Artist's United Statements
You are looking
so peaceful today!
Jill Alo:
Since 9/11 my work has become overtly political for the first time. I¹ve
always wanted to make beautiful, timeless objects but the realities of politics
are usually more on the sordid side, and tied to fleeting events or celebrities
of the moment. I found myself staring into space a lot through September 2001,and
then images started to practically paint themselves. The first one was The River---an
image of an American businessman and a Middle Eastern man leaping off a dock
into a wide and swiftly flowing river. The river of life, the tide of events,
I was then and still am convinced that no matter what the root causes of such
anger and violence, we are all in it together---the causes and the healing.
Angel with Bombing Targets appeared next, inspired by nonstop News coverage
of war-torn Afghanistan. The images of endless desert and forbidding mountain
ranges made me want to protect the fleeing and desperate survivors.
The 99 Names of Allah was the most difficult
to paint; how to convey the enormity of the Islam experience of God? There are
countless ways to call His name and ask for Divine Intervention. God is everywhere
and yet elusive. Each of us searches in our own way for personal connection
to God, so I painted the solitary Islamic pilgrim in silent concentration. And
so my paintings and the ripples of 9/11 continue, in the search for images to
make sense of it all.
D. Bear
D. Bear creates art that reflects the patterns he observes in nature. The Nameless
One is a painting of acrylic on canvas that represents the flow of
energy from a sacred spring. The pattern is a mandala, also a target to focus
ones gaze and attention. The well is both a reflection of the internal well
that flows with love and the external well that flows with life giving water.
The great mystery is nameless and shall remain unknowable.
Carmen DeAlva:
Myths, mysticism and eroticism...to please, appease and tease. Revealed through
the intimate exploration of my soulvision, I describe rituals, secrets, stories...human
endeavors and beliefs. My art is the product of a lifelong search to unveil
and gaze upon...to bring order to the chaos within.
MA, BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. Currently teaching studio
art classes for ACC.
Martha Jacobson
Out of an Inner Cosmos ... My paintings come from the realm of intuitive flash;
I never know what
will emerge. The images are sometimes spiritual and sometimes whimsical; each
work is surprising
and a joy to bring to form. What seems most insistent is color: I say yes to
color at every turn.
Painting has taken me over these days. It's an
interactive process between the white void and the
pulsation of paint coming together. I am delighted to share this "creative
burst" that is emerging.
Fran LaMantia
My thoughts this year, this month, this week, this day, this moment, have been
of duality. I have
thought many times about how fear and love, for example, can and do exist in
every moment
all the time, at the same time. I have felt a struggle with, a seeking of, balance
of some kind
or another all my life. Too much work, not enough play. Too much receiving,
not enough giving,
too much anger, not enough forgiveness. In the past, if I got too little or
too much of one thing I
would swing all the way to the other side of the coin, seeking balance, only
to have to swing all
the way back again in another moment. I have gone from love to fear to love
to fear. I have
been from anger to forgiveness to anger to forgiveness. I have watched this
pendulum swing
in our local community and also seen it play out in a more global way. I am
now learning a
new way of seeing.
It is not so much a question of trying to balancing any two opposites, but an
acceptance that
they co-exist, simultaneously within myself, within my local community and in
the global
community in every moment. I am learning to integrate and accept seeming opposites,
rather
than try to keep shifting my focus, back and forth and back and forth-trying
to maintain as
close to the arbitrary medium as possible. I have tried to reflect this new
thought of duality
in my art piece. Will I be able to integrate and accept what is happening in
the world, in my
local community and in my personal intimate relationships --love and fear, anger
and
forgiveness, pleasure and pain, coming together and moving away, and remain
true to my
highest goal of becoming a loving, nonjudgmental, authentic human being?ng
go
Fran, dancing goddess of fire and love. ove.
Linda
Montignani
Since the events of September 11, thoughts have turned to what is important
in life. The conclusions I have come to in this time are 1) that love is the
primary motivating factor, or should be, in life, with peace being the result
2) that peace within produces peace without in the world 3) that violence, anger,
and jealousy do not beget love or peace and 4) that tolerance is the result
of love, not the other way around. That day was a turning point for me in my
life, as I'm sure it was in the lives of others as well. Since then, my thoughts
are "What is the result of every action I take? Is it love, or not love?"
My work has also changed. It has become about that, about love, about what is
most important in life.
The painting "War
and Peace" is the first in a series, and is very different
from my Landforms series, in which I was exploring color and texture in abstracted
landscape forms. This work is more emotionally charged, and contrasts the feelings
of war, anger, sadness, despair with the feelings of love, peace, tolerance
and harmony. Instead of working with collage and hand-dyed papers, I have chosen
to go back to the purity of expression in paint alone. The result is a focus
on contrasts: dark and light, smooth and rough, bright and toned down, colors
of warm and cool, inner and outer, spiritual and material. I hope the viewer
will not only enjoy these studies in contrast, but will come away with a new
dedication to him/herself and to the world to be about love, about peace and
about harmonious relationships.
Cheryl Rae
The butterfly for me represents the metamorphosis of humanity after September
11. We had a global, spiritual shift as we witnessed the unthinkable. I was
watching it on TV when the first tower fell. My stomach felt like someone had
hit it hard with his or her fist. Then slowly the shock of both towers falling
subsided and I felt a nervous movement and finally the energy left me, I saw
colors and streams of light - like many butterflies dancing in the sunshine
where the towers used to be, a fluttering was all
that remained.
David Smith
About My Avatar Experience: Beliefs are
but fleeting whims of thought which if allowed to take root will severely limit
the process of experience.
VSA Arts
Promoting the creative power of people with disabilities.