Author: Stefany Fisher

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Going Baroque? ‘Splendor and Passion’ coming to Boca art museum

The Boca Raton Museum of Art will hold the world premiere of the historic Spanish Baroque art exhibition, “Splendor and Passion: Baroque Spain and Its Empire,” beginning Nov. 7 and going through March 30. The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York City, which features a timeless collection of 57 Baroque masterpieces, evolving around 17th-century Europe.

What Is the Baroque Period and Why Did It Start?

Times were looking a bit gloomy after the High Renaissance period that lasted into the mid-16th century. The Mannerism style, between 1520 and 1600, was a reaction to the Renaissance’s idealized naturalism. People didn’t like it and wanted change. However, times grew turbulent, marked by significant political and religious upheaval after the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Baroque art originated in Rome and spread throughout Italy and other European countries, including France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, south Germany, and Poland. 

 Melchor Pérez Holguín, “Saint Peter of Alcántara and Saint Teresa”

Although the prior period was composed of harmonious, idealized, and balanced compositions, the new focus took to emotion in a dramatical sequence of exaggerated motion. It consisted of fine detail easily interpreted as a response to the Mannerist distortions and the idealizations that preceded it. 

A lot of political instability existed during the emergence of the Baroque period. Europe was rife with wars, revolutions, and power struggles. With these chaotic conditions, the artists of the time wanted the freedom to express themselves without the High Renaissance perfection constraints. Consequentially, much of Baroque art mirrored the dramatically dark themes. The gloominess of the times acted as an overture to the darkness compounding into the compositions of this new wave.

In Spain, the Baroque period was a time of great artistic achievement that reflected the country’s landscape, politically, socially, and religiously. The Catholic Church and the Spanish Inquisition held significant influence on the arts, intending to inspire devotion from the dismounted upheaval of rebellion. Many religious themes held to the period as the Catholic Church aimed to reassert its dominance.

Another factor moving the Baroque period was the advances into new scientific discoveries of the time, and in astronomy, that challenged existing worldviews. Artists expressed not only awe, but also the existential dread that these new discoveries provoked. 

Style, Depiction, and Symbols

The Baroque style’s dramaticism used intense light and shadow to express such strong emotions. Many works were elaborated with ostentatious decorations incorporated into the compositions. Spanish Baroque art, specifically, exercised visual realism with its realistic depictions of subjects often accommodated with somber or melancholic tones. 

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, “The Prodigal Son Among the Swine”

Similar to other preceding and proceeding art periods, symbolism is used to display the adequate tones of work, much like reading a story. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s “The Prodigal Son Among the Swine” shifted concepts but stayed within the message. Instead, Murillo captures the biblical tale of the Prodigal Son in a destitute manner and repenting nature, where the swine serve as a reminder of the consequences of his actions that hang over him.  

Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, “Don Martin de Leyva”

Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo’s portrait of Don Martin de Leyva, or the Count of Monza, is a flat emptiness with the exception of an elegant decoration oddly hanging in the background. It is a unique, yet ghostly minor detail with symbolic significance when accenting Mazo’s subject’s notable characteristics. The true focal point is the light on Leyva’s face and skin that contrasts with the dark attire of one’s military and noble background.

Earlier Works with High Vibrancy of Skill in Light of Characteristics

Style, depiction, and symbols continued: Anthonis Mor van Dashorst was a Netherlandish portrait painter in the 16th century. His “Portrait of a Man” defined the dignified presence of a man with high social standing through rigorous rendering of detail. The use of dramatic light contrasts to categorize the Baroque style. 

Anthonis Mor van Dashorst, “Portrait of a Man” 

The traditional Baroque landscape in technical detail creates the high visual realism that is captured in the artist’s skill of likeness and personality of his subject. Rather than the traditionally natural landscapes of preceded movements, Mor van Dashorst decorates the background by highlighting social symbolism, such as the woman in the portrait who was likely his wife. This helps to shape the power of social status by adding position through the use of emphasis, while drawing the eye of the viewer is also aiding in establishing the emotion brought forth to the focal point.

