Art Space 2000 gallery 27 artist Sal Contreras Charles E. Newland

Farm House

Sunset Toast

Kenneth L. Smith

Bronze - Signature Member

Web Site U.S.A

I work from personal experience, photographs, trips, and perhaps most importantly, feelings and emotions that are gathered through visits and conversations with those who have special moments or places they wish to capture on canvas. Most of these subjects contain old places, buildings, items, events that usually represent the often hard work and efforts of people who have gone before to provide the present with rich and cherished memories. Current work is often taken from old, black and white, sometimes-damaged photographs of building and places that only exist in the minds of those who experienced and appreciate them. My goal in each painting is to bring out and show the true life, feelings and emotions associated with these special places or events.

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Oil on Canvas

Vernal Falls
Mark Gudmundsen

Web Site U.S.A

Mark Gudmundsen is Yosemite's most acclaimed living artist today. He also is known for painting other National Parks. His paintings have a realism and light that make the viewer feel as if they were there. Gudmundsen is a master painter, working in Oils, Acrylic, and Watercolor.

Arrival

Elynne Rosenfeld

Web site United States United States

I am in awe of tree trunks; these asymmetrical tubes are a visual treasure trove. While we celebrate their cross sections by turning their hewn remains into something other, while we marvel at the fruits they bear, the sap we extract and the leaves we watch glinting in the sun, we seldom reflect on the intricacies of a tree's outer layer in its full life bloom.

I began observing tree trunks long before I found a proper setting for them. I never wished to depict them in a naturalistic way. (we have eyesight, cameras, arboretums, forests and even front lawns for that) Instead I wanted to discover their attitudes, textures, and color possibilities, create environments, unlikely situations, anthropomorphic metaphors; I wanted to provide viewers an alternative idiom in which to consider them.

The Ribbon Series is an outgrowth of this. I place the trunk form in abstract fields, often with undulating metallic ribbons woven through the composition. In my Tree Trunk Series the form is more recognizable. Often trunks are set against extreme closeups of other trunks. I like to pair a tropical trunk with one that could only grow in a Northern climate and weave them between unlikely barriers such as fences of metal, painted wood or stone.

Most recently mixed media drawings have evolved which vary the subjects introduced in my earlier work on canvas. I've taken an interest in succulents and how they might interact with deciduous trunks and barriers. I've also begun painting succulents interacting with metallic barriers in fields of glass beads and mica chips.

My work is an odd twist on botanical or nature art; Each new piece leads to the next, surprising me with its little bending of self-imposed rules.

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