THE ARTISTS
curated by Michelle May & Payal Thiffault
view by artist or scroll down for continuous view
Bruce Wilson
Colleen Hoffenbacker
Katherine Downey Miller
Jim Kociuba
Andrea Lewicki
Pip Shepley
Heidi Brueckner
Ronald Gonzalez
Monica DeSalvo
Emily Krill
Sherry Karver
Mark Mulholland
Karen Nunley
Jacob Strock
Sasha Knittel
Robert Steffen
Michele Benzamin
Jessica Lovina Guimond
Isabella Ronchetti
Martha Wakefield
Sylvie Mayer
GALLERY
———- keep scrolling for a seamless gallery experience ———
BEST IN SHOW
BRUCE WILSON, Massachusetts, USA
Hands, strings, faces
20x27”, archival pigment print, $450
Come
20x27”, archival pigment print, $450
Here and there
20x27”, archival pigment print, $450
Bruce Wilson is a fine art photographer whose work reflects his broad interests and his need to discover new relevant subject matter and experiment with new techniques. His current projects feature individuals and places, and he has developed processing methods that produce colorful composite images while retaining and enhancing details in the original images.
His artistic interests and the challenge of portraying them evocatively balance the technical work that has made up most of his career as a mechanical engineer. Bruce credits an undersubscribed photo review class as revealing to him how images could be made more cohesive and more interesting. Since that class, he has pursued his interests with vigor. In 2019 he had a solo exhibition at the Newton Free Library. In the summer of 2020, he showed 25 works from his "Urban Ponds" series at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum. He has exhibited many juried and non-juried shows. He has won awards in numerous exhibitions, most recently the “Over 50 years of age award” at the City of Boston’s Fay Chandler Emerging Art Exhibition. He serves on the boards of the Newton Art Association and the Allen Art Center, a music and art venue in Newton, Massachusetts.
He is an artist member of Galatea Fine Art, a cooperative art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, and a member of Newton Art Association. He participates in Newton Open Studios, an annual citywide art fair. He also lends his photography skills to various volunteer groups and cultural organizations. Other interests include learning French, discovering new art, and keeping fit.
“In my art I try to go well beyond typical portraits or landscapes. After working for several years in depicting varied subject matter realistically and vividly, I invented a technique that has added considerable variety to both my subject matter and the depiction thereof. This technique creates very colorful, otherworldly composite images. The new method also allows me to not only retain detail in the images but even to enhance it.
With this technique, I am trying to present individuals to the world in a visually interesting way, a way that just might encourage more openness and curiosity about a diverse group of people. I hope that this same openness and curiosity carry over to other encounters. Furthermore, in working with individuals, we connect, and that is very rewarding. I have not seen images like mine elsewhere, and my collaborators have been very pleased to see themselves in a positive, novel way.“
COLLEEN HOFFENBACKER, Bellingham, WA
Floragen 2.0.1
12x12”, oil on aluminum, NFS
Regen 1.0.1
12x12”, oil on aluminum, NFS
Floragen 2.0.2
12x12”, oil on aluminum, NFS
Award-winning botanical artist Colleen Hoffenbacker captures the delicate essence of nature in her Bellingham, Washington paintings. By fusing traditional fine arts practice with innovative AI collaborative tools, she examines the evolving bond between the natural world and technology. Following a commercial art career, she studied traditional realism at the Academy of Classical Design. Her work is recognized in the permanent Lunar Codex collections. She is a member with Distinction of American Women Artists, and member of Women Painters of Washington. Her oil paintings have been featured nationally in galleries, museums, and private collections and support the conservation efforts of environmental organizations.
My floral paintings envision imaginative gardens that reflect nature's beauty and transformative power. Incorporating classical techniques informed by my creativity, my compositions conceptually bridge nature-inspired traditions with contemporary AI artistry that unveils new visual perspectives. Meticulously hand-painted from personalized, digitally collaborative botanical images, I seek to spark an innate sense of curiosity and possibility. By harmonizing emerging digital capabilities with timeless values underpinning humanity’s appreciation of nature, I want my artwork to compassionately further dialogue on our shared ecological future – one where human creativity might thrive in unison with technology and our planet. Though anchored in tradition, I fuse the old and new, the natural and digital, in hopes of revealing our world anew. My aim is for artwork that speaks to our past yet envisions bold new horizons, celebrating nature’s wonder while pioneering uncharted visual frontiers through modern capabilities.