Sebastián Muñoz, “Maria Luisa of Orléans, Queen of Spain, lying in state”

Here’ye, Queen: The Queen of Spain’s funeral around 1689 brings the resilience of contrast for viewers to indulge in the darkness of emotional Baroque. Sebastián Muñoz, a Spanish painter of the time, splits timelessness into a paradox through the use of darkness and light between the symbolism of good and evil. The story of the composition surrounds the queen in her lying state as emotion pours from the good in light of its poignant context. The grandeur and solemnity of the event in an extracted demonstration of the Catholic Church is a timeless masterpiece with the care of detail. The detail is right down to the hierarchy of the queen’s earlier portrait hung high, as a time of honoring and remembrance. 

Fray Alonso López de Herrera, “Virgin of the Immaculate Conception”

Although Fray Alonso López de Herrara’s “Virgin of the Immaculate Conception” does not necessarily seem as dark and cohesive to the Baroque style as others, the sense of depth and volume combined with the interplay of light and shadow builds the emotional intensity that reflects the Counter-Reformation’s influence to reinforce Catholic doctrine. The swirling movement around the Virgin intensifies emotion with her as the focal point, evoking deep emotional responses through the flowing use of line of her garment. There is a sense of urgency within the realm of tranquility, contradictorily giving light to religion’s portions of belief.

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Refuge of strength, fragility at the Norton

The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach is exhibiting Donna Conlon, an American-Panamanian artist active in Panama, born in 1966. Her still of “From the Ashes (De las cenizas),” a 2019 video, endorses the hummingbird as her current statement toward invasive climate change.

Conlon’s exhibit is as silent as it is real. The exhibition is a two-minute, 57-second soliloquy of the smallest things as a big reminder for nature conservation. Hummingbirds, typically measuring 3–5 inches in length, include the smallest species of the bee hummingbird, just about 2 inches long and weighing less than 2 grams.

That’s small.

But don’t underestimate their size. They have the highest mass-specific metabolic rate of any homeothermic animal. Hummingbirds play a crucial role in maintaining the health and balance of ecosystems. Their co-evolvement with specific plant species makes them highly efficient pollinators, and their ability to travel long distances helps in the cross-pollination of plants promoting genetic diversity. However, habitat loss and range shifts are causing hummingbirds to lose a significant portion of their current range. Reduced nectar secretion due to climate change can reduce the volume and sugar content of nectar. This leads to a decrease in nectar production and means less food for pollinators, which also affects the hummingbirds’ survival and reproduction. Extreme heat can reduce their food intake and energy levels.

While there are around 366 species of hummingbird found in their native lands of the Americas, currently 21 of them are listed as endangered or critically endangered. Although many hummingbirds live from 3 to 5 years, some can live up to a decade or more in the wild. This further emphasizes the need for natural habitat conservation and pollution reduction.

Note that Conlon’s message is likely most relevant when attempting to solve the big problems by focusing on the little things.

Naturalism and Contemporary Conveyance of Reality

While Naturalism emerged in the 19th century as an attempt to resolve the idealized and stylized art between Neoclassicalism (also found at the Norton Museum) and Romanticism’s errors in realistic portrayals of the real world, the conveyance of reality cannot be more employed within a naturalist aspect to address the conservatory issues in contemporary lifestyles today.

Conlon’s statement is blatantly honest. While her work is a socio-archaeological investigation into her immediate environment and daily life, the intersection between these two fields offers valuable correlations between habitat and reality. Social archaeology explores how the social dimensions of human life are reflected in settlement patterns, for example, as Conlon’s artistic focus is on identifying and revealing their idiosyncrasies. Her conveyance is connected and contradicted by human nature inherited from today’s contemporary lifestyles. Settlement patterns, especially under climate change, are as revealing in nature as wildlife, and how their existence thereof underlines the contextual aspect of health stemming from the environment.

Idiosyncrasies: Behavioral Peculiarities, Distinctive Features, and Physical Reactions

In native tribes, the hummingbird represents life, love, beauty, joy, and freedom. This is likely due to its procession of autonomic compliance to these qualities and by adjacency to contemporary dynamic consistencies. Hummingbirds are sensitive to change, making them important indicators of environmental health.

