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Color of Reverie Color of Reverie is a wonderfully diverse grouping of contemporary painters working at the forefront of their medium. With an adept eye for form, the featured artists swathe their imagery in wonderfully rich colors to maximize both visual and emotional reactions. With influences ranging from historical events to the natural world, visitors will enjoy exploring and interpreting the messages so brilliantly expressed through the power of color.
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Katrin Alvarez
 
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German artist Katrin Alvarez’s mixed media works are both troubling and engaging, as they combine Salvador Dali’s surreal imagery and the jarring ruptures of Hannah Höch’s Dada collages. Most of Alvarez’s pieces incorporate two- and three-dimensional materials, creating a tension between surface and relief, representation and abstraction. This tension makes her artworks recognizable to a point, yet impossible to interpret completely.
This incongruity in Alvarez’s materials extends to the thematic contents of her work. She uses a surrealist’s vocabulary, dealing in the myths and archetypes of dreams and psychoanalysis. Yet amidst the images of modern society’s melancholy and dark psychic underbelly, Katrin Alvarez incorporates deeply personal narratives. She treats her private issues through her art, all the while appealing to culture-wide problems. Not only do her images depict her inner demons, the disjointed ways she juxtaposes these personal problems with cultural crises suggests that the two are fundamentally related. Representations of her small inner universe always seem to reflect the dynamics of the greater whole.
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"Unexpected"
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"Streetgirl"
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Jon Axelrod
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Jon Axelrod puts musical arrangements on canvas by deploying innumerable expressive forms. Their distinctly musical properties convey rhythm through their alternating shapes, and the varying silent spaces between them. The Florida native recently graduated from Pratt and lives in Brooklyn, where he also works in sculpture, drawing and photography. His paintings are extremely intricate and abstract, conveying movement and energy without depicting identifiable entities. These colorful forms, nonetheless, take on distinct characteristics of shape, weight and movement. The effect is of a choreographed dance of vaguely cubist abstractions over the canvas's surface.
Indeed, Axelrod also composes digital music, which then serves as inspiration for much of his visual artworks. Not surprisingly, then, his paintings are extremely expressive. Their titles and expressionistic properties create coherent meaning despite the canvases' abstraction. Through form, alternation, color and shading, Jon Axelrod visualizes the ideas expressed by his titles, while also offering viewers many other interpretations. His paintings' titles, then, become only one of the many ways his audience might hear his works.
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"Stem-Cell Stencil"
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"Forest Symphony"
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George J.D. Bruce
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Like strolling back in time, classically trained artist, George J.D. Bruce, is an erudite painter of the first degree, steeped in the traditional techniques of portraiture, landscape, and still life. George works in oils on modest-sized canvases and with an unassuming simplicity draws the viewer in to take pleasure in the arrangements of bright, cheerful bouquets and the play of shadows cast by folds of fabric. He applies paint with lush, confident strokes that reveal a sensitive eye for light and texture, while his sense of drama shines forth in breathtaking landscapes that feature sweeping rain clouds and awakening seas spurred by the oncoming storm.
Educated at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, George is a thirty-nine year member of the venerable Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London, where he has taken up multiple leadership roles in the organization, including president. George J.D. Bruce lives in England and works from his studios located in London and in the countryside of Suffolk.
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"The Gateway"
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"David's Roses"
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Patricia Guadarrama
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Patricia Guadarrama’s works are stunning to behold. Calming abstract designs, stylized color blending and purposeful edges, beckon the viewer to explore deeper uncovering a multi-layering of shades and textures. Utilizing a method that incorporates acrylic upon canvas and gold and silver papers, Patricia offers depth, complexity and intrigue that shimmer and radiate from the canvas. Art for Patricia Guadarrama is a means to express her moods and observations. Color plays a significant role, “Color is extremely important to me, because I believe that it represents happiness.” Each work utilizes a palette of just three basic colors of varying intensities and hues, signifying her three children and the inspiration they provide.
Born in Mexico City, Patricia Guadarrama inherited the joy of art from her Architect father. Her appreciation for art and her natural abilities have found numerous creative outlets throughout her life including a career in Graphic Design. Patricia.Guadarrama’s work has been honored at several expositions, galleries, and art fairs in Mexico, and her mural graces a major Ixtapa hotel.
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"Siempre A Ganar"
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"Simplement Viajar"
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Marina Harris
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Paintings by Marina Harris, born in Cyprus and currently based in Dubai, bear the legacy of her personal history. Her imagery of seascapes and boats recall her childhood home on the Mediterranean Sea, and her family's displacement when Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974. In oil paintings generally dominated by a single warm color, Marina pairs dreamlike imagery with expressive brush strokes and tones. The combined effects of her artistic style are of a lost past that can only be conjured through a combination of memories and fantasies.
Though this imagery of nostalgic longing takes root precisely in Marina’s experience of being rootless, her use of archetypal visual analogies makes her work widely accessible. Recurring motifs such as weathered boats and rocks, broken chains and faint horizons resonate with more universal experiences of displacement. Marina’s paintings testify to the complexity of personal narratives and the immense global forces that redirect them.