KATHERINE DOWNEY MILLER, Massachusetts, USA
Blue Flame
36x48”, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, $8640
Green Flame
36x48”, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, $8640
Wildfire Wildheart
72x72”, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, $19,900
Katherine Downey Miller is a painter and art educator. She received her BS in Fine Arts from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York with a minor in Art History. Her MFA is from SVA’s Illustration as Visual Essay Program in New York City. She works in the genre of Landscape to Abstraction and her work is environmental in nature and metaphorial in emotion. She was a Teaching Assistant at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado coaching many well known artists and then received a teaching scholarship from SACI in Florence, Italy where she taught painting. She teaches in museums, art centers, leads workshops and teaches privately. Katherine has had solo exhibits and been included in many juried exhibits throughout New England. She has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and received grants from Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artist’s and the Massachusettes Cultural Council.
This current body of work invites viewers to engage and reflect on the beauty and energy of fire. These paintings, reactions to the devastating images of extreme fire events around the world, acknowledge the imminent threats of drought and climate change as well as the potential for healing. Using metallic paint to effervesce abstract compositions, my aim is to make a compelling visual reference to Kintsugi, the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery with liquid gold, a practice that repairs ‘the broken.’ Elemental fire is a symbol of love, desire, anger, power, strength, and assertiveness. It is also a symbol of transformation: it changes food into energy, ideas into action, and spiritual offerings into smoke. It is also destructive. Of the four elements (earth, water, fire, air), fire is the only one which humans can create. My paintings incorporate all these visual metaphors simultaneously enabling fire’s double-edged ability to heal and harm.
JIM KOCIUBA, Massachusetts, USA
It fell in my path and I followed
16x24”, Acrylic over heavily sculpted gesso and marble dust on canvas, $1800
Over the course of my artistic career I have been a representational painter. My imagery seeks to capture the power and regenerative aspects of nature. Producing recognizable landscapes that bring a sense of familiarity and calm in this troubled world is my goal.
I have always painted on flat canvas and board surfaces. Lately, I have been experimenting in losing the flat fabric texture of my canvases by spreading a mixture of heavy bodied gesso thickened with marble dust. This random gestural action of spreading the gesso mixture with palette knives, potter’s ribs and brushes creates a sculpted surface which implies a subject of my new work. Starting to apply paint without an intentional plan and seeking imagery in the textural qualities of the surface is a new approach that brings a new path and new challenges to my work.
ANDREA LEWICKI, Washington, USA
Gluten-Free Pink Use By 1989 For Pinkest Results
10x6x2”, mixed media collaged box with artist’s original work, ephemera, and graphite with internal sand weight, $280
Free-Range Posterior Manufactured In A Facility Where Butter Is Consumed
10x7x2”, mixed media collaged box with artist’s original work, ephemera, and graphite with internal sand weight, $280
The Light in a Forest of Despair
12x12x12”, silk, cashmere, and wool lampshade, NFS
The nature of collage enables my many small obsessions even when I am not using paper and glue. I am attracted to materials that exhibit signs of wear and degradation because I usually start with subtractive processes. I am drawn to dimensional pieces not meant to hang on a wall. I am employing more and more fabric in my art, most recently silk and cashmere salvaged from damaged garments, mainly for texture.
Since early childhood I have been able to see abandoned things and visualize them as sensory-rich objects with imaginative stories to convey. I was raised in a community of people whose hands were always busy, from my father restoring neglected cars to showroom-worthy classics to my Scottish neighbor who taught me to crochet with reused yarn. The pull to create meaning no matter the hand being dealt is deeply ingrained, and the artists I admire most are the ones who roughed out their work and translated abstract urges into reality with the materials they had.
My studio is based in the rural margin around Seattle. I have contributed art to several literary magazines including Mud Season Review and Cream City Review. My work appears in publications such as Cut Me Up Magazine, Contemporary Collage Magazine, and Juniper Rag. I am also the founder of Special Agent Collage Collective, an international gathering of hundreds of collage enthusiasts in the scissors-and-glue-stick world.
