One of my greatest pleasures and challenges is painting from the natural world. The first layer was painted in winter and set outside to freeze. Subtle patterns and textures created by frost and the warm hues of the base color suggested an autumn canvas. For this piece, leaves, ferns, and other materials were gathered and hand-crafted stencils were used as resists or to make impressions. After the leaves and stencils were arranged, watercolor paint and acrylic inks were poured, weighted, and left to dry. A few more leaves, shapes and additional color were introduced to balance and finish the painting.

My first perception of an urban space is the geometry of the buildings and their relationship to each other. The collagraph process, one of layering materials, suggests layering in imagery as well. Many buildings have layers of paint or plaster or painted advertising from a former time all indicating passage of time.

As a documentary photographer, I have spent the past 35 years looking at people who grow our food and work the land, and who are proud of the work they do in keeping us fed and healthy. It is arduous, wonderful work, usually culminating in photographic essays in which people feel recognized and honored, even if what I am saying sometimes contradicts how they see themselves. It is often a fine line that takes energy and patience and a willingness to look in ways that are new and challenging.

Thus every once in a while I need a break, letting my camera, or in this case my iPhone, be in charge, seeing what it and my eye come up with. Sometimes they land among the abstract and abstruse. Or sometimes they find the simple, gentle, humorous and direct, as when groups of pigeons in the MoMA courtyard gathered to play and beg at my feet.

Lorraine Bromley Brown
Watercolor/Mixed Media/Photography/Graphic Design

Art touched me early and deeply in my career as a Graphic Designer and Fine Artist. The fundamentals enchant and intoxicate me: design, composition, relationships between elements, and color.

I capture these components that excite me in the patterns of nature. These fragments and views are lodged in my imagination as I travel around the world: all botanicals, the forests, gardens, cultures and sometimes the daily mundane all around us. Butterflies, water/sea, stone houses, fences, wild shaped leaves, and florals of all sorts. These myriad snippets of interest ricochet off each other in my mind and at times combine in fun ways to produce complex convergences or distill down to clean forms, with calligraphic brush strokes/lines, color and whimsy. I love to draw, making marks with different kinds of tools but always combining my watercolor techniques, whether a printing method, creating a collage or on paper.

Costa Rica has been a special place for me to paint and draw. I stayed at an artist residency there in 2005 for one month, and every year after that I have spent the cold New England months in the tropics of Ciudad Colon, CR. Many a series of botanicals have come from these trips. My curious nature excites the process and then I can refine areas with descriptive details. My paintings are often (but not always) large. I will continue to experiment and discover new ways to combine interesting designs, w/collage, printmaking, watercolor and drawing tools.

Every art piece is a journey in itself, one is never like the last. It's what keeps me coming back for more - playing with the light of the universe.

My work reflects the spirit of the landscape, its richness of form and color, textures and patterns of nature. The frequent presence of water in my paintings - its reflections and fluidity, its necessity for life - holds for me the symbolic reflection of spirituality and the Universe, much in the philosophical traditions of the Luminists.

Nothing can replicate the freshness and immediacy of the moods and true colors of nature. Nature's color and light always enrich and refresh an artist's palette and present a depth of experience that enhances one's expression and lingers on in the studio.

Back when the Earth was cooling, Harry Callahan was my Photo I teacher, I worked in B+W and a Rollei twin-lens was my best friend. Then a love affair with the history of the medium started in the early 1970s, and The U. of New Mexico Press published the photo history text I had written. University teaching was offered for employment, and for 25 years I reveled, with my students, in a stinky, noxious darkroom.

At some point, digital imaging could not be ignored, though I tried mightily. Through the graces of the UMassDartmouth Fine Arts Department I was allowed to transfer my pedagogical allegiance to Nature Drawing, Thesis Writing, and Instructional Development (teaching grad students how to teach). I limit creation of digital images to those of my cat Beatrice.

For the past 10 years I have worked in both two and three-dimensions. Sculptures hurt. Paintings not so much.

In the work presented here I am making use of high contrast image capture and multiple exposures to explore abstraction in the more scientific usage of the term. In the math and science spheres, abstraction is a process of grouping like items together in order to simplify the analysis or equation. Minor differences are ignored and treated as one. In much the same way I have grouped similar tones and colors together to reduce the image to its essential components.

My primary interest is in exploring the expressive range of digital image making as it relates to both the photographic and printmaking traditions.

Cynthia DiDonato is a non-representational digital and analog artist. As a digital artist she sees herself as a techspressionist. Techspressionism is a newly created movement that uses technology to express emotional experience.

