A: I’m an Artist, Mentor, and Award-Winning Film Producer. I’m primarily focusing on street art based in Palm Springs, California. I partnered with the Palm Springs Public Arts Commission where we started a test pilot project for public art with the street bench program last year that was approved by the city. This program has now expanded around the entire city including the Palm Springs International Airport, City Hall, and the Convention Center. We were able to hire over 50 artists during the pandemic to help stimulate the local economy as well as uplift the morale and spirit of the community.

Q: What is your background?

A: I have always been artistic since I was a small child growing up in New Jersey. I really discovered my art style as a teenager, airbrushing and painting on jeans for classmates and kids that lived in my neighborhood. I started making logos for local businesses. My parents encouraged me to pursue my art and creativity, which built confidence in me. As I started to develop my craft, I received more opportunities, which led me to where I am today.

Q: How do you work?

A: I love to create. I get lost in my work where I lose all space and time. My artwork is a reflection of my desire to share my talent and gifts with the world. I can only genuinely create from my own inspiration. My mission is to produce artwork that can be admired by generations to come.

Q: What art do you most identify with?

A: I identify most with street art, contemporary art, modern art, and fine art. I am a gallery artist but most of my work consists of public artwork and wall mural projects. 

Q: What has been your favorite experience so far as an artist?

A: Mentoring is one of the highlights of my career. Spending time with my students through Zoom has its challenges, but we are able to impact these young artists in an effective way. Actually, it has made us grow closer as a group. I learn so much from these amazing students and also discover things about myself as well, so when we are able to meet again in person, it will be an extraordinary and important bonding moment. 

Q: Who inspires you?

A: I’m inspired by the works of famous street artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Andy Warhol. My inspiration also comes from the styles of Pablo Picasso. 

Q: What is the best advice you have received?

Q: How has your career as an artist shifted during the past year?

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Amy Shekhter | Studio Jackie

Amy Shekhter is a pop artist inspired by iconic figures of the past and her love of today’s fashion. She uses a creative mix of mediums, combining digital design with various layers of texture found from resin, crystals, glitter, and paint. By putting a modern spin on familiar imagery, Shekhter’s pop art not only introduces younger generations to these important icons but also touches on materialism and values in today’s culture.

Shop Amy Shekhter > https://redwoodartgroup.com/brands/amy-shekhter/

Clare O’Neill 

Each piece of Clare O’Neill’s work is beautifully created with intent—each with its own story to tell. Working in mixed media, O’Neill combines her photographs with pigments, wax, and oils, adding a sense of mystery and intrigue to her contemporary photo encaustic paintings. O’Neill uses rich imagery, bold brush strokes, and playful drips to create paintings full of gesture, spontaneity, and motion. It’s a labor-intensive process where the photographs are printed on tissue paper in multiple pieces and then carefully embedded into layers of hot beeswax. The result is a stunning, modern, ethereal design with a warm textural appeal.

Shop Clare O’Neill > https://redwoodartgroup.com/store/ClareONeill/

Diana Vurnbrand | Contemporary Art Projects USA

With prestigious degrees from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and the New England School of Photography in Boston, Diana Vurnbrand is inspired by 15th-century paintings to create powerful yet romantic portraits of women. She creates models of romantic rooms, then photographs the image as the last step of her artistic process. The real work takes place in the construction of the elaborate headdresses and painted backgrounds, fabricating an atmosphere of mystery and romance and developing an interaction and statement between mother nature and strong beautiful women.

Shop Diana Vurnbrand > https://redwoodartgroup.com/brands/diana-vurnbrand/

Diego Guti | Studio Jackie

Award-winning artist Diego Guti was born in Colombia and achieved academic success at both the Miami International University of Art and Design and the University of Antioquia. Interested in creating artistic works aimed at the intervention of social problems, Guti work predominantly features urban aesthetics and themes. With clear reflections about life on the streets and mass consumerism, Guti approaches the individuality of the human being from the perspective of the daily differences of each side of the social gap. From this, he draws his inspiration.