PIP SHEPLEY, Massachusetts, USA
Neither Here Nor There
18x24”, Camera Obscura archival pigment print, archivally framed, $475
Almost Winter
18x24”, Camera Obscura archival pigment print, archivally framed, $475
Onward
24x18”, Camera Obscura archival pigment print, archivally framed, $475
Inspired by camera obscura pictures I had seen, I decided to embark on the design and construction of a portable camera obscura. My theory that every art project becomes a science project was amply proven. My camera obscura projects onto a photographic print inside a lightproof box, and a modern digital camera captures the composite image. I cannot see the image until it appears on the back of the digital camera, making the photographing a true adventure.
Pip Shepley is a lens-based artist who is fascinated by the interplay of the artistic and technical sides of photography. Shepley’s imagination piqued by capturing a subject which the eye cannot see. His work explores the unseeable feeling of a place or object by abstracting and paring it down to a simpler level.
He has studied at many venues including Maine Media Workshops and College, New England School of Photography, and MassArt. Over time, he continues to work with photographers John Paul Caponigro and Vincent Versace.
Shepley’s photographs have been in over 50 exhibits, including the Griffin Museum of Photography, A Smith Gallery in Texas, PhotoPlace Gallery in Vermont, Black Box Gallery in Oregon, and Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts. He is a Board member of the Bedford Center for the Arts (BCA) Photo Group. He also selects renown photographers to present to the BCA.
His non-linear path includes a degree in French, Spanish and Italian and a career in coordinating and building highly-engineered electrical construction mega-projects.
Shepley resides in Belmont, Massachusetts, with his wife and cat.
HEIDI BRUECKNER, California, USA
Big Beatty Board Boss Brent
78.5" x 48”, oil and yarn on recycled Amazon bubble mailers, $4000
Waiting to Wait
72" x 45 1/4", oil and paper, dichroic film, tile, thread, tulle, ribbon, sequins on recycled Amazon bubble mailers, $5000
Inherently, we are interested in observing others as a way of understanding ourselves. My work is inspired by this curiosity and invites the viewer to participate. These large-scale oil and mixed media portraits are individualistic narratives which explore personage through self-presentation, facial expressions, and gesture. They often inspect the under-revered, and appreciate the subject’s presence and dignity, giving pause to honor the person.
In addressing the question of how my work is taking new directions and evolving, there are two main themes: first, I've been experimenting with texture and the physical quality of the surface through using alternative recycled materials such as pieced-together bubble mailers and paper bags. I've found them to be exciting and sturdy surfaces and believe these media add a uniquely interesting and environmentally friendly component to the work (see images 3 and 4); second, I have started to reconfigure the overall shape of the paintings beyond the “square” and also to experiment with adding more substantial 3D elements to include sculpted fabric (made with fabric stiffener and molds), which offers more relief the small found objects that I’ve incorporated before. (see images 1 and 2).
Heidi Brueckner is a Professor of Art at West Valley College in Saratoga, CA where she has taught painting, drawing, and design for over twenty three years.
A native Californian, Brueckner studied at the University of Heidelberg and The Goethe Institute in Germany in the late 1980s. During this pivotal year, she visited the major museums of Europe and found herself heavily influenced artistically by twentieth century German art.
Brueckner received a BA in Fine Art and a BA in Art History from University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991. She received an MFA in Painting from University of Kansas in 1997.
Professor Brueckner’s work has been shown at museums, galleries, colleges, and in publications nationally and internationally. She has received many awards and scholarships for her work.
In 2018, she published the book “Monsterbet”, based on a series of twenty six satirical oil, acrylic, and mixed media paintings spoofing the format of a children’s alphabet book.
In recent years, Brueckner has had 16 solo or small group exhibitions, participated in over 100 juried group shows, and won 14 first place awards among others, which included the Italian International Prisma Art Prize and the Faber Birren Color Award. She was also a finalist for the 2022 7th Edition Boynes Emerging Artist Award and 2023 New Emergence Art Prize. Her work has been written about in publications and online art sources such as Art Seen Magazine, All She Makes Magazine, Visionary Art Collective, Create! Magazine, The Huts Magazine, ILikeYourWorkPodcast.com, GearBoxGallery.com, 48 Hills News, NotRealArt.com, Suboart Magazine, The Pacific Sun, and The Vassar Review.
2022-23 solo shows include Buckham Gallery in Flint, MI; Abington Art Center in Jenkintown, PA; Gearbox Gallery in Oakland, CA; East Central College Art Gallery in Union, MO; O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, Mill Valley, CA (4 person); Women United Art Movement, Online; Crossing Arts Alliance in Brainerd, MN; Kirkland Art Center in Clinton, NY; and Delaplaine Arts Center in Frederick, MD. Upcoming solo exhibitions in 202425 include; Crary Art Gallery in Warren, PA; Grants Pass Museum of Art in Grants Pass, OR; Dalton Gallery in Rock Hill, SC; and Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac, WI.
