a tribute or homage to the great masters and masterpieces of the past, but also a parenthesis in the artist’s production, in which are enclosed memories of what has been relevant to the formation of the artist self.
Memories are often blurred imagery, where the overall is recognizable, familiar while the details remain unfocused.
‘Blurred Icons’ Is intended to be an autobiographical series of paintings that represents the farthest phase, back in time, of D’Ospina’s artistic life, his artistic roots, the European roots.
Whereas many rock or pop musicians sometimes also cover songs of other musicians they relate to, they admire and respect, or just for the fun of it, reinterpreting those songs with their own sound, painters also often replicate other masters’ paintings with their own style. 

James Doherty is a contemporary figurative painter. Living in Lawrenceville NJ with his wife and two boys in a 1920’s Center hall colonial that is also the location of his studio where he paints just about every day. James believes that a painting should look like it has been painted and not like a photograph. You should see each brush stroke, each drip of paint, and each layer of color. He often leaves the bottom of his paintings unfinished so you can see the process. His favorite painters are Gainsborough, Sargent, and Degas.