The Persistence of Form Form is the vessel in which ideation takes shape, and it is with ingenuity and abundant variety that artists communicate their ideas about the world. The Persistence of Form is a captivating journey into the hearts and minds of a talented grouping of artists who have distinctive techniques and interests. The artworks complement one another by exploring individual perspectives and the imaginative means to express them.
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Mavin Staub Ambrose
 
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Mavin Staub Ambrose’s ethereal, enigmatic paintings engage the viewer’s imagination on several levels. Ambrose’s work tells a story, yet a story without chronology, as if the viewer has stumbled into an intensely emotional moment in the middle of a scene. She states, “I try to evoke a feeling of mystery and magic in my work. Much of my focus is on female imagery because I am so often impressed by the strength and mysticism of my female friends and relatives, and I feel that it needs to be visually recorded.” Perhaps more than other visual artists, Ambrose’s work offers a cathartic feeling. Her muted tones and sensuous lines allow for expansion of thought, for “breathing room,” in her paintings. Ambrose challenges her viewer’s to dig deep into their imaginations and their own personal history to bring meaning and understanding to these emotionally charged works.
Mavin Staub Ambrose has exhibited her work widely throughout New York and North Carolina. She lives and works in Elmira, NY
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"Glial"
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"Hope"
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Carla Asquini
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Carla Asquini’s floral paintings are joyful celebrations of life. Like Georgia O’Keefe, who wrote “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” Carla Asquini uses floral subjects to study the relations between color and form, as well as light and shadow. With her deliberate and instinctive brush strokes, Asquini examines the various stages of a flower’s lifecycle, not only to render the naturally beautiful resulting colors, but to call forth the emotions associated with each stage of development. Budding flowers represent the hope, innocence and lightness of youth, while brilliantly hued flowers in full bloom recall the sensuality, confidence, and power of adulthood. Likewise, the muted tones of an older bloom signify the peace, rest, and wisdom of old age.
Born in Udine, Italy, Carla Asquini seeks perfect harmony between inspiration and realization in all of her paintings. A truly international artist, Asquini completed her artistic training in the United States and has exhibited throughout Europe, North America, and China.
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"Feel"
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"Poppy 7"
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javier iturbe
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"Urbanism Shrinks our Souls"
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"Life has more Edges than a Diamond"
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Catherine Keller
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Catherine Keller brings new dimension to glasswork, fusing fine art and seamless craftsmanship in glass paintings of remarkable beauty. Keller hopes to use the materiality of the glass medium, its thicknesses, and its colors, to suggest the invisible, the human presence, the imprint of a time that reflects a bygone age and our own era at the same time, the very essence of humankind. Born in Monrovia, Liberia, Africa, Catherine Keller grew up primarily in Switzerland. She studied Art History at the University of Fribourg and trained in glassmaking at the famous School of Vitrail in Monthey, Valais/CH. An entrepreneur specializing in artistic glass work in traditional and contemporary art, Catherine has gained international acclaim for her deft use of multi-layered techniques such as fusing, sanding, thermal molding of glass "lamps", mirrors, pictures, and Acid work. Using a palette reminiscent of her visual environment during her childhood in Africa, she uses yellows, oranges, reds, earth tones, and warm greens to create a luminous sense of atmosphere. She is equally influenced by European art, which leads her to integrate subjects within time and space. In every work she conveys her bond to nature, its colors and forms, to the viewer in timeless pieces which can only be described as glass paintings or stained glass.
Catherine Keller is a proud member of the Verarte Association for professional stained glass makers; as well as a member of the Friends of the Swiss Museum for Stained Glass in Romont, Switzerland, a society for appreciation and education of historic monuments.
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"Daisy"
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"NY 2"
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Irina Levchenko
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The works of Irina Levchenko are awash in sharp color. Her hues do not blend or fade one into the other; rather, they stand together in contrasts so sharp that even abstractly-rendered objects clearly reveal their forms. There is a lyrical whimsy to her creations that might leave the viewer with the feeling the each is an ocular children’s tale, were it not for the complex pastiche of oblique visual narrative that runs through them. Ultimately, Levchenko wants to stir the beholder to notice the beauty of our world—and her chief utensil is color. “I believe Malevich’s thesis, which claims that the emotional influence of color is equal to the sound of music, is absolutely correct,” she says. “A good painting is similar to melody in a large musical work, which strikes you and creeps on the skin.”
Irina Levchenko’s artworks are often three-dimensional, and in them one can trace influences ranging from American pop art to the constructivism of her native Russia.