In August 2023, she attended Wildacres Artists Residency in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. She currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
Dracena
59” x 52”, oil, fabric, paper, and buttons on recycled Amazon bubble mailers, $5500
RONALD GONZALEZ, New York, USA
Found Figure 1
6x2x2”, Found objects, detritus over wire, $1000
Found Figure 2
5x3x2”, Found objects, detritus over wire, $1000
Found Figure 3
7x2x2”, Found objects, detritus over wire, $1000
The magic of objects lives in me through memory and imagination. The aesthetics of finding brings the tangible and poetic together in recognition of the tragic vulnerable thing, the crude material given shape that speaks of life and the art of relation to objects. My work is an expression of a found reality where disparate parts exist in a domain populated by the use to be things from yesterday’s decay transformed by time and mortality. Things and humans live in a parallel space between birth and destruction. The found object being replete in its forms is a survivor and remnant cast out among us serves as a metaphor of an inevitable end. I am drawn to a sculptural vocabulary that communicates through the energies of growth and dissolution animated by intuition and chance. It is a quest for innumerable creations that emerge between the boundaries of life and death, using what I find to form a world devoted to things that describe their beauty and fate.
Ronald Mario Gonzalez is a contemporary sculptor and installation artist known for generating innovative bodies of work that explore the intersection between found objects and figuration. At the core of the artist's practice is a complex fusion of time worn and abject materials that blend personal memories with an archelogy of past objects into proliferations of mournful and evocative heads, figures, and assemblages. Since the mid-seventies the artist has created elegiac sculptures and installations that are embodiments of mortality, memory, and survival combining elements of both assemblage and bricolage, remaking dated leftovers at hand in a process of dissolution and renewal. Always working in anthropomorphized serial form, the works feature permutations of materials, scale, color, and texture, giving degraded materials human status and presence through improvisation and craft. Gonzalez’s restless investigation of animating materials has produced a disquieting sculptural universe with expressive distressed elements that serve as an existential grounding for representing the human condition.
His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D C. De Cordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Savanna College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA. The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS. Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MI. Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY. Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, NY. Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, LA. Allan Stone Gallery, NY. Salina Art Center, KS. Jonathan Levine Projects, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ. Intar Gallery, NY. Anthony Brunelli Gallery, Binghamton, NY, The Hudson Walker Gallery of Art, Provincetown, MA. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva NY, SOFA Art Fair, Navy Pier, Chicago, Illinois, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Spoleto Festival, Charleston, SC. Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame, IN. Atlanta College of Art, GA. Gallery 24, Berlin, Cavin Morris Gallery, NY, Alternative Museum, NY. V23 Gallery, London UK, Institute Cultural Peruano Norte Americano, Lima, Peru. Capro Nason Gallery, Santa Monica, California, Art Omi, Ghent, N.Y. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Toon Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Muse De Arte Modern, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Galerie Protégé, NY Galerija SULUJ, Belgrade, Serbia, Menier Gallery, London UK, Czong Institute of Contemporary Art, Gimpo-Si, Gyeonggi- do, South Korea, Art Basel Scope, Miami, Fl., Space Millepiani, Rome, Italy, Littlepedia, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angles, Ca. Art in Embassies, Benin, Africa, Guerrilla Zoo, Newspeak House, London UK, George Billis Gallery, NY. Sculpture Fields of Nova’s Art. Bridgehampton, NY. Superchief Gallery, NY. Ovalo Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico. Primo Piano Special Projects, Palmieri Foundation, Lecce, Italy, Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, India, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, Denise Bibro Fine Art, New York, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts Kunsthalle, Beacon, New York.