Again, back to the little things, it is not to underestimate them by their size. Watching the muscle power and strength of the bird in Conlon’s slow-motion graphic stimulates the same power of structure and endurance that the strongest swimmer swimming the 800-meter butterfly encompasses. In real time, its wings are flapping as rapidly as up to 80 beats per second.

That’s fast.

Conlon captures this distinctive and peculiar feature in which its idiosyncrasy is a common-sense way of seeing it from a formal point of view about the resilience such small creatures possess. Their power to bestow is entangled with human nature: Different species of hummingbirds prefer different types of flowers, which helps maintain plant diversity of plant species in their habitats. For humans, this means nutrition and food security, medicinal resources, and ecosystem services—and helping climate regulation by plants alone.

Perhaps the hummingbirds’ vibrant colors construct the symbolic joy embodied in human nature. One cannot undermine the beauty of fragility and, in life, as a connotation of peace.

The Little Things—Ways to Conserve at Home

Planting native flowering plants that are as resilient to climate change as the bird’s unique qualities can help ensure a steady food supply for these pollinators. From a natural standpoint, you can attract these lovely neighbors to come and say hello during the day! Planting native flowering plants can also help to house a nest for the female, who is responsible for caring for her young. Lastly, the hummingbird can help in insect control to those pests that may, unwelcomingly, like to hang around.

Donna Conlon resides and works in Panamá City, Panamá. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Kansas (1991). She also has a master’s in fine arts from the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art (2002). Her work is represented by Diablo Rosso in Panamá and by Espacio Minimo in Madrid. For more information about Conlon and her work, go to www.donnaconlon.com.

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Sharon Shevell: a message from nature

Surrealism is certainly potent in the delicate works of Sharon Shevell. When I went to view them at the Parkland Library while on display until the end of August, I could not help but want to dissect them all. Each of them tells its own story, taking us back to the prevalence of nature and in tune with the realities of today. The works are  dynamic and certainly opposed to the discrepancy-specific environments that each composition entails. Here I explore each of Shevell’s acrylic intricacies and attempt to anatomize the message that she finds and portrays from nature.

“Hope on the Horizon” is an acrylic painting on canvas, with overtones of connotation, and diversions like puzzle pieces that surrealism supplies. The bodiless configuration of the female suggests that the rest of the self is in the background. The emotions are revealing of the water, and the consciousness within the sands. Her roots in the forefront seem to be a bid to cover the mystery that interestingly and inadvertently tells all by the irony of only her right eye being exposed. It is the eye that is the focal point that’s applying the symmetry, and by its subvertical alignment before the integral of vision displaces at the horizon.

Quite possibly, the clouds off the horizon could be analogous to electrical configurations of the subject, and the thought processes, posing at the overall conjuncture of the composition. In the topic of  “hope,” the message could very well be a substance applying the importance of self-awareness.

“Oy Vey” (a Yiddish phrase expressing dismay or exasperation). Well, it is often said we should avoid talking about politics; however, politics seems to be screaming at the reciprocal of this platform, and is quite detailed. The mood changes considerably in this composition and, moreover, toward its undertones that are held of voicelessness and in the context of politics that surround the topic. Instead, Shevell seems to articulate the protection and safeguarding of the nurturement of nature, embracing it as a mother would her child. All the while, the feminine subject is emphasized as still attempting to save her head. The chosen animals involved add to the visual dynamics of this piece. The work speaks its message quite transparently, as Shevell takes the viewer through the storm of its exquisite composition.

“Another Day Another Dollar.” Acrylic, paper, coffee filters, and styrofoam quite clearly deliver what this artwork speaks about, and three-dimensionally. Paradoxically, it is quite fun to look at, while maybe not the evidence that extracted from it likely was. More so, the experience hits the message on the button, becoming a question at hand: Is it all worth it?

“Victoria’s Lament.” This painting in acrylic on canvas is another work that Shevell uses as background to the theme of emotion from off the composition. Here, what an emotionless Victoria lacks in the expression of her face is the emotional journey spread of the sea in which she dwells. And as she grasps what past is entangled with roots, the message is exposed as a question: Is it the effort to reach what washed up on the shore, or is she letting go?

