Ann Marie Balasco

(click to enlarge images)

Like many children I loved to draw and paint. I remember when my childhood interest grew into what would be a lifelong dream of being an artist. During a visit to the school library in fifth grade, I checked out a book of collections of Charles Schultz' comic strip, Peanuts, with plans for drawing them. I drew so many of the comic strips and even took "orders" for some in school.

As a child I took two years of painting instruction from the nuns at the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary at the Fruit Hill Center in North Providence, RI, two sessions of ceramics and painting with Professor Gino Conti and two Saturday classes at RISD. I took lessons from Earnest Falciglia, music director for the Providence Schools.

In addition to Charles Schultz and Snoopy, I have been fortunate to have had other creative influences in my life including my Uncle, Johnny Spagnolo, a commercial artist for the State of Rhode Island. His ability to draw anything had tremendous influence on my desire to be an artist. Also, my grandmother, Mary DaPonte, crocheted almost every day. Despite having arthritis she made beautiful blankets, decorative chickens, snowmen, dolls clothes, etc. Most of what she created were her own designs.

More recently, Eileen Shanley, an accomplished local artist, opened my eyes to "Call for Artist Shows". Since learning about these types of shows I have painted regularly and entered and been accepted into many shows. I have taken a few classes at the Newport Art Museum School including introduction to oils with Peter Dickison. Much of what I have learned has come from observation and reading.

I have always observed colors, perspective and details of everything around me. Now, my main focus is on color. I am fascinated by color and believe I am on a lifelong journey trying to understand and discover it.

6 Colony Drive, Middletown, RI 02842; 401-619-0447, 401-580-5089; amb10@cox.net
 

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN PAINTING AND THIS PAINTER, ON THE OCCASION OF THE NEW FACES SHOW AT DEBLOIS GALLERY IN NEWPORT, RI, NOVEMBER 2007

BY RACHELE CICCONE AND BY PAINTING

THIS PAINTER: What is painting?
PAINTING: I dunno.  What is painting?
THIS PAINTER: Come on, help me out.

PAINTING: Painting is the image.                                     
THIS PAINTER: Painting is the energy transformed into image.
PAINTING: Painting is energy and light, you’re right . . .
THIS PAINTER: I believe in paint.  I believe in its ability to convey my energy.
PAINTING: You don’t plan me out?

THIS PAINTER: No, never.
PAINTING: You paint energy?  You’re saying--
THIS PAINTER: I’m saying it’s real, it’s fresh, it’s uninhibited.  It comes out as fast as a stream of consciousness.
PAINTING:  There’s something I’ve gotta ask you.  On a scale from one to ten, how strong is your need for representation?
THIS PAINTER: Five.
PAINTING: You like me to make people fade into and out of representational consciousness and abstract unconsciousness.

THIS PAINTER: Exactly, but it’s not a conscious decision of mine all the time.  Usually you tell me.
PAINTING: You know when to let beautiful accidents be and when to obliterate them.  I only help you decide.  You’re the head with the brush.  I’m just an inanimate object.
THIS PAINTER: My goal is that when you, the Painting, are done, you will be in limbo between being inanimate and its converse.
PAINTING: And I thank you for that.  ‘I’ in the collective sense.
THIS PAINTER: What are you, ‘in the collective sense’?  You’re welcome, by the way.
PAINTING: You are a painter’s painter.  That’s what I’m thanking you for. 

THIS PAINTER: No, I am a painter of painting.
PAINTING: Same difference.

THIS PAINTER: Fine. 

PAINTING:  Why do you paint?
THIS PAINTER: To satisfy my need to be representational and abstract at the same time.
PAINTING: I figured.  So what’s with the figures in your paintings?

THIS PAINTER: They are all caught in limbo between two disparate things.
PAINTING: Are they dead?

THIS PAINTER: Some of them might be.  Some are alive.  Some are envisioning being dead.  And some are envisioning being alive.  Like in Answers.
PAINTING: Is painting dead? 
THIS PAINTER: No, it is still the center of the universe.
PAINTING: Good answer, girly.

THIS PAINTER:  Thank you.  Oh, and don’t call me girly.

PAINTING:  Okay. 
THIS PAINTER: I learn so much from you, Painting.  I hope you never patronize me.
PAINTING: If I do, it will only be in jest, dear follower.
THIS PAINTER: I am in your cult.  You captivate and enrapture me.  I have a sexual attraction to you.
PAINTING: And mine to you is that you don’t try to art things up.  That’s so hot.

THIS PAINTER: I think you’re hot, Painting.

PAINTING: Can you expand and explain more precisely, please, how you’re sexually attracted to me?

THIS PAINTER: The way paint touches its support is sensual for me and I think my aesthetic instincts are transformative in the-

PAINTING: -the same way sex is?  Like in Middle?

THIS PAINTER: Yes, in that one, sure, if you feel the need to single one out.  But it’s really in all of the paintings for this New Faces show.

PAINTING: How do you see the world?
THIS PAINTER: As illustrations of the guttural reactions of humanity.

PAINTING: As in Questions?

THIS PAINTER: Yes, exactly as in Questions.

PAINTING: Do you feel that your work is an extension of yourself?
THIS PAINTER: Yes.  My paint is existential.  It is living and it breathes.  If anyone sees it as decoration--
PAINTING: Then what?  A painting is a decoration.
THIS PAINTER: Not my paintings. 

