Van Gogh's Freedom, Erma Swartz

Insectia, Madison Sankovitz

Night Plain, Heather Hanson

Nowhere and Everywhere, Analise Iwanski

II Mammatus II, Patrick M. Wine

Untitled, Ali Cowel

Exhale with the Seasons, Ali Cowel

Desert Moonrise, Marisa Merola

The Blues, Omar Kaheel

Lost Pieces, Haley Takahashi

Untitled, Marissa Marino

Emerging, Self-Portrait, Maddie Camilli

Sanctuary, Maddie Camilli

 

Van Gogh's Freedom, Erma Swartz

Van Gogh's Freedom

Artist Statement:  The masterpiece is in the motion. There is no image without the movement behind the stroke of paint. When I paint, my process overcomes my entire body. It is not so much an image-based practice, but a playful dance that occurs between my fingers, the canvas and the paint. The way the colors and textures work together to create something pleasant for the eye is the product of a long ballet that is rarely ever planned, yet somehow releases something emotional, truthful and colorful onto a canvas. This work specifically has been the result of a slow progression into abstraction that began almost ten years ago. Within each piece, the viewer can feel only what they themselves project upon the work. It is my hope that all that can be seen of myself is the movement.

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Insectia, Madison Sankovitz

Insectia

Artist Statement:  Examining the natural world is invigorating and fascinating. Through collecting and pinning insects I am able to appreciate their beauty and intricacies. I collected these insects from sites throughout Colorado, and I think they represent the natural diversity of the state. Now that they are pinned, the insects will be preserved long past my lifespan. The collection is a way of creating timeless art and scientific specimens. This project combined my love of ecology and crafting art with my hands, and allowed me to recognize the small but mighty animals for their detail and uniqueness.

Materials:  Insects/Photography

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Night Plain, Heather Hanson

Night Plain

Artist Statement:  In Night Plain, the dark fields and the reflection of a passing semi’s headlamps across lonely utility lines communicates the alienation, freedom, and vastness a night crossing provides.

Materials:  Stone Lithograph, Edition of 5

Dimensions:  11" x 15"

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Nowhere and Everywhere, Analise Iwanski

Nowhere and Everywhere

Artist Statement:  This painting is based on a photograph I took on a backpacking trip at James Peak, and though we were in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, being immersed in that kind of beauty made me feel more like I was everywhere I could ever dream to be.

Digital Painting

Dimensions: 56" x 42"

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II Mammatus II, Patrick M. Wine

Mammatus

Artist Statement: Mammatus clousds boil over the Oklahoma countryside as a spring thunderstorm rolls in. As the clouds flow like waves in the ocean, a bold of lightening illuminates the sky above the clouds, tinting the storm a newon blue. The beauty of these structures is something no photograph can accurately relay. 

There are several hypotheses about the cause of these amazing formations; however, they generally correlate to specific storm systems and don't extend to all types of mammatus clouds. Nevertheless, based on personal observation, I would feel confident in the hypothesis stating these formations are caused by extreme convective ocerturning in powerful supercells with anvil tops. Therefore, if you ever see a storm of this type, chase it to find these beautiful features!

Photography

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Untitled, Ali Cowel

Untitled

Artist Statement: Self-portraiture allows me to be playful yet remain in control. In this piece I am exploring the inevitable fate of the human nature, becoming more and more loosely tied to the natural world, and more and more inter-twined with the digital world. I reflect on the different places humans seek to absorb energy, and use dress-up as a way to explore the many different personas that exist within one person.

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Exhale with the Seasons, Ali Cowel

Exhale with the seasons

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Desert Moonrise, Marisa Merola

 

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The Blues, Omar Kaheel

The Blues

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Lost Pieces 5/10 & 9/10, Haley Takahashi

Lost PiecesLost Pieces

Artist Statement: As a continuation of research into Japanese culture and my personal family history, these pieces explore family artifacts that wer elost when Japanese families were forced into internment camps. The samurai helmet and faceplate draw from traditional Japanese Oni (demon spirits) that are usually depicted as a lion, ox, dragon, or a mix of the three. The center plate replicates the imagery of the ox horns, but traditionally would have been a place for the family Mon (crest) to go. I chose note to use my own Mon because I have never seen my family's samurai armor. It was either left in Japen when my family immigrated to California or was stolen when they were taken from their homes to be put in internment camps. The soft pink fading into deep blue, or the solid blue, is to represent a sun setting into the ocean and the melancholic sadness associated with the loss of the culture. I used red and yellow embroidery floss to stitch through these pieces to represent my atttemps to stitich together what little I know about my family. The red string is specifically symbolic of "the red string of fate," a traditional Buddhist belief that we are tied to imprtant people in our life by an invisible red string, and it is our duty to find those people. I believe that it is important that we undertand the cultures from which we hail and respect the cultures that we are surrounded by so that what happened to my family will never happen again.

Woodblock print and embroidery

Dimensions: 15" x 16"

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Untitled, Marissa Marino

Prague, Czech Republic, 2017.

UntitledUntitled

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Emerging, Self-Portrait, Maddie Camilli

Emerging, Self-Portrait

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Sanctuary, Maddie Camilli

Sanctuary

From the Galisteo Basin Preserve outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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