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"The Arrival"
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"The storm"
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Neil Masterman
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The self-taught British painter Neil Masterman employs multiple styles in his acrylic works, combining impressionism, expressionism, abstraction and fauvism (to name his most overt allusions). His paintings are dominated by strong colors, generally in a wide variety rather than within a single hue. Working with the expressive qualities of his bold colors, Masterman often forgoes minute details, conveying emotion, texture and movement through juxtapositions of strong color planes.
Throughout these mingling styles and colors, Masterman maintains a stable and recognizable aesthetic all his own. This personal style emerges from the uncanny impact of his paintings: at first glance their allusions to earlier styles make them seem familiar, but further engagement reveals their originality. Masterman’s works do not simply allude to preceding artistic traditions. He renews their immediacy in several ways: by placing stronger colors into jarring proximity, by choosing certain extremely contemporary subjects, finally by creating his own hybrid mode through these multiple styles brought into dialogue within his canvases.
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"Caribbean Sunset"
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"Norwich Mish Mash"
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Arlene Nedeljkovic
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South Africa-born Australian painter Arlene Nedeljkovic explores themes of duality and productive tension in canvases featuring energetic drip patterns against abstract compositions, initially evoking an imaginary Pollock-Rothko collaboration. These divergent techniques often adopt a figure-background relationship, with trickled colors playing across more muted patterns. Frequently, however, a synergy develops between these initially autonomous elements. Movements explicitly documented in the paint drops appear implicitly in the surrounding forms. Nedeljkovic invites this dialogue, rubbing dribbled patterns and using various treatments to blur distinctions between her two predominant modes of application.
The effect is of breaking down oppositions between different modes of understanding lived experience. Nedeljkovic's paintings explore recent concepts such as string theory – which her linear forms echo visually – positing multiple and interwoven realities. Where her chaotic patterns of dripped paint suggest one way of seeing, the full backdrops offer another complimentary approach. By engaging such conceptual frameworks for structuring the shape and content of our world, Nedeljkovic develops her own hybridic form.
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"Dappled Forest"
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"The Singing Violin"
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Alexander Oukrainskiy
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Alexander Oukrainskiy’s brilliantly hued works portray a vital optimism that characterizes his overall artistic spirit. Blending abstract and representational styles, Oukrainskiy produces stunning visions of bold color, strong gesture, and vibrant movement. In his paintings imbued with a feeling of joy and optimism, Oukrainskiy shares his enthusiasm for art making with the viewer, placing his artistic mark firmly within the work. He aims to connect directly to the viewer using his own unique and active voice and his paintings are a testament to the humanistic power of art. An accomplished muralist, Oukrainskiy shows a virtuosic manipulation of abstracted symbology, which when combined with his unusual color palette engages the viewer visually and psychologically.
Born in Moscow, Russia, Alexander Oukrainskiy has completed studies at several prestigious institutions including the LaGuardia School of the Visual and Performing Arts, Rutgers University, and the Academy of Fine and Industrial Arts in St. Petersburg. The artist currently lives and works in both the US and Russia.
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![The]()
"The"L""
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"Awakening"
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Robert Polansky
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Slovakian artist Robert Polansky's thirty year career covers conceptual, digital and graphic art in multiple styles. Appropriately, his recent acrylic paintings are most influenced by abstract expressionism, but bare traces of other styles and media. Polansky's works evoke material weight and kinetic movement simultaneously. He creates impressions of frenetic dynamism with bright strokes of streaming colors and simmering backdrops. This effect results partly from his paint application, but also from his ongoing practice of revision. Polansky continuously returns to paintings to alter and re-shape them, scraping and gouging their surfaces.
The layered effects of this process harkens back to Polansky's conceptual work. They also provide clear evidence of the artist's touch, evoking the painter whose influence he cites as most significant, Jackson Pollock. Polansky certainly recalls the American modernist in many works, but his recurring geometric motifs also bare traces of Kandinsky and, in his portraits particularly, cubism. While alluding to several preceding styles, Polansky's process and final effect are entirely his own.
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"Sam"
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"You"
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Marc van der Leeden
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Quick brushstrokes, simplicity of design and the development of negative white space allow me to create loose and dynamic watercolor paintings in the context of architectural and landscape subjects. My limited palette of raw umber and Prussian blue serves to unite my paintings, hopefully evoking an emotional response from the viewer.
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"Architecture"
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"The Bungalow"
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Sonia Maria Yinsey
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Yinsey's art traverses genres from the figurative to the abstract, equally influenced by abstraction, street art, classical study of form, and even surrealism. Yinsey plays with shapes and colors to create pictures which unfold slowly and perpetually. She uses primarily oils to create a generous gradation in a selection of warm and vibrant tones. The range of shadows gives her figures a sense of mystery and mystique; and her abstracts a wonderful fullness of volume with a definitively high art finish. The effect is at once forceful and light, full of dimension and sometimes texture.
Through art, Yinsey seeks to both express inner turmoil and find a simpler world, a world where "talents, sensibility, perception, creativity and geniality are recognized." Originally a dedicated student of criminology and an investigator of artificial intelligence, Yinsey worked as a private detective before becoming a professional artist. Yinsey has exhibited work all over Spain, and holds degrees from the Universities of Salamanca and Barcelona.
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"Generacion"
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"Tenues Crisálidas Buscando una Fuga de Color"
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