Shevell exposes the hypothetical nature of mythical reasoning to converse about choices, provoking thoughts about which can be claimed, and what came first and why. Too often in life there’s a threshold that forces one to give up one thing for something else. Perhaps this message is about nature’s natural procedural of balance.

“Cry” is an emotional painting of mixed media and acrylic on canvas that seems to be a transcendence from “Hope on the Horizon.” Undoubtedly beautiful, clearly the message portrayed here is about conservation: a very important one at that.

“Eye of the Storm” is acrylic and fabric on canvas that appears as a metaphorical sense of what weather does.  It gives a sense of how time and place both create the environmental stress, and how it functions both as the action and effect.   While a psychological fraction of its pressure costs is left to be freely interpreted, the transcendence of color is interestingly viable from the skies of “Oy Vey.” This three-dimensional concept brings its extraordinary essence of interpretative vision right in front of viewers to investigate for themselves.

“Garden Nymph Contemplating the Effects of Climate Change.” Shevell’s acrylic on canvas has a surrounding seven-piece set of 8-inch-by-8-inch small canvas picked by the theme of its subjects’ motivation. This painting emphasizes the prose of the composition while its muse blends into the delicate magic of care along its landscape. The conjunction of sea life and botany coheres with the abstract thought behind her, riveting color as a tool to emphasize the need for survival. The intensity of this work is honest and provokes emotion, as is seemingly needless for any visual input by its cause. Instead, this painting’s subject is from a perspective at the other side of it. Interestingly, no matter how colorful the composition is, it still leaves the viewer with a sense of emptiness: the irony entangled with the subject at hand.

“Cosmic Winds I & II” is acrylic on canvas, both pieces integrate pebbles into galaxies, expressing the stepping-stones toward the bigger picture. What a lovely path Shevell makes of it, and within the discrepancy that time decomposes, as color fills any negative space rhythmically imposed by the contrast of suggested wavelengths. Its mundane choice of compositional trajectory keeps the subject communicating along with the connectivity of it all. Very powerful.

Sharon Shevell is a New York-raised, local Floridian residing in Parkland who studied painting at the Boca Raton Museum Art School in the 1990s. Her works have been displayed around South Florida quite fluently, and they’re held in private collections between Canada and the U.S. For more information, visit www.sharonshevellart.com.

 

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Sharon Shivel: a message from nature

Surrealism is certainly potent in the delicate works of Sharon Shivel. When I went to view them at the Parkland Library while on display until the end of August, I could not help but want to dissect them all. Each of them tells its own story, taking us back to the prevalence of nature and in tune with the realities of today. The works are  dynamic and certainly opposed to the discrepancy-specific environments that each composition entails. Here I explore each of Shivel’s acrylic intricacies and attempt to anatomize the message that she finds and portrays from nature.

“Hope on the Horizon” is an acrylic painting on canvas, with overtones of connotation, and diversions like puzzle pieces that surrealism supplies. The bodiless configuration of the female suggests that the rest of the self is in the background. The emotions are revealing of the water, and the consciousness within the sands. Her roots in the forefront seem to be a bid to cover the mystery that interestingly and inadvertently tells all by the irony of only her right eye being exposed. It is the eye that is the focal point that’s applying the symmetry, and by its subvertical alignment before the integral of vision displaces at the horizon.

Quite possibly, the clouds off the horizon could be analogous to electrical configurations of the subject, and the thought processes, posing at the overall conjuncture of the composition. In the topic of  “hope,” the message could very well be a substance applying the importance of self-awareness.

“Oy Vey” (a Yiddish phrase expressing dismay or exasperation). Well, it is often said we should avoid talking about politics; however, politics seems to be screaming at the reciprocal of this platform, and is quite detailed. The mood changes considerably in this composition and, moreover, toward its undertones that are held of voicelessness and in the context of politics that surround the topic. Instead, Shivel seems to articulate the protection and safeguarding of the nurturement of nature, embracing it as a mother would her child. All the while, the feminine subject is emphasized as still attempting to save her head. The chosen animals involved add to the visual dynamics of this piece. The work speaks its message quite transparently, as Shivel takes the viewer through the storm of its exquisite composition.