Shop Diego Guti > https://redwoodartgroup.com/brands/diego-guti/

Dmitry Syrov | Syrov Art 

Born in Russia, Dmitry Syrov studied geology and geography after high school but found that this was not his path in life. By 25, he had totally dedicated his efforts towards his beloved craft of art. Syrov believes in the freedom of art. His paintings are sensual, passionate poetry, locked away on a canvas. Embracing the mood of the painter, viewers are forced to live, dream, and become unbounded by their imagination. The search for balance and harmony on the canvas becomes self-evident in both his impressionism and abstract paintings. Syrov is an artist unwilling to let the negative products of civilization hold him back, believing that it is better to love the world around him than to live in the tension of hating it. Rather than scare or shock or reflect the reality of today, it is better to move on into eternity, fantasizing, pleasing, and realizing people’s dreams. No character is needed: His reality is on the canvas. He creates without system or rules, letting the atmosphere of the painting speak. 

Shop Dmitry Syrov > https://redwoodartgroup.com/store/syrov-art-inc/ 

Jacinthe Rivard | Studio Jackie

Jacinthe Rivard lives in a little town just outside Montreal, Canada. For years, she had been painting portraits. Then, one day in 2017, she painted a six-pack of Coca-Cola. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so she started painting more objects from her youth. She realized that a vintage telephone could bring a range of emotions—like that first love, sitting by that phone waiting for them to call. A water gun can bring back memories of younger days playing in the yard on a hot summer day. She also loves to paint food items. Food makes people happy, and that is what her art is all about. Rivard paints in oil from photographs she takes herself. She can spend hours behind her camera, trying to make water droplets stay on a Perrier bottle or to make three donuts balance on top of one another. When you see her paintings, they look like a photo until you take a closer look. Then the brushstrokes and all the texture are revealed. It’s hard not to touch them and “feel” the painting. Today, she is internationally recognized, awarded, and collected. 

Shop Jacinthe Rivard > https://redwoodartgroup.com/brands/jacinthe-rivard/

Jackie Fuchs | Studio Jackie

Strewn with waggish details of high society, the collages and dog sculptures that spring from the imagination of Jackie Fuchs invite the viewer, with a series of visual winks, to momentarily delight in the absurdity and artifice of the blue-chip contemporary art world.  Everyone knows what she is referencing. Her scenes are glamorous but, somehow, not entirely fun—like a fancy party you would go to just to snoop through the big house. The figures, too, seem to occupy the space as art objects. Fuchs’ images, if taken seriously, offer a kind of Hirstian dystopia of the contemporary art community. Hers is an all-too-familiar world in which art is, like an Hermés bag, a symbol of wealth, status, and a certain kind of cultural literacy—something to be hung above a mid-century lamp, gazed from behind Chanel sunglasses, and Instagrammed. Her work is definitely recognizable and relatable and collected.

Shop Jackie Fuchs > https://redwoodartgroup.com/store/studiojackie/

Janet Bothne 

Mixed media artist Janet Bothne has been “weaving” with paint for over three decades. Although her focus shifts from time to time, her signature of vibrant color remains. Bothne has been passionate about the power of color throughout her life. “I see color akin to music,” she says. “It’s no coincidence they both can be described in terms such as soft, loud, or bright—they have keys and tones. To put it simply, music is color for the ears, and color is music for the eyes.” Her work has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums across the U.S., and her collectors span the globe. She currently resides in New Mexico and works out of her studio in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.

Shop Janet Bothne > https://redwoodartgroup.com/store/janetbothne/

Luis Kaiulani | Contemporary Art Projects USA

Growing up as a child in Hawaii, Luis Kaiulani describes his influence as a mixture of culture, nature, geography, and philosophy. His upbringing involved absorbing all of the wonders of the Hawaiian forests, playing in the sands on secluded beaches, meditating on mountaintops, and diving into one of the world’s most amazing bodies of water, the Pacific Ocean. Although he credits his affinity toward nature to this idyllic time, there is another side of Kaiulani that is fiery, passionate, and aching for excitement. He attributes this to his Latin American heritage. For the past 20 years, Kaiulani’s attention to fluidity, mindfulness, and color dimension brings his artworks into a realm all of their own. Kaiulani creates abstract works that draw from his Hawaiian and Venezuelan backgrounds and are expressed via his sculptures, paintings, and art objects. For the onlooker, his work simultaneously feels strong and imaginary, much like the archipelago he hails from. His focus on color brings to life his work’s objective. “My art is a metaphor for nature’s constant quest for growth through learning, experience, and contribution,” he says. And this objective is made evident when one looks at the color and rhythm his works exude. Kaiulani’s amazing sculptures are each a testimony to his life force.