MONICA DESALVO, Massachusetts, USA
The End of Sums
22x30”, mixed media collage on printmaking paper with acrylic monotypes, pastel, and vintage ledger papers, $850
Cochlear Cornucopia
15x22”, mixed media collage on acrylic painting on printmaking paper, $625
Where are the pants
18x24”, mixed media collage on Canson paper with acrylic monotypes printed on felt and vintage ledger papers, $850
I have been experimenting with compositions with irregular borders and have created a new structure called a “book’tych”—an asymmetrical blending of the diptych and triptych where two “pages” are bridged by a smaller panel like a spine. This idea was inspired by an early autumn 2022 visit to Greece, where preserved ancient statues and architecture—often damaged, no longer symmetrical or balanced—nevertheless stand boldly with their missing parts. While there, surrounded by the abundance of falling foliage, I saw new meaning in their forms, and they became my monoprint stencils. These wafting, irregular entities were treasures and useful despite being at the end of their life cycle. Both concepts led to the insight that there is no finish—only an afterward—and fed my commitment to visually express the value of something despite its imperfections. This echos a major influence on my work—the poetic musings my elderly late father said during his physical decline and the hallucinations he had as his dementia increased. I regularly print on my father’s paper memorabilia, and it makes its way into my collages. The results of this convergence build upon my “visual duets”—enchanting mixed media collages that are rich in surreal abstraction and storyline.
Monica DeSalvo received her BFA in Visual Design from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her work has been shown in both juried and invitational shows and is part of collections in the US and Europe. DeSalvo is represented by Fountain Street Gallery in SoWa Boston, where she is a core member.
EMILY KRILL Pennsylvania, USA
Paper Moon
42x32”, paper collage, $1600
Love, Raymond
42x32”, paper collage, $1600
Stack of Bowls
30x40”, paper collage, $1600
Emily Krill is an artist and blogger living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a teenager, she worked with the group Tim Rollins + K.O.S. to create a painting for the 1991 Carnegie International Art Exhibition. She attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts and then Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Later years were in New York City for the next two decades. During that time she worked with architects and interior designers to renovate high-end Tribeca lofts. She was still painting during this time and was one of the first artists to be signed by Mixed Greens.
As artists often find, family and children were prioritized over art making. Emily’s path to art was postponed as a stay-at-home mom. Still expressing creativity, she built a popular food blog called “Resolution Eats.”
Recently Emily has found time to create artwork again. Unlike in her youth, the work is rather pragmatic. Now she makes paintings that are meant to match sofas. It’s modern art that you can live with.
SHERRY KARVER, California, USA
Nostalgic Moments
24x36x2”, mixed media -photography, jigsaw puzzle pieces made from my own photos, vintage b&w photos, oil, resin surface on wood panel, $7600
A Particular Point In Time
24x36x2”, mixed media -photography, jigsaw puzzle pieces made from my own photos, vintage b&w photos, oil, resin surface on wood panel, $7600
Cafe Of Wishful Thinking
30x40x2”, mixed media -photography, jigsaw puzzle pieces made from my own photos, vintage b&w photos, oil, resin surface on wood panel, $8000
I am not a traditional photographer - for me the photograph is the beginning of a process not the end result. In this series, which began during Covid, I started working on jigsaw puzzles, which gave me the idea to have my own photos made into one-of-a-kind puzzles. This was a risk for me since I had never thought of incorporating puzzles into my work, and had no idea how it would turn out.
In this new direction I began leaving out some of the puzzle pieces when putting them together, and painting the negative spaces with oil paints. This new series is titled "Missing Pieces of the Puzzle", since in life, and especially during Covid, people missed seeing family and friends, missed going to restaurants, traveling, etc.
The pieces intentionally left out represent our search for the missing pieces in our lives, or in the world, and teaches us acceptance that not everything can be found and replaced. The hopefulness is that the missing pieces can be space for something new to enter the picture.
By integrating jigsaw puzzles that are my own photographs with my painting it has led me into a new direction and adds another layer of depth to my work.
I was born and raised in Chicago. Art has always been a part of my life even as a child, but I did get a B.A. degree in sociology from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and later went on to get my M.F.A. in ceramics from Tulane University in New Orleans, Luisiana. I taught college-level ceramics for a number of years, but my own work evolved into photography and mixed media painting.
My work has been shown nationally and internationally in over 25 solo exhibitions, and is in over 185 private, corporate, and museum collections, and is represented by several galleries around the U.S.
I now live in Oakland, CA with my poet/novelist husband Jerry Ratch.
MARK MULHOLLAND, Connecticut, USA
"Peace Out"
30x40”, acrylic on board, $3500
Mark Mulholland is an artist living in Stonington, Connecticut. Mark has shown his work throughout the northeast including recent juried shows at the Hygienic Gallery New London, Connecticut, Krikorian Gallery in Worcester MA and a group show at The University of New England Art Gallery Biddeford, Maine.