“Another Day Another Dollar.” Acrylic, paper, coffee filters, and styrofoam quite clearly deliver what this artwork speaks about, and three-dimensionally. Paradoxically, it is quite fun to look at, while maybe not the evidence that extracted from it likely was. More so, the experience hits the message on the button, becoming a question at hand: Is it all worth it?

“Victoria’s Lament.” This painting in acrylic on canvas is another work that Shivel uses as background to the theme of emotion from off the composition. Here, what an emotionless Victoria lacks in the expression of her face is the emotional journey spread of the sea in which she dwells. And as she grasps what past is entangled with roots, the message is exposed as a question: Is it the effort to reach what washed up on the shore, or is she letting go?

Shivel exposes the hypothetical nature of mythical reasoning to converse about choices, provoking thoughts about which can be claimed, and what came first and why. Too often in life there’s a threshold that forces one to give up one thing for something else. Perhaps this message is about nature’s natural procedural of balance.

“Cry” is an emotional painting of mixed media and acrylic on canvas that seems to be a transcendence from “Hope on the Horizon.” Undoubtedly beautiful, clearly the message portrayed here is about conservation: a very important one at that.

“Eye of the Storm” is acrylic and fabric on canvas that appears as a metaphorical sense of what weather does.  It gives a sense of how time and place both create the environmental stress, and how it functions both as the action and effect.   While a psychological fraction of its pressure costs is left to be freely interpreted, the transcendence of color is interestingly viable from the skies of “Oy Vey.” This three-dimensional concept brings its extraordinary essence of interpretative vision right in front of viewers to investigate for themselves.

“Garden Nymph Contemplating the Effects of Climate Change.” Shivel’s acrylic on canvas has a surrounding seven-piece set of 8-inch-by-8-inch small canvas picked by the theme of its subjects’ motivation. This painting emphasizes the prose of the composition while its muse blends into the delicate magic of care along its landscape. The conjunction of sea life and botany coheres with the abstract thought behind her, riveting color as a tool to emphasize the need for survival. The intensity of this work is honest and provokes emotion, as is seemingly needless for any visual input by its cause. Instead, this painting’s subject is from a perspective at the other side of it. Interestingly, no matter how colorful the composition is, it still leaves the viewer with a sense of emptiness: the irony entangled with the subject at hand.

“Cosmic Winds I & II” is acrylic on canvas, both pieces integrate pebbles into galaxies, expressing the stepping-stones toward the bigger picture. What a lovely path Shivel makes of it, and within the discrepancy that time decomposes, as color fills any negative space rhythmically imposed by the contrast of suggested wavelengths. Its mundane choice of compositional trajectory keeps the subject communicating along with the connectivity of it all. Very powerful.

Sharon Shivel is a New York-raised, local Floridian residing in Parkland who studied painting at the Boca Raton Museum Art School in the 1990s. Her works have been displayed around South Florida quite fluently, and they’re held in private collections between Canada and the U.S. For more information, visit www.sharonshevellart.com.

 

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Scenes for summer: Nava Lundy

Adaptability. From the plasticity of an organism, to neuroplasticity of the human brain, to simply adapting to life, this quality engulfs us all.

Nava Lundy is no stranger to it. She has been painting all her life, and professionally since 1998. Lundy has transitioned from drawing from live models, and traveling with a sketchbook in her hands, to domestically taking memories from old photographs. While life changes, so do her strategies to make her art adapt. It is a mastery that has drawn her works of gold. Quite literally, actually.

Lundy’s canvas always begins already full. Her textured backgrounds build upon one another to create her “set.” Gold shines through her muses to highlight their beauty. It accents as a complementary emphasis in her compositions.

Lundy holds a certification in painting from the first art academy in America and a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania. She was taught in oils, but when she got pregnant with twins, her choice of medium changed to acrylics. “It was too dangerous,” she explained.

Either way, omnifying her art remains the offset to her strategies, and those who prefer oils may be fooled, if not take a double-take, when viewing her work.