Color, line, pattern, and atmosphere are her visual language. She states," I am mapping the mind through imagination, intuition, and memory. My work records this creative journey." She has shown her work both nationally and internationally. She has won numerous awards for her artwork in various juried shows within RI and MA.

She teaches online workshops in Procreate and Instagram for artists.
Website: cynthiadidonato.weebly.com
Instagram: cdidonato_art
Twitter: twitter.com/cdidonato_
NFTS: https://foundation.app/@cdidonato_art

As a multifarious artist, my work is an expression of the moment. Am I experimenting in something new? A new tool for writing or mark making, a new surface for painting or drawing, or a new medium? Am I revisiting any of the above? Am I feeling in the Abstract or traditional today? Do I want to say something in a Calligraphic piece, or something not necessarily for the viewer, writing in, under or entwined in an Abstract piece, as these works are. I am inspired by so many things, including the process of creating work that incorporates my varied art background through the calligraphic stroke, gesture, legible, partially or fully obstructed, the drawn or painted image, or the melding of mediums.

Kendra's work is mainly contemporary colored pencil using ordinary subjects and compositions and to portray them in an extraordinary way. Colored pencils allow her to combine the expressiveness of painting with the control of drawing. She uses color, line, value, shape and light to portray emotion and luminescence in her work and her intent is that each element is reflected in one another and develops simultaneously, deepening a relationship to one another.

Recently Kendra has begun to work in a three-dimensional manner, creating handmade books and repurposed book sculpture, incorporating colored pencil, image transfer, printmaking and water media into her work. Using subjects are from her travels and scenes and still life in Rhode Island, sometimes incorporating elements of both.

I was first attracted to the sculptural form of this specific wisteria in the winter when its bare branches and entwined upright form seemed a metaphor for perseverance and resiliency. As the seasons changed it revealed a tender side when green sprouts emerged and it once again came to life. As a subject, this vine reveals aspects of itself the more I revisit it during different seasons or times of day. Using a variety of materials to capture its spirit forces me to focus my attention on different revelations of its character and get to know it more intimately. While close observation is essential to each work, I also try to interpret, not just record, what I see.

Paper as surface - smooth, rough, soft
Paper as object - strips spun into string, folded, torn, woven, cut
Paper as surface becomes the substrate for watercolor, oil stick, printing ink
Through the ages paper has been with which culture and history of human kind has been recorded.
For me it has been the path of exploration in expressing my art.
I started out as a watercolor painter (still am), but paper as a medium has become a fascination that has brought me to use it as a sculptural element.

Color, light, and gesture are important elements in my work. My use of these varies across landscapes, nature, people, and culture. My choices of timing, perspective, and composition are intended to draw the viewer into the setting and moment.

In creating art, I try to remain open to possibilities, trust my instincts, and discard labels that are divisive. I use technology to increase my creative options and productivity not to replace my vision.

Recently I have been interested in exploring the small details of daily life, the objects that surround all of us, light and shade, the beauty of ordinary things.

Watercolor, a visually seductive medium, allows for the translucency and transparency that is so important in describing the momentary experience.

The importance of a Zen-like focus on the day to day, the actions of normal living, the immediacy of the world that surrounds us, a personal narrative of our worldly lives, are the ideas that I am conveying in this series of works.

Painted in a large-scale format expresses the moment of recognition in a very direct way.

Hiroko Shikashio was born and raised in Japan, now living in Rhode Island, USA worked over 50 years on her art works. Her media varies from Watercolor, Acrylics, Collages to Photography. She coordinated art exchanges with Japan/USA exhibitions and served on boards at Watercolor USA, RI Watercolor Society, and Newport Art Guild and members of 19 On Paper and other art organizations.

After many years, I have discovered that my art and its process is a therapeutic escape from the emotional rigors of the world. The farther I can detach myself from the contemporary, the better. And so, I find release and sanctuary within the antique, repetitive and laborious methods of intaglio and relief printmaking.

In my body of work I rely and pay homage to the old masters such as Albrecht Dürer and Katsushika Hokusai. Working primarily in a dark, monochromatic scheme, the bold and graphic contrast of my marks along with a detailed line language is consistent throughout my prints and sumi-e paintings. My subject matter varies from moody, imaginary settings and figures to nature studies and quasi abstractions of my own personal experiences and interests. I find further satisfaction in studying and rendering patterns and detail.

As many others before me, I forever chase the moments where I can effortlessly lose sense of time and exterior self to the repetitive rituals of the printmaking medium. The added benefit is the total freedom of expression of oneself in this mindful and meditative craft.

The works in this show were created on repurposed cardboard boxes that I would usually put in the recycle bin. Using a material that is impermanent and something we would quickly dispose of to create a lasting image is very compelling to me. The images were made by removing layers of cardboard and by incising lines. The resulting prints are monoprint collagraphs because each on is different and some have been enhanced with drawing materials.