It is both fascinating and inspiring to witness the evolution of an artist's style and technique. In the case of Mark Mulholland, we see a seamless transition from an abstract pattern painter to a narrative artist, incorporating elements of cartoons and realism. This metamorphosis has been greatly influenced by the artist's utilization of his small Brother printer and the vast resources available on the internet as sources of inspiration. Mark's journey began with a deep exploration of abstract patterns. However, a desire to communicate more explicit narratives led him to explore new avenues, embracing the inherent power of storytelling in his work. Harnessing the potential of modern technology, the artist discovered a treasure trove of visual references on the internet. The printer became a valuable collage tool, enabling Mark to incorporate elements from cartoons and realistic imagery into his creations. This newfound inspiration breathed life into his art, allowing for a more relatable and accessible expression of his ideas. The artist has evolved his style, creating a body of work that combines abstract patterns with the power of storytelling. It is a testament to his artistic growth and a testament to the ever-expanding potential of art.
KAREN NUNLEY, Massachusetts, USA
The Sun is a Tomato
22x30”, mixed media, $1500
Originally from New Jersey, I hold a degree in French from Bethany College in West Virginia and the University of Dijon in France. I worked for many years in the computer field - as a programmer, project manager, and technical writer.
I maintain a studio at Hudson Art Studios at 14 Main Street, Hudson, Massachusetts. I am an active member of ArtsWorcester, Cambridge Art Association, and the Monotype Guild of New England. My work has appeared in many local shows and galleries, and I have been honored with a number of awards.
“The Sun is a Tomato” had its beginnings as a delicate painting on 300- pound watercolor paper. Over time, I added many, many layers of collage, paint, and pastel but did not feel that it was coming together. I took a power sander to it, excavating down through the layers, leaving me a very textured surface to begin building up again. I enjoyed adding opaque flat paint, as well as transparent collage. The resulting piece has a rich, varied veneer.
JACOB STOCK, Massachusetts, USA
Ceramic Vase 1
4”x4”x4” Stoneware clay, cone 10 glaze and stain, $45
Ceramic Vase 2
5" x 3.5" x 3.5” Stoneware clay, cone 10 glaze and stain, $55
Ceramic Vase 3
7" x 4" x 4" Stoneware clay, cone 10 glaze and stain, $65
Ceramics is a new medium for me. I was introduced to it as a kid and have always been surrounded by it in some way (even just as dishes in my home), but in March, I challenged myself to take on pottery after not touching clay for over a decade.
While I learned the foundations of hand-building and wheel-throwing, in under a year, I have been able to carve out a personal style. Volcanic, geological, and coastal, I invoke nature and Earth, question the sources of luxury, and demonstrate how functional vessels arrive to us through natural materials and artists. My process blends sculptural ceramic decoration and form with functionality, and I am always experimenting with new glazes, stains, techniques, surface textures and clay bodies.
Jacob Strock (they/them/he/him) is a 23-year-old visual and recording artist from Massachusetts. A multidisciplined artist, Jacob is an aspiring potter and collage artist, who draws, paints and is a musician. Jacob is a detail-oriented gallery and museum preparator, who received their B.A. in Studio Art and Music Technology at Clark University, Massachusetts. Currently, Jacob is employed as a gallery preparator, attendant, and ceramics studio assistant at The Worcester Center for Crafts, as well as focusing on entrepreneurial goals as an independent preparator and mixed-media artist.
SASHA KNITTEL, Massachusetts, USA
Mist
11x14”, photography giclee print limited edition 1/50, $140
Drenched
12x18”, photography giclee print limited edition 1/50, $160
Forest Speaks
11x14”, photography giclee print limited edition 1/50, $140
Sasha Knittel is a Burlington, Massachusetts based commercial and fine art freelance photographer. Sasha has experience taking traditional digital nature and abstract photos for seven years. Recently she has been inspired to explore overlooked details in the natural world through the use of high dynamic range (HDR) photography. HDR photos are created by taking three or more photos at different exposures with a tripod of the same subject and merging them into one photo in photoshop, then editing. This process reveals intricacies that is difficult to achieve with one photo.It’s closer to what the human eye sees and connects the viewer to the natural world more deeply with visual depth. The layer in the background of the photo appears soft and blurred. This highlights the symmetry that is present in nature. She is examining evolution’s preference for simple algorithms (symmetry) by using HDR technology. Our planet’s natural structure is based on this simplicity since it reduces the chance for things to go wrong in evolution.