This month we adapt to the summer with some of her refreshing themes.

Hats. The Studio E Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens seems to be selling several of Lundy’s hats this time of year. Why wouldn’t they? There is always a seeming mystery left to the viewer that entices wonder and imagination as to the subject. Who is behind the hat? Is that you?

There is an elegance and sophistication present in these themes that is suggested in her characters. “Escape” (2021), a 36-by-36 acrylic on canvas (sold), is one of them. It warms you up and cools you down at the same time. Who wouldn’t want to dip their feet in the water and sip on some pina coladas in the hot summer months ahead? Let’s hope to do so!

Her lively art demonstrates concepts with which the viewer can connect. It is something to appreciate. When asked what motivates her, the answer was quite a simple one:

Mood. It is a natural contributor to Lundy’s work. “Watermelon Sugar,” a 36-by-72 acrylic on canvas, is a lovely example of mood (title picture), especially this time of year.

Before 2021, Lundy may not have chosen to work with water’s ripples and reflections. She referred to it on social media as something that once was “daunting.”

However, it seems the mood got contagious, according to Lundy, as attempting the complexity of water compositions has brought joy to do them, and cooling off can be quite the observer’s delight!

For beach lovers, “Come Sit Beside Me” (2024), acrylic and mixed media on canvas (sold), brings a calming elation. Here distinctively are the vibrant accents of gold. The composition brings together the stubborn strokes of dissonance into a graceful escape.

Lundy’s work has been used in several set designs in films, is part of the permanent digital collection at the University of South Florida in partnership with the Florida Holocaust Museum, and is in the permanent collections of private collectors, universities, and museums around the world, including Australia, Canada, and Israel. More locally, Lundy has exhibited at the Fort Lauderdale airport. She is an internationally recognized artist right here in the local community.

To view some of Nava Lundy’s muses, her online gallery is at navagallery.com.

 

 

 

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Jennifer J.L. Jones: Piece in nature

“Echoes of Elysium” is the exhibition on display at New River Fine Art on Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale through April. Artist Jennifer J.L. Jones finds her employment in the abstract contemporary trends and transforms them into the botanical atmospheres that cohere to the observer’s metaphysical hemisphere of realistic conjuncture. The strategy is by the composites of layers, not by the disconformity of postmodern rejection, but the singular reluctance to recognize concentrations between values. The artistic empirical is apparent. In agriculture, the thumbnail would be up and the hands would be down. 

Jones was born in Virginia and was raised between there and the east coast of Florida. Currently settled in Port Royal, South Carolina, she holds a bachelor’s of fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago. 

In “Collections,” if you will, in free will, that employs the atmospheric abstracts into the altercations between hemispheres that lather by the waste sides of mere entropy is instead gorgeously assigned to her earlier works of “Hypnotic Starlings” (2016). Here, the division is in black and white, and the value is laid out indusively by color choice. The whites and blues drip, and the reds? A staged presence in a spacious spread of reasoning, and to the “Tejas,” mixed media on wood (2014), in the “Lacuna” series. 

To view the past collections, visit www.jenniferjljonesstudios.com/collectedworks.

Is this Euclidean geometry by color? “Odyssey,” currently on display at New River Fine Art, is a requiem. If one was to follow the leaves of green, the shape appears to heed the branch of mathematics that puts axioms and postulates in place on a flat space. The relationships of points are defined by color choices, at the angles intended, and beneath the fluidity, lining them up and into visual consonance.  

It shouldn’t go further than that, space, to distinguish the difference in hemispheres: one, the choice to avail dissonance into one’s solutions, or two, the opposite of where one must withdraw and appreciate the length of the objective segment itself. Jones shows her skills and artistic mastery in this light.

Distance is on the other side of it. This empirical nature goes only as far as it needs to go. It is witnessed that the closer one arrives to “Untitled,” the more abstract the artwork becomes. The potency of floral arrangements from a postmodern world extracts the work’s serenity as a schema, and in turn, dimensions are idealism. Dimensions are the elongated measures of the botanical muse to see what needs to be seen, and when it arrives. The disregarding sensuality of exposed synthetics demises what stem and into the true nature of a visual connection. What a very delicate balance that absurdity can bring! 

