The Revelry of Energy This collection of sublime abstract works is from a select group of artists who are crafting a very personal artistic language and technique. Very modern in their appeal, the paintings comprising The Revelry of Energy display a sense of boundless imagination, while peering deep within the overlooked crevices of our everyday perceptions. The brilliant colors and unique styles on view explore the artists’ personal narratives and visionary experiences.
|
Suzy Andron
 
|
Following in the tradition of the artists of the Renaissance, Suzy Andron incorporates triptychs and polytychs in many of her paintings. She has advanced the art form through her experimentation with multiple geometric shapes and imaginative compositions. Her multi-paneled, multi-dimensional paintings are layered with color, texture and abstract shapes. Though each panel is permanently connected to the others within the piece, Andron’s work communicates a sense of freedom and movement with sweeping strokes and vibrant palettes. Andron’s use of multiple canvases gives her the liberty to take each piece in multiple directions, while still maintaining synergy and balance between the panels. While each panel is rich with content and could be exhibited solely, the combination of the panels to create one piece makes a dynamic, bold statement and a lasting impact on the viewer.
Suzy Andron earned her bachelor's degree in Fine Art and Art Education at The Pratt Institute in New York. She currently resides in North Carolina where she works in her personal art studio.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"L'Chayim"
|
|
"Emerging"
|
|
|
|
Meghan Oare
|
Dynamic and vibrant paintings by Meghan Oare resemble a continuous cycle of emotions that we experience as humans. Oare's ability to have faith in the universality of all emotions enables her to create psychological landscapes that speak directly to us without language; and yet, there is an order in her composition, a structure to her "controlled chaos." She creates her work from materials at her disposal such as glass, acrylic, house and oil paints on canvas, masonite and other alien surfaces. Her ideas are represented by dripping, spattering, smearing, throwing, as well as using traditional brushwork, which create layers of emotional inquiry both aesthetic and personal that she entrusts to the viewer. Her interpretation is bypassed allowing the paintings to be free from limiting criticism. This liberal thinking frees space for the paintings to develop the structure needed for what Oare refers to as "open for the viewers' interpretation."
These interactive paintings are works of stunning originality and complexity, which inspire contemplation and aesthetic dialogue.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"Gerhard"
|
|
"James"
|
|
|
|
Pilar Pérez-Prado
|
Pilar Pérez-Prado's pure abstractions of color and shape recall the serene sublimity of the Color Field Painters, while possessing a vital energy comparable to the Abstract Expressionist Action Painters. Pérez-Prado is interested not only in the ways the mind perceives images, but the ways in which the memory alters and reshapes these recollections over time. Conjuring works from repeated images to which the artist refers as "textures," Pérez-Prado's paintings come alive with a rhythmic visual energy that is akin to the auditory sensations of music. Each canvas emits a different vibration, from a legato line of monochromatic shades, to the percussive clash of jagged shapes of umbers and reds, to the staccato repetition of square upon square.
Born in Asturias, Spain, Pilar Pérez-Prado is a trained sound engineer who went through a profound artistic transformation while residing in Barcelona for two years. The artist now lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"At the End Everything Matches"
|
|
"Faces on Broken Glass"
|
|
|
|
Viviana Puello
|
Booming with dynamic, glowing, sweating colors, Colombian-American painter Viviana Puello's canvases range from expressionistic landscapes and cityscapes to completely abstracted compositions. Irrespective of the ostensible subjects in her works, Puello deals in temperatures, movements and sounds arranged within grid-like geometries. Her swooping, scratching, simmering palette of warm, frenetic yellows and reds and more calming, gliding blues and cool greens give her art an edgy multi-sensorial dimension that shifts and mutates as it leaps across different parts of each canvas. The whole creates a sense of operatic build up and accelerating motion, of momentum gathering with each successive brush stroke.
