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These are installation shots at the State of the Art Gallery for the May show entitled Wings, Petals, and Leaves, featuring the work of Diana Ozolins, Margy Nelson, and Carla DeMello. The three if us have woven our art together into a unified whole. Our individual works of art were well on their way before we decided to join our talents and show together. Collectively we shared a love of nature, both an appreciation for the aesthetic beauty of nature and the scientific study of what we find in nature. Mingling our work expresses that in a way that brings our art and our experience alive to all the facets of the subject – various creatures, the landscape viewed as it surrounds us, and the miniature landscape of the goldenrod with its complex ecosystem.
Permanent link to this article: http://ozolins.com/what-the-gallery-looks-like-in-may/
New at the State of the Art Gallery for May, I am collaborating with Margy Nelson and Carla DeMello in a joyous burst of nature. I will be showing landscape paintings started during summer and fall 2021 outdoors in various parks and nature preserves. They are luscious paintings drenched in color and rich in texture. Carla DeMello will be showing paper sculpture of birds and insects, and Margy Nelson is presenting the culmination of a four year exploration of the ecosystem found on Goldenrod.
Permanent link to this article: http://ozolins.com/petals-wings-and-leaves-may-2022/
The State of the Art Gallery will present The More You Look, The More You See, featuring nine members of the Gallery January 6 – 30, 2022. There will be an opening reception January 7, 5:00-8:00 pm.
I am showing a collection of paintings from far ranging locations and time periods. Some are paintings I have never before shown which have been waiting for just the right combination of companion pieces. These semi-abstracted landscapes reveal the patterns of nature – horizontal bands of earth, air, and water, the jumbled chaos of bush and vine, the random patterns of rippled water and mowed pasture.
Slea Head is a painting that I started long ago in 2001, after a three week painting trip to Dingle, on the west coast of Ireland. Slea Head is one of the many headlands in that rocky coast. A patchwork of sloping sheep meadows juts out above the Atlantic Ocean and ends in a steep cliff. I went to Slea Head on a day of cold mist and drizzle, bundled in warm fleece, sturdy raincoat and rain-pants. I drew with my sketch book protected inside a large clear plastic bag. When I returned to Ithaca, I started the painting in my studio. It remained hanging there, unfinished, because I thought it was lacking something. Two decades later, I could finally see – it needed less, not more, and I removed a strip of land, essentially bringing the viewer closer to the brink of the cliff, to look down on the beach below.
Unspoiled is one of a pair of paintings that I made in response to an ugly disaster. On April 20, 2010, the oil
drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, operating in the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and sank resulting in the death of 11 workers on the rig and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations. For weeks volunteers worked tirelessly washing oil off of shore birds, saving as many as they could. This was the painting that showed the pristine beach before the spill and its companion showed the water and beach despoiled and littered with oil covered dead birds. At that time, only the second painting got into the show in the gallery, while this one stayed in the studio, biding its time, waiting for its turn to celebrate the beauty of nature unspoiled.
Wolf Island Hayfield was inspired by a painting trip to the St. Lawrence . Wolf Island is in the middle of that river, between Kingston, Ontario to the north and Cape Vincent, New York to the south. it makes a lovely day trip via ferry when visiting that area. It is mostly rural in character, with a larger town in the north where one can catch another ferry to Kingston. Why did it languish in the stacks for so many years? It was ahead of its time as one of my first experiments in abstracting the landscape, and needed some time for later paintings to catch the new style in order to make a collection. So, here it is stepping out onto the stage for the first time
The Resevoir, and Morning Perceptions round out the group of six paintings that I chose for this show.
Permanent link to this article: http://ozolins.com/the-more-you-look-the-more-you-see/
December at the State of the Art Online: 62 Artists, 95 works nationwide. For links to State of the Art Gallery’s First National Virtual Juried Art Exhibition go to http://soagithaca.org
Also the Gallery will be open for in person viewing of member work. It is my custom to alternate landscape and abstract paintings, and this month I have the opportunity for the first time, to show the entire Black and White Shape Explorations Series. It is comprised of 6 individual acrylic paintings on canvas, that just happen to look pretty darn good all together. (Installation views above and below are all in gallery – masks required, hand sanitizer provided.)
Sixteen members of the State of the Art are showing work in a variety of media that include paintings in oil, acrylic and watercolor, digital images, sculpture, photography and artists’ books. It includes abstraction, realism and witty social commentary.
Both shows run from December 3-27, 2020. Gallery hours are Thursday, Friday noon – 6:00 pm and Saturday and Sunday noon – 5:00 pm.
The Gallery is located at 120 Martin Luther King St. / State St., Ithaca, NY.
http://soagithaca.org for links to National Virtual Juried Show
Permanent link to this article: http://ozolins.com/soag-in-december-online-and-in-gallery/
Up and running now at State of the Art Gallery: Textures in Stitch and Stroke
Saundra Goodman and Diana Ozolins are the two featured artists at State of the Art Gallery during October, starting October 1 and running through November 1, 2020. Goodman uses colorful crochet as her artistic medium, and Ozolins is showing the oil paintings of landscapes done during the past two years. The Gallery is open Thursday and Friday noon – 6:00pm and weekends noon -5:00pm. It is located at 120 W Martin Luther King Jr./ W State St. in Ithaca.
We are practicing social distancing in accord with NYS safety measures to guard against the spread of Covid-19. Please visit the gallery only if you are healthy, no more than 8 people will be allowed in at a time. You are required to wear a mask properly at all times, use hand sanitizer, and sign a visitor log when you come in. more info at www.soagithaca.org.
Smaller paintings such as the one on the left, Sapsucker Pond in September, were all started on location during the summer of 2019, with palette knife, and are highly textured. Most were also brought into the studio to continue the process of becoming fully resolved paintings. The larger paintings were painted in the studio using photos and sketches as reference material.
As summer waned, and the days grew shorter and colder, I had to stop my outdoor painting practice and move into the studio. I found myself doing a completely different kind of painting, surreal images that came out of my head in response to emotional states, and the strange way covid was making us live. The muse is an unpredictable companion to creation, and I wondered if I would ever return to landscape
The first of these larger landscape paintings was prompted by early spring fog on the morning of May 14. It was so beautiful, It was as if my heart had suddenly burst open to nature again, and I knew I had to paint it. I also knew that the fog was going to quickly change. The sun would burn it off, so I didn’t have time to do a painting right then and there. I grabbed my camera and a sketch book, took some photos, and made a pencil sketch to capture the essence of the scene. After breakfast I started the painting. I used the brush to catch the softness of the morning, and found, to my surprise, that it felt comfortable and familiar, and had a pleasing tactile feeling as the paint was being applied. Almost all of those larger paintings, except for Von Engeln Nature Preserve, were done with brush, and have a smoother texture. Returning to using the brush was a surprise from my muse.
You can see more of this show online at www.soagannex.art
Permanent link to this article: http://ozolins.com/textures-in-stitch-and-stroke-october-2020/