Still, are the flowers.

A mythological state of perfect happiness, where botany molds to the surface, is Jones’s earlier work from 2017, “Midnight for Butterflies I.” It may very well translate for some as a still life from 17th-century Dutch artistry. The change from stroke to the use of line is highly emphasized. It is a clear takeaway from traditional portraits with flowers in a vase—to, who needs a vase when you have colors to focus on? Jones takes the eerie darkness from the Baroque era and colors it lively.

Her change from 2017 to works on exhibition today is still a psychological sense of untiming. In “Cailleach” (2024), the black-and-white orthodox grows on the subject of butterflies, if at all intended, bringing shape to the subject, certainly by stroke. 

The means to the instance is of the goddess this art is named after, or “veiled one,” which is sparkled with gloss, clung to width by the blue of the skies. 

 

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Artist Marina Veen: Mirrors to the soul

“I get bored easily,” Marina Veen told me over tea and coffee and a lovely stroll together. A very independent, hard-working woman, Veen played a corporate role since her early 20s. During the Covid pandemic, she found the change she had been searching for.

This career adjustment fed something more important—her soul. “Two hours of meditation wasn’t enough,” Veen said. “It was time to reset.”

During her early years of taking art classes and drawing, Veen was confronted with bias technicalities in creating art—the type of technicalities that hold to rules, the type of technicalities that can hinge creative development, imagination, and heart. She found it void.

“I wished somebody would’ve told me that it was okay to reject technique,” Veen said. “I probably would’ve gone back to art much sooner if I had.” She instead held a conscious mindset toward life as she built it. In her search for something much deeper, it seems that it’s the rejection where she finds the connection to her motivation.

“If I see it is a tree, I am no longer interested,” Veen said. The intense colorism of the works by Henri Matisse in the early part of the 20th century is a good example of where her motivations belong. It is the type of connection that holds the equilibrium between mind and emotion to meet at the surface. It is the intangible reality we all silently attend to. How it is translated, or if it is clear, is something everyone experiences at one point or another. Yet it is here that Veen finds her answers by reflection. The canvas: a mirror.

Darkness to Light

Veen pulls the light from the shadows without manipulation. It is raw and undefined—until it isn’t. The light has been set, revealing the integrity and utter honesty of her focus. It is amid the darkness that one can view, in “Drift by My Windows,” recently displayed at the Parkland Library. Time predisposes beneath, where it is clear by the textures of depth nondiscriminatory. However, beneath all the textures are the stories untold.

Upside Down

Veen is a Ukrainian-American originally from Odesa, who spent much of her prime in the hustle and bustle of New York City. After moving to the California Bay Area with her family and for work, she thought she would never return to the East Coast. The artistic resilience of California held a spark. Yet, things happen. While moving to Seattle for her work with Amazon and Microsoft, and during the time of Covid, she saw the big picture.

“In Between” is an excellent example. If viewed from the opposite direction, one may see an unbloomed flower. Still are the layers on the canvas used to demonstrate perspective. Her impressively high originality cannot go unnoticed. The rejection of a still life is recreated in an entirely new definition of quality, and coincidently, it had been painted upside down. The fluidity of rhythms shines in the sheets of layers, and per the use of perspective, the story unravels, much like the rigid nature of corporate Seattle.

Lavender

The color certainly molds to the surface in characters offset of white. The character is within the color that would commonly be overlooked if not made aware of. Here the body holds much more than its weight. It is in echoes of colors beneath where the lavender-like blend developed unto its finish. During Veen’s weeks of working on this piece, “Echoed Through Me” is just one example of how her work undergoes a total metamorphosis of change—until it speaks fluently.

Methods and Media

Veen is inspired by the songs and poetry of Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, and Rainer Maria Rilke. One can feel the rhythmic fluidity that shows through to the surface of her pieces. It is a movement of poetry held in the textures beneath the surface of her media. Mixed media, acrylic, cold wax and oil, collage, stenciling, gelli plate printing, woodblock printing, and mark-making are just some of the resources used to create her compositions. Her method—addition and retraction.