PAINTING: If that’s the case, you need to pay attention to every mark you make.
THIS PAINTER: I do.  I can look at a finished painting of mine and read each feeling I was entertaining at the moment of paint’s impact on surface by brush.
PAINTING: Explain to me your brushstrokes.
THIS PAINTER: They are the typewriter of my mind. 

PAINTING:  You let the surface speak as to what I need.

THIS PAINTER: Positive marks, not marks in reverse.  The viewer needs more than just a tiny window into the other side.
PAINTING: Your strategy is to either pare it down or attack it; at times, both.
THIS PAINTER: I just want people to get lost in my paint--
PAINTING: And maybe find their way out?
THIS PAINTER: If they want to.  If they want to stay lost in it, that’s even better.
PAINTING: Your paint is about painting.  It is not verbal.  You make me and then you hang me on the wall and your titles don’t even help with explaining what you’ve created!

THIS PAINTER: I know.  That’s because I am painting about life and about death.  PAINTING: They are narratives of the making.
THIS PAINTER: And it is human nature to want to uncover something that’s covered up.
PAINTING: Exactly.
THIS PAINTER: Who are you?
PAINTING: I’m whatever you feel like doing with me, girly.

Jeff Edwards

Artist Statement 

It seems we spend much of our lives consuming then discarding—leaving the remnants of past projects and ideas to rot under the light of a fading sun. Just as a virus moves through its host, devouring everything it requires to progress, so we too abandon what we no longer need to survive.

Monumental factories, hospitals, and once-homes are left neglected and forgotten, waiting to be retaken by nature or burned by naïve teens in a fit of pyromania. These places where men and women once lived and worked are intriguing in their decay—once a brilliant idea for a business or institution now fades away.

But where most see an eyesore, I view a still-life. They are as beautiful to me now as they were to others decades ago. Hallways, covered with graffiti, still beat with the life of those who once walked them and corridors form eerie pathways to the past. In them, I feel an off inspiration. Using these locales as my canvas, I hope to make a lucid connection between then and now.

Far from ignoring these archaic structures, I find myself compelled to explore and create my art within them. Whether it is a memory of love lost or a journey reconsidered, we have all reflected on our unique histories at one point or another. I wish to embody this reflection in my art.

Society wishes to have these places demolished and forgotten so progress can continue and better things may take their place. But the irony is they too will someday lie derelict—lost to all but our aspirations and fleeting memories.

Alice O’Neill Artist’s Statement

            The visual direction of my recent work has evolved from my fondness to over-lap.  Whether it is color, material, metaphorically, physically, or emotionally my work retains a constant awareness to my partiality of layers, whether it is subtle or bold.  An underlying aspect of my work is my unconscious and conscious overlapping of my thoughts, daydreams and dreams.  I constantly drift from one form of thinking to another and try to address that frame of mind in my work.  My color pallet is sometimes very limited.  I adore deep rich grays and blacks, which are prevalent in my etchings.  I believe that I can simulate color without using it.  Visual trickery is a subject that is present in my recent work.  I am very interested in what is and isn’t in my imagery and how our visual perception deciphers what it sees and what it “fills in”; what is realistic and what is not.  Printmaking is the ideal medium for my work, since it consists of many techniques and combinations, layers.  I also bring photography into a great deal of my work.  Photography is a strange medium because many believe that if something has been photographed then it is “real”.  I enjoy exploring that idea in my work by simulating ghosts, angels and other trans-world interlopers.

            Two artists that I am particularly fond of are the Starn brothers.  They elegantly express the unlimited flexibility of the physical world and the transience of beauty.  I am struck by their scale of work, their physical presence, weight, substance and sometimes degree of melancholy.

            My mother bought the book Where Angels Walk, by Joan Anderson, for my brother 10 years ago.  It consists of true stories of heavenly visitors.  It is somewhat an eerie book, but there are parts that are incredibly moving, stirring something deep inside.  I want my work to have the same effect.  I believe that it is our own egocentric fault that we believe that we are alone in this world.  I think as humans many of us feel mental unrest and unease with others and ourselves.

            The Buddhist lama, Lama Zopa speaks of equanimity, the importance of balancing our feelings of liking, disliking, and neutrality. “ The kindness of others, especially your mother who gave you life, must be repaid.  How far from the modern psychoanalytical approach that points the finger of blame at parents and early childhood for all one’s woes.” ￿  I feel that this statement is pure and clean.  I approach my work the same way. 

Alice O’Neill

ED RONDEAU

WHY  I  SCULPT 

I sculpt because I have a passion for creating objects of beauty, which bring to life the musings of my imagination.  I sculpt in steel because I am fascinated by the power, durability, energy and versatility of the metal. 

Steel is a mysterious substance to me.  Borne of a mix of elements blended deep in the earth’s core over the millennia and refined in the blast furnace, steel is as organic and living as any substance on or under the earth.  Steel represents great strength and mass (as in a powerful railroad locomotive), and yet, it can be shaped into the most graceful of objects (as in the elegant bridges spanning the San Francisco Bay, the Charles River in Boston or The Narragansett Bay at Newport.) 

Cutting, shaping, joining …re-forming steel into art involves very primal activities.  Heating, cutting, shaping, and joining metal at the hands of the sculptor helps bring to life an idea, an image, a feeling, which makes a statement about the human experience. 

This is what excites me as an artist. 

My personal goal is to create objects of beauty, which will embody and transmit these ideas, images and feelings to all who view and experience the work.  Hopefully, those who view my work will experience and realize their own ideas, images and feelings from their interaction with the work. 

If the result of that interaction  pleases, enlightens, entertains and/or satisfies the viewer, I will have succeeded as an artist.