Shop Luis Kaiulani > https://redwoodartgroup.com/brands/luis-kaiulani/

Maddi Ring

As a self-taught photographer, Maddi Ring has traveled extensively to over 80 countries, exploring remote parts of the world and seeking out unusual images of people, still life, landscape, and architecture. Her focus is often on remote areas, though there are more popular travel destinations, including her home city of New York, in her collection. She uses both color and monochromatic tonal ranges to reproduce the scene and set the mood. Then, working in an image transfer process, she creates a completely different watercolor effect. She also uses digital manipulation on select images to produce tinted black-and-white images as well as fanciful color abstracts.

Shop Maddi Ring > https://redwoodartgroup.com/store/maddiringphoto/

Rose Masterpol | Studio Jackie

Rose Masterpol’s work emphasizes multilayered systems of abstraction within time and space. All of Masterpol’s paintings have a geometrical component as well as an emotional relationship and meaning. The paintings are either from the gestural action painting part of her career (energetic, chaotic, free form) or the newer body of works that are narratives of the “language of shape.” Masterpol’s newer collection is called “The Geometrix,” representing a shift and departure from her previous more gestural work but containing residual remnant style, shape, thought, and emotion from the prior works. She designs them digitally and then draws the shapes on canvas. Then the painting begins. Masterpol has been a graphic designer for over 25 years. Today, the two mediums are a collaboration—a marriage of the digital virtual world into a two-dimensional surface world. The imagery comes from the choreography of melding organic shapes that embody and influence a formal relationship among structure, form, movement, tension, transparency, hierarchy, flotation, and emotion. Her works are literally a ligature between contemporary art and mid-20th-century design.

Shop Rose Masterpol > https://redwoodartgroup.com/brands/rose-masterpol/

Stefanie Demas 

Born in Brooklyn before it was cool, Stefanie Demas is a self-taught—and still Brooklyn-based—artist. Endlessly inspired by wildlife, she uses ink, oils, and watercolor to paint portraits of endangered species. Her work depicts the powerful beauty of these animals while also reminding us of their precarious and possibly fleeting existence. She strives to raise awareness of the climate crisis and resulting in mass extinction through her art. A portion of all proceeds is donated to wildlife conservation charities.

Shop Stefanie Demas > https://redwoodartgroup.com/store/sdemas/

Tysen Knight | Studio Jackie

American street artist Tysen Knight grew up during the peak of the street art movement and has been inspired by the works of famous street artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Knight’s art style also reflects the styles of fine artist Pablo Picasso and pop artist Andy Warhol. He uses these influences to create unique pop culture graffiti pieces that can not only be found on city murals but also in fine art galleries. His work transitions between two worlds, fine art meshed with street art and graffiti all coming together to help him cultivate his style. He has created something new that captivates people from all walks of life. 

Shop Tysen Knight > https://redwoodartgroup.com/brands/tysen-knight/

Joseph R. Locke | JRL Artistry 

JRL Artistry is Joseph Locke’s photography studio based in Brooklyn. He specializes in transforming original photography into unique works of art. Locke believes there are no boundaries on how one’s view of photography can be shaped. Art can expand, evolve, and inspire. Therefore, there’s one element woven into the fabric of what he creates and that’s quality. Quality from the angle of perception to the equipment used to capture the vision to the material images are printed on to remarkable imagery that will wow collectors. In short, Locke believes quality is his art.   

Shop JRL Artistry > https://redwoodartgroup.com/store/jrlartistry/

The post Redwood Art Group Spotlight Artists – June 2020 appeared first on Art Business News.

Eco-grief and Artivism: Both are new terms to me, but they’re beginning to define my life in Australia. As a wildlife artist and animal lover, I’ve been so deeply affected by the devastating bushfires that it’s been hard for me to focus on anything else.

Every day, I pour my heart into my art. In my Extinction Series, I’ve been painting the landscapes and wildlife incinerated by the flames: koalas, kangaroos, cockatoos, platypus, wombats, and wallabies; iconic Australian species, some endangered and even facing extinction.

‘The Long Sleep,’ ‘Goodnight, Koala’ and the other artworks shown in this article are part of my Extinction Series. The Northern Koala, shown sleeping here in these two works as fire approaches, was already endangered before this year’s catastrophic bushfires and its survival as a species is in doubt.