Veen’s first group show was in September 2023 at the Macy Gallery at Columbia University in New York City. Last summer, she and her family settled in South Florida. There is high anticipation for more of her work still to come.

Today, Veen continues expanding her artistic communication of lost expression through her talent. Her work can be viewed at marinaveenstudio.com and on Instagram at marinaveenfineart.

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Harold Garde: 100% to just shy of 100

Who remembers the GI Bill? It was a range of benefits provided by the U.S. government for World War II veterans returning home after the war. Through it, Harold Garde received his initial art education at the University of Wyoming. Seven decades later, the artist’s education engages and challenges us in his works across the decades.

Garde, “the rebellious provocateur” as GrowingBolder.com has put it, was born in New York City in 1923 to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents. He joined the U.S. Air Force and served in the Philippines and World War II from 1943 to 1945. He was exposed to Abstract Expressionism during his educational years, which clung a bit to his early career.

Garde’s prolific art career began in the later generation of Abstract Expressionists during the 1950s and ’60s. Early influences of Surrealism and Figurative painting in his educational years also seem to have held a motif to his later work. As his career matured, he seemed to grasp an individual gestural abstraction into the figurative forms of art. His works withheld hints of influence driven by the period of Neo-Expressionists between the 1980s and ’90s.

In 1984, Garde and his wife moved to Belfast, Maine, where many of his earlier works are represented. Garde was able to find his place as an artist in Belfast, where he remained an influential contemporary American artist making his mark on the world. In 1993, it was on to New Smyrna, where he then split time between Maine and his Florida home. Garde died Oct. 11, 2022, in Florida, just shy of 100 years old.

Garde invented Strappo printmaking in the mid-1980s as Neo-Expressionists were busy affecting conceptual and minimal art with their intense subjectivity. He developed this technique by combining printmaking and painting as an artistic ambivalence of originality worth mentioning. It is a transference of acrylic paint layers from smooth surfaces, such as glass, onto paper. The technique gives a reversal image of the layered medium, and a “Strappo Monotype.” His famous 2005 “Self-Portrait,” not at all shy by use of line, was acrylic Strappo mounted on paper. Garde taught his technique in workshops nationwide.

Garde challenges us to look back to the post-war movement in a new depth of today’s reality. His work transcends generations; to view it is to feel the past as an offset to emotional provocation. In the art industry, it is well identified that successful art is a work that provokes emotion, or which provokes a distinctive reaction. It is a work that defends itself while connecting points of view within the psychological stratosphere of others. It is a movement with time, as Garde proves to us, in shadows of color and thick use of strokes.

For example, “Nude Woman 2” is a geometrical offset between spatial relationships, and it is fortified with contrasts of color. It can be a reminder of the short-lived Fauvism even before his time. In one way, Nude Woman 2 appears to be divided into four separate sections. When we look deeper, the form absorbs its colorful depth, and into a minimized picture as a whole. It is then a man hiding behind the door where Nude Woman 2 is, and here we can see the desperate yearning for his helpless passions. These passions are further emphasized on the door that his back is against, where thought-provoking consciousness holds to his ear. Then we have a still life that decorates the room. What better color to use to paint a flower and what the flower sits in? The geometrical usage surpasses cleverness; it is where we see emotion as Garde shares it with us. It is the emotion that brings the painting to life.

Garde composes the figurative landscape into a two-dimensional acrylic on canvas in “Lady with a Cape” (2005). The passivity is here and is to be revealed within the autonomy of his subject, as Garde seemingly avoids any further depth away from her arm. The flattened background seems less important than the figure, and yet somehow a part of her, while the colors are geometrically atoned to emotion. Here, he develops a synchronicity of it that is held by her expression.

“Harold Garde at 100: The Unseen Works in Two Acts” features 100 never-before-exhibited artworks. This exhibition will unfold over the course of 2024, with selected paintings and works on paper from Maine, New York, and Florida. These works highlight the continuity of Garde’s clear vision and his unwavering symbolic hierarchy across decades.

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