The two images I am presenting in this exhibition have in common the theme of forgotten subjects that were once useful. When I encounter these gems, I am attracted to a sense of presence, a story that must be told. For even in their abandoned state, there is a spirit worth capturing. Black and white completes the metaphor of timelessness and abstraction from the normal in our lives.

The NB Series, is the investigation and interpretation of the everyday shoreline of Narragansett Bay in Jamestown RI. This is a natural fit, considering my love of fishing, being on the water, and exploring the waters edge at low tide.These drawings are soft pastel, pencil, and acrylic, using the pastels in a painterly fashion to achieve a more gestural appearance.

Rituals of the ancient world fascinate me. They do not feel foreign because the Roman Catholic Church adopted many of these forms in the past (if not currently) Holy relics- Litanies, especially of the Virgin Mary , listing the attributes of the Mother of God. This is at least as old as Sumeria. Some of Her attributes are around the gold bricks.

The bricks are gold sheets pounded from gold nuggets by a Myanmar boy who swung on a rope and smashed the nugget with a leather mallet until it became a wide gold stamp. He did this for free because the thin gold sheets were made to cover Buddha statues (done by men! not women!) and this was a privilege.

Rituals of the ancient world fascinate me. They do not feel foreign because the Roman Catholic Church adopted many of these forms in the past (if not currently) Holy relics- Litanies, especially of the Virgin Mary , listing the attributes of the Mother of God. This is at least as old as Sumeria. Some of Her attributes are around the gold bricks.

The bricks are gold sheets pounded from gold nuggets by a Myanmar boy who swung on a rope and smashed the nugget with a leather mallet until it became a wide gold stamp. He did this for free because the thin gold sheets were made to cover Buddha statues (done by men! not women!) and this was a privilege.

I spend time outside, looking at nature, up close, or far away. I become fascinated with a particular place and then intensely focused on how to paint what I see there. My visceral response to a particular place leads to a series of paintings that explore the colors, spaces, marks, and energy of that place, and what lives and grows there. It is really just an ongoing exploration of paint and painting, anchored in the natural world. My painting "Open Space" is part of my Aquidneck Island Land Trust Series in which I am documenting the landscapes around me that have been conserved by our local Land Trust.

Meredith LeBlanc is an artist and realtor living in Newport, RI. Having returned to her easel in recent years, painting is a journey into herself and a meditative process. Feeling the sensuousness of the paint, the vibration of blending the colors, and the emotion that arises as she works has lessened her need for perfection and lets her life flow more naturally. As the daughter of an artist, she was fortunate to have the encouragement to explore being creative in every possible way. Her goal as an artist is to share what brings her joy and happiness.

Meredith LeBlanc is an artist and realtor living in Newport, RI. Having returned to her easel in recent years, painting is a journey into herself and a meditative process. Feeling the sensuousness of the paint, the vibration of blending the colors, and the emotion that arises as she works has lessened her need for perfection and lets her life flow more naturally. As the daughter of an artist, she was fortunate to have the encouragement to explore being creative in every possible way. Her goal as an artist is to share what brings her joy and happiness.

I work at capturing a moment using my camera.

I work at capturing a moment using my camera.

My interest in clocks goes back to early childhood. I liked taking clocks apart just to see the exquisite tiny parts (I didn't expect to put them back together! That's a whole other story). However, the idea of using a clock-face as a tiny canvas is very recent. At one of the many customize-your-[whatever] sites, I discovered that it was possible to order a quartz-movement clock with a customizable design on its face - including nothing at all. The site I go to is called Zazzle. Having ordered a blank clock, I removed the hands, decorated the smooth acrylic face with a simple pattern in 3D paint and then put the hands back on. The result was very pleasing for me - that's all I can say, in explanation! It's still a working clock, and it's easy to tell the time even without any numbers. Every clock I decorate this way is unique and can't be duplicated.

My interest in clocks goes back to early childhood. I liked taking clocks apart just to see the exquisite tiny parts (I didn't expect to put them back together! That's a whole other story). However, the idea of using a clock-face as a tiny canvas is very recent. At one of the many customize-your-[whatever] sites, I discovered that it was possible to order a quartz-movement clock with a customizable design on its face - including nothing at all. The site I go to is called Zazzle. Having ordered a blank clock, I removed the hands, decorated the smooth acrylic face with a simple pattern in 3D paint and then put the hands back on. The result was very pleasing for me - that's all I can say, in explanation! It's still a working clock, and it's easy to tell the time even without any numbers. Every clock I decorate this way is unique and can't be duplicated.

Halloween