My response to the tragic loss of over a billion animals in this season’s fires has been one of overwhelming heartbreak. I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve cried endless tears of grief. I’ve been trying to channel these feelings into my art practice, trying to turn traumatic personal experience into a call for climate action. What I’m doing can be described as raw artivism: creating art in the heat of the moment; emotional art to soothe my broken heart; political art to push for change.

It gives me a temporary escape from grim reality. The technique I use is called ‘encaustic’ or ‘hot wax painting’ — an ancient Egyptian art form that involves burning layer upon layer of melted beeswax and raw pigments into wooden panels. Because (ironically) I’m using fire in the process, it demands my full attention. Even a tiny error, such as holding the flame above the substrate for a second too long can wreck an entire week’s work, which, as you can imagine, helps me focus.

‘Fire in Our Skies’ Encaustic Original (Triptych), January 2020

But the meditative effect of my paintbrush and torch is always short-lived. With each new report of suffering and loss, my head pounds, my heart races and my throat constricts. It’s partly grief, I realize, and partly fear. It might also be a physical reaction to the toxic smoke that blanketed us for weeks, day and night, indoors and out.

It’s also rage.

It’s all I can do not to scream at the limp response to the bushfires from our political leaders in Canberra. “Don’t overreact,” they say. “Bushfires are part of Aussie life,” they say. “Stop being so emotional!” Then they turn around and give the green light for another coal mine, while warning us – including those who’ve lost everything in the fires – not to listen to “reckless” climate activists.

How can anyone witness the Morrison government’s blinkered, blundering response to the climate crisis and not feel anger and rage?

Political frustration isn’t new to me, I must admit. I’ve spent my career working to curb the spread of nuclear weapons, and I’ve seen policies being implemented that are dangerous and delusional. I pinch myself every time I hear politicians and officials (including here in Australia) espousing the security benefits of these horrific weapons. We now know that only luck saved us from nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War, which makes today’s nuclear brinkmanship even more terrifying – proof that humanity sometimes dresses up heartless, selfish, and self-destructive decisions in the language of rational action.

It’s hard to ignore the parallels in our failure to address the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change. As a scholar and writer who studies and critiques nuclear policy decisions — decisions that are sometimes based on narrow self-interest, lack of knowledge, and a failure of empathy, vision and courage — I know how important it is to speak out. And as I’ve done this, I’ve begun to regard rage as a positive emotion, despite my training as a dispassionate academic. Why? Because without personal rage, individuals won’t be spurred into action. Until masses of enraged individuals come together to peacefully express their joint rage, governments will continue to downplay the science on climate change and feed the world’s irresponsible addiction to fossil fuels.  In other words, without rage, political leaders won’t be held accountable for what amounts to criminal negligence.

‘The Scorching Skies Above Us’, Encaustic Original (Triptych), December 2019

My own rage is mounting daily. I can barely contain it. When it gets intense, my therapy is to pick up my paintbrush and mix another palette of fire-toned oils. I want as many people as possible to see the art that myself and other Australian artists are creating, partly because our profits are being donated to help wildlife injured in the fires, and because I want people everywhere to connect with our art on an emotional level, focus on the urgent need for change, and act on it. I want people to cry over our disappearing wildlife. I want people to rage over our fire-ravaged land. I want people to join the movement and stop sleepwalking into climate catastrophe; to realize what’s happening here will affect everyone’s future, not just Australia’s.

‘The Rescue’ and ‘The Scorching Skies Above US’ (detail)

Dr. Tanya Ogilvie-White is a senior fellow at Australian National University, adjunct senior fellow at Griffith University, board member of the New Zealand Centre for Global Studies, and founder of Scorching Skies Art.  To contact her about this article, please email tanya@scorchingskiesart.com or call her at +61 466 465835. You can make direct contributions to wildlife rescue and rehabilitation via WIRES, WWF, Birdlife, RSPCA, National Parks Association, Humane Society International, The Wilderness Society, Nature Conservation Council, Animal Welfare League and IFAW.

Meet Dr. Ogilvie-White at Art Santa Fe 2020 and see her amazing art. Read more about the artist at https://www.scorchingskiesart.com/

The post Painting Australia’s Bushfires: Eco-Grief & Artivism appeared first on Art Business News.