Cutting through the ideology of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, my paintings uproot the myth of a world polarized between pure wilderness and urban wasteland. Though it has shifted with time, this myth continues to influence our values and biases. It promises the existence of a distant paradise to which we can escape while obscuring the realities of environmental issues.
By borrowing and subverting traditions from past landscape artists, I use levity to challenge this notion of division and explore the ways in which humans and nature interact. The moments I depict are anchored together by contradictions. Beauty clashes with humor, and anxiety is tempered by nostalgia. Unnatural hues push my landscapes past the bounds of reality and the quotidian to the realm of absurdity. I present a relationship between nature and humans that is not of opposition or division, but of complication, anxiety, affection, and humor.
Margaux Albiez currently has no website.
Born in 1981, St. Ann, Jamaica. Alicia Brown is a contemporary realist oil painter. She received her BFA in Painting, and a diploma in Art Education from Edna Manley College of the Visual Performing Arts and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. She has been a recipient of the Dawn Scott Memorial award from the Jamaica Biennial, two Elizabeth Foundation Grants, the Joan Brady Foundation Grant and an LCU Foundation Grant. Alicia has attended residencies at the Leipzig International Art Program in Germany and the Cutty Hunk Island Artists’ residency in Massachusetts. Exhibitions have included the Jamaica Biennial, Prizm Art Fair Miami, Jamaica Spiritual London, and the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been featured in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, American Art Collector, Painting the Figure Now SHOUT MIAMI, ARTIT voice of Artists, Caribbean Quarterly Journal and other publications.
Marianne Chapel is an artist, an instructor of Fine Art at the Ringling College of Art and Design, and the founder of a new art gallery with art studios in Sarasota called SPAACES. At SPAACES, Marianne specializes in high caliber, new forms of contemporary art and community collaborations. She has her Masters in Fine Art Painting from Indiana University and has been instructing art at the college level for over 20 years. Marianne has an extensive exhibition and grant record, and a working art studio in downtown Sarasota. She is currently practicing a form of art new to Sarasota called Socially Engaged Art. She is a dedicated advocate for artists and is building SPAACES to provide better working conditions and studios for Sarasota artists.
Jeanne Chinnis was born and raised in Wilmington, N.C., where she developed an avid interest in drawing, painting and sculpture. She studied Fine Art and Interior Design at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Fla., and the New York School of Interior Design. After continuing her studies at the Institute Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and with Wolf Kahn at the National Academy School of Art in New York City, Jeanne settled in the Sarasota area. She had her own interior design firm, Jeanne Chinnis Interiors, working in that field full time while also continuing to paint. She was inspired by living for 22 years on the beautiful and largely undeveloped Braden River in Manatee County, just north of Sarasota. She worked closely with her brother, Rusty Chinnis, who was a contractor primarily on Sarasota’s Siesta Key. Her life and work also were strongly influenced by her experience caring for a special-needs daughter, and she continues to design the interiors of new buildings at The Haven, a residential facility for children and adults in Sarasota. She has exhibited her work at The Studio at Gulf and Pine on Anna Maria Island, M Gallery on Palm Avenue, the Longboat Key Art Center, and the Fine Arts Society of Sarasota’s Creators & Collectors Galleria at Ringling College. Her artistic passions center on capturing the beauty of Florida’s landscapes and exploring the human form through female figurative drawing and painting.
Chris Cournoyer studied fine art at the University of South Florida. He is a 2d artist focusing on Painting and Printmaking. He is currently working on a Master of Teaching in Art Education K-12. He is a Native American from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, born in Nashville and raised in Florida. He attended undergraduate school at Saint Leo, transferred to the USF School of Fine and Performing Arts and received a BA in Studio Art and a minor in Jazz Studies. During that time, Chris took a 9-month technical course in Violin Repair, and began a job refurbishing string school instrument fleets. Chris plays Bass in a duo called the Jazzberries and a classical Orchestra. Much of his work relates to his culture and spirituality and themes of recovery and mental illness as he has a diagnosis of Bipolar 1 and Schitzo-effective disorder. He is also a local double bassist and performs in both Jazz and Classical Idioms. Recently he completed a technical program in violin repair. He hopes to bring his talents and abilities to enhance education in the arts for the youth.
Christopher currently has no website.
Joan Libby Hawk, multidisciplinary artist based in Sarasota, FL, uses many materials to investigate visual questions and express her incisive point of view through clay vessels, sculpture, paintings on shaped canvas and paper crafted into three dimensions. Intrigued by relationships in space, color and texture, Joan’s art achieves a complex candor and hard-won elegance. Joan says, “I see myself in the continuum of artists recording and responding to human experience, innovating art objects for life’s purposes and rituals. The opportunity to manipulate and stretch materials to create contemporary art makes for a challenging and joyful workday.” Intentionally, her work nods back towards antiquity but is as comfortable in the future as in the past. She fashions engaging contemporary ‘artifacts’ that invite viewers to take a close look, touch and hold textured, handmade objects. An artist and advocate, Joan’s multidisciplinary practice often reflects compelling human rights concerns.
Matt Hollis creates abstract/organic, soft sculpture and large scale installations in eye-popping colors and oddly-appealing textures. He has shown work and created installations in galleries all around the Washington D.C area as well as Los Angeles, California where he attended graduate school. He earned a BA in Studio Art from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2003. After living and working in his fantastical jungle of a studio in the historic 52 O Street Studios in Washington DC for over 13 years, he relocated to California to earn his MFA at Otis College of Art & Design, graduating with an Academic Excellence award in 2019. Matt now lives in Sarasota where he is eagerly getting involved with the local art community and has added ceramics to the many media he employs in his practice.
Nicholas Keen pursued a successful career in Technology in the banking sector