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"Blessing of Water"
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"Coat"
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Nicu Liuta
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Nicu Liuta uses both spiritual and painterly strokes to capture the luminescence of our life cycles in his breathtaking expressionistic and figurative paintings. He blends color and form in a gripping collection of signs which point out the soul's pilgrimage in and between the conflicting realms of the spirit. His paintings relate a profound search for "the seen of the unseen", the visible of the invisible. With emphatic splashes of color and scratches of his brush, he translates mystical experiences of spiritual encounters in works reminiscent of Marc Chagall and Ad Reinhardt. Nicu believes that color has the capacity to heal our soul by inspiring contemplation, thus leading the viewer to reach beyond the limitations of his perceptive mechanisms to get closer to the natural world.
Born in and raised in Romania today Nicu Liuta resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, and has participated in Group and Solo Exhibitions in Romania and Canada. His paintings are housed in private collection across Europe, Canada, and United States.
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"Lady of Hope"
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"Child's Soul"
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Iva Milanova
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Bulgarian artist, Iva Milanova, creates inspiring works that draw from a wide variety of sources. Within her paintings, one may discover elements of Cubism, Folk Art and Expressionism. But in fact her style eludes definition; Milanova will tailor her aesthetic approach to the subject rather than the opposite. Rich colors and linework greet Milanova’s audience, figural works where women rise from a medley of bright strokes, or purely abstract paintings that found their wellspring within a musical rhythm or quiet reverie. Her style is a personal interpretation of the world, irrepressibly bold and bright with a handling of oil paint that creates lush textures and is coupled with a wonderful sense for pattern.
In explaining why audiences are so engrossed with her paintings, one senses immediately the emotional quality of a piece; her style’s accessibility forms an immediate bond between viewer and artwork. Milanova’s work continues to inspire a great deal of international attention with exhibitions in Venice, Rome, Toronto, New York and Paris. Milanova presently resides in Berlin.
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"Pistis Sophia"
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"Women"
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Vasiliy Morozov
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Eastern European painter, Vasiliy Morozov experiments with bold hues, complex layers, and distorted imagery to create an intriguing and dynamic view of his figurative, landscape, and common-place subjects, rendered in various levels of abstraction. His oils on canvas possess a snapshot quality that imparts a sense of immediacy to the scenes captured in his resulting works. Further enhancing the visual interest of his works, Morozov layers images upon one another, creating the impression of an overexposed photograph, which adds an element of mystery and impermanence to the highly graphic paintings.
Born and educated in Kazakhstan, Vasiliy Morozov’s art is informed by an eclectic background in advertising, architecture, design, and fine art. He has enjoyed considerable artistic success on an international level: in addition to receiving multiple prestigious awards, Morozov continues to exhibit his uniquely composed works in galleries and museums throughout Europe and is included in many public and private collections
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"Dad and Son"
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"Temptation"
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Shelly Porter
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The soft watercolor choices in Shelly Porter’s paintings coalesce into keenly composed meditations on the fluctuating organic systems that assemble, sustain and deconstruct life. Porter shades her work with a focused iconic minimalism in the tradition of Georgia O’Keefe, but uses her simply framed subjects to grapple with complex and compound explorations on cellular and cosmic scales. The elegance at work in her strokes rarely seeks to tame the elements they address, but rather reins them in, emulating the compositional philosophy of Wassily Kandinsky by engaging the inner sounds of form and structure in the face of deceptive and startling abstraction. Her artwork boldly and clinically analyzes supernal themes with an emotionally charged palette and the subtlety of thematic pop art reduction.
Porter’s work has appeared consistently over the last decade in numerous exhibitions at the Art Center of Corpus Christi, as well as around her native state of Texas, and now reaches into the Northeast at the Agora Gallery.
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"By Understanding He Set the Heavens in Place"
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"The Desert Tribes will Bow Before Him"
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Vicente Russo
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"Photography was my first experience practicing with images taken from nature," says Brazilian painter Vicente Russo. Influenced by nineteenth-century French painting, Russo's artistic growth also stems from his years living among the vivid color and light of South America. The beauty of Nature is always his subject, and whether he's painting the sea awash in sunlight or a clearing in a forest, his meticulous brushwork has both the intense scrutiny of pointillism and the spontaneity of impressionism.
There is the tranquility and balance of nature in Russo's works, and he presents a vision of the world as something always in motion, bathed in particles of light or opening up to us as a vista. The spiritual process of creativity, so vital for Russo as an artist, is conveyed to us, and we feel his joy, and his appreciation for the world's beauty as a gift.
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"White Light"
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"Sunset II"
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