Sasha is currently focusing on creating HDR photos of leaves and water in this project. This project is titled Forest Speaks. She plans to photograph the same locations each month and show how they change through HDR photos in 2024. She will focus on Horn Pond in Woburn, Massachusetts and Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts and various other areas including waterways and parks in Boston.
Sasha is a participating member of The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts. Her art will be featured in the annual group show Winter Solstice in December and January. Griffin Museum is New England’s first photography museum. She has been selected for the juried art show Apricity curated by Allyssa DelVecchio for Fort Point Arts and will be featured in the FPAC Gallery in the Boston Seaport also in December. FPAC is an artist collective and offers programs in all forms of art. Her photos are also available at Coastal Collective, Massachusetts which features local artisans from the New England area. The shop also works to give back to the community through local events.
ROBERT STEFFEN, Massachusetts, USA
Near Nature 4
12x20”, archival pigment print, $350
Near Nature 1
16x20”, archival pigment print, $350
Near Nature 3
16x20”, archival pigment print, $350
Recently, I returned to color after more than two decades of digital photography that featured a large catalog of urban themes with an extensive concentration in Black and White imagery. This change provided me with a new path of inquiry and a means to reach beyond previous assumptions toward an expanded conceptual understanding of color.
Two equally meaningful events combined to blaze the trail of my new uncharted journey back to color. First, two trips to the American southwest revealed an inviting new palette through its unique landscape of stunning texture and scale. In addition, the purchase of a new full-spectrum camera fueled my growing interest in infrared photography and its potential impact on my art.
The choice to explore the infrared spectrum assured that my overdue reckoning with nature, a formidable challenge, had finally arrived. Once the visible color spectrum had been broken, I rejected all further color boundaries, including generally accepted infrared processing methods. The surreal properties of infrared greatly influenced my digital workflow, enabling a conceptual blurring of subjective divisions. The result: a reconceived full-spectrum landscape.
The discovery process is invigorating and fuels persistence. At some point the path forward becomes clear. By approaching the subject in a new way, a breakthrough was achieved providing inspiration for a new project. In 2022, this new body of work became an exhibit entitled “NEAR NATURE,” a collection wholly distinctive from my previous work in concept, process, subject, and depth.
My process begins with original photographic content digitally processed to portray the thematic intent, and often invites the influences of graphic art and abstraction in response to my education and interests.
MICHELE BENZAMIN, California, USA
‘Enso Goddess’
34x46”, Japanese ink and Pencil on Paper, $2500
My art and life as a performance artist, activist, leadership-mentor; with four decades of teaching Zen meditation, hypnosis, and the non-violent martial-arts of Aikido and Japanese sword forms of Laido, integrate into a whole spiritual path. I use some form of meditation preparation, moving from a ‘point zero’ inner stillness before painting, to make visible this inner-sourced world. I use water based mediums and pencil, going from abstract with paint to detailed realism with pencils, often integrating into the brushwork, figurative empowered female forms. I represent the female body in its grace and power.
I am a self-taught artist working as a commercial arts since the 70’s and moving over completely to fine arts in the late 90’s, showing in galleries and museums mainly in the US. I come from a family of artists of Japanese and American heritage. My art is a blend Eastern and Western culture, philosophies and disciplines. My studio, and retreat center I co-founded, for over thirty years, has been a source for many in need of inner peace, reflection, and transformation.
JESSICA LOVINA GUIMOND, Massachusetts, USA
Imagine Self-Portrait with Buddy: In Memoriam
5x5”, scratchboard, NFS
Dark Alice
9x9”, scratchboard, $1200
I'll Sit with You 'Til the Stars Come Out
6x5”, scratchboard, NFS
"Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down."
In October, my cat Buddy passed away after battling feline diabetes and kidney disease. Witnessing the passing of a loved one, whether a human or pet, is a profound experience. After Buddy’s passing, I struggled with both emotional and physical pain. Seeking solace, I turned to art. While my recent artistic journey had focused on digital paintings, the advent of AI left me questioning my direction. The ease with which AI could produce works left me with little desire to continue painting digitally. Ironically, a chance encounter with AI-generated woodcut-style art rekindled my interest in traditional media, particularly scratchboard.