Explaining the intense liveliness of her imagery, Puello cites the formative nature of childhood experiences – the bright colors, sounds and smells of her coastal hometown – as a guiding aesthetic principle. Accordingly, her paintings invest everyday scenes (city streets, a chair, a river, gardens) with the magical buzz of memory, of songs half-forgotten, of smells and textures amplified through the intensity of colors and shapes.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"Bay at the Nile"
|
|
"Windows III"
|
|
|
|
Chris Spuglio
|
Chris Spuglio's daring, multilayered explorations into such raw emotions as rage, loss and despair straddle the line between abstraction and surrealism, while also taking a near-sculptural approach to the canvas itself. He scratches into his paintings, adding mixed-media textures, and portrays objects such as nails and stones against turbulent backgrounds of deep crimson, aquamarine or midnight blue. He makes particular use of strong vertical lines, whether in the form of savage lightning-like jagged streaks, or thorny strokes from the tip of his brush. The theme of death-within-life is strong in Chris' work, as he frequently uses dreams as raw material and chooses subjects which suggest a deep absence.
There is a brooding, severe subtext to Chris' work beyond the complex visuals of his paintings, and it is the skilled creation of deep-toned backgrounds in their support of his ecstatic brushwork which creates this pervasive tension. As Chris Spuglio endures the artist's turbulent emotional territory, he presents us with his impressions of that rough terrain.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"Hells Kitchen"
|
|
"Eyes of the Tribe"
|
|
|
|
Graeme Swanson
|
Color dictates Graeme Swanson’s understated, atmospheric oil paintings. Soft expanses of reds, yellows or blues give his work an emotive, transfixing quality; his paintings immediately invite meditation. While influenced by places, architecture, nature and history, Swanson tends to record a mood more than he records an actuality. He is attuned to sunlight and to the nature of his surroundings but he abstracts the representational moments that initially inspire him, so that reality becomes more ephemeral and experiential. It is the physical spaces depicted in his paintings that primarily provide the underlying structure for Swanson’s exploration of how colors, painterly gestures and textures can harmoniously work together to create a memorable visual experience.
Swanson, who lives and works in Aberdeen, Scotland, graduated from Gray's School of Art in 1979 and received a Post Graduate Teaching Certificate from Northern College in Aberdeen. His work was recently on display at the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, Mall, London.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"Kasbah"
|
|
"Adobe"
|
|
|
|
Laurie Vaughn
|
Laurie Vaughn’s energetic, painterly and vibrant canvases incorporate her social activism, cultural consciousness and informed art historical understanding with her unique style of Afro-Expressionism. Vaughn’s strong, gestural brushstrokes and aggressive color pallet evidence the influence of Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning, while her use of simplified iconography and rhythmic pattern recalls traditional African textiles, particularly those of the Bakuba people. Vaughn applies acrylic, enamel, and other mixed mediums to the canvas in large, sweeping movements, creating a dynamic visual drama, which first confronts the viewer with its sheer aesthetic power and subsequently draws him in with topical subject matter. Vaughn’s most recent works have come to be deeply influenced by spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and reflect an awakening of consciousness and soulful presence.
Descended from parents actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement, Vaughn has naturally inherited a socially aware spirit which imbues her artwork. Having lived in New York, Florida, and Ghana, Vaughn exhibits her work internationally.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"Tightrope Walker II"
|
|
"Mother and Daughter Shopping at the Mall"
|
|
|
|
Bill Watson
|
Santa Fe is a place of art, science, fact, mythology, spiritualism, history, and great cultural diversity that stimulates my imagination. These stimuli, when combined with my background in science and investigations of herbal medicines, and talks with shamans in remote areas of the world, define my approach to art. I create a body of work with bold colors, swirling lines, connectivity, and rhythms, and my paintings often utilize animal or spirit forms as subjects. These representations frequently are variations of folk tales or beliefs of native populations in the Americas. I want my bright acrylics to capture your attention, and the content to cause you to pause, reflect and sometimes laugh.
|
|
click to enlarge
|
|
"On the Town"
|
|
"We are Not Alone"
|
|
|
|