The tactile experience of the scratch tool on paper allowed me to immerse myself in the process and momentarily alleviate the weight of grief. The sound and feel of each scratch became a comforting ritual. Since October, I have produced one scratchboard after another, often on the theme of death as a means of processing loss. Concurrently, AI has become a valuable tool that I have utilized as inspiration for compositions and as a reference for details such as hands. The amalgamation of technology and traditional media has provided a new direction. In contemplating the question of "Where do I go now?" in my artistic journey, I have found comfort in the traditional path. The hands-on process is as much a catharsis as it is a testament to the artist’s struggle where dedication defines the value of the work.
ISABELLA RONCHETTI, Virginia, USA
Venus II
11x8.5”, collage + digital, NFS
Self-Portrait I
12.5x16.5”, collage, $1500
Venus I
11x8.5”, collage + digital, NFS
Isabella Ronchetti is an Italian-American visual artist, graphic designer and muralist. A graduate of Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti in Milan, Italy, with a degree in graphic design, Isabella grew up between San Francisco, California, and Florence, Italy. Although her studies were in branding and editorial design, she has always been drawn to the tactile nature of analogue media. Her work explores the human figure through an experimental, often surrealist lens, using media ranging from oil paint to collage. She tends to fragment and distort the human body, often depicting headless subjects or figures floating in space, as testaments to the mind-body separation prevalent in western culture, and as representations of the universal experience of embodiment. She is inspired by her time in the mountains, mythology, dream-sensations, and the inner workings of the human mind
MARTHA WAKEFIELD, Massachusetts, USA
Hand-Me-Down Dress, Borrowed Innocence
6x8.5”, Repurposed book, botanical toned cyanotype, dried rose, satin ribbon, cotton thread, $350
Learning To Save Their Souls
6.25 x 8.5”, repurposed bible, vintage photograph, black marker, waxed cotton cord, $275
Teaching Small Minds
8x11”, repurposed primary school book, vintage photograph, muslin, $300
This body of work explores themes of pathos, memory, and mementos. In 2021, my siblings and I dismantled our childhood home where my parents resided for over sixty years.
My parents accumulated objects, emblems of their life, evidence of time passing. Hidden away were other items whose stories are missing. These artifacts have no value yet seem weighted with sentiment.
Each one, embedded with a personal history, undergo a material metamorphosis to the reimagined. By reframing them I trace a line between the now and then seeking an empathic bridge to the ethereal echoes of family. I work with alternative photographic processes, silk veils, deconstructed books, handwritten love letters and memory laden tokens of past lives. Through these one-of-a-kind mixed media objects, I entreat the viewer to pause and contemplate poignant remembrances these works may invite.
An award-winning painter and photographer, Martha Wakefield has exhibited her work in over 75 exhibits across the country including the Fitchburg Art Museum, Wheaton College, Lasell University, and the Griffin Museum of Photography. Artist’s residencies include Weir Farm National Historic Site, Vermont Studio Center and Orquevaux, France. Wakefield’s work has been featured in several publications including Artscope and Watercolor Artists magazine. Her paintings are in numerous corporate and private collections internationally. She is represented by Powers Gallery of Acton, Massachusetts and Hera Gallery of Wakefield, Rhode Island.
SYLVIE MAYER, Massachusetts, USA
Radiator
25x19”, Flashe and oil on canvas, $800
Equinox/Solstice Walk
46x44”, Flashe and oil on canvas, $3600
All Day
58 x 44'', Flashe and oil on canvas, $4500
Sylvie Mayer is a painter originally from Rhode Island and currently living in Boston. She graduated from the RISD with a BFA in Painting in 2018. Currently, she is an MFA Candidate in Painting at Boston University and a 2023 grant recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.
Through painting, she contemplates grief — from personal to collective, quotidian to life-altering. The tension between the inevitability of change and the permanence of an image are at the focus of her work. She considers how grief and loss appear in everyday life; the banal can conjure memory, instigate tenderness, and perhaps bridge subjectivities. Recently, she has been considering how anxieties about loss are compounded by the technologies of the contemporary world.
In her latest work, she has been experimenting with techniques and materials new to her practice. Traditionally an oil painter, Sylvie has begun working in flashe vinyl paint - a matte, flat and fast drying pigmented material. This new medium has opened possibility both formally and conceptually. The flatness of the medium relates to her ideas about technology and the speed of drying has allowed her to work more quickly. This has led her to leaving more of the process — drawn and underpainted elements — visible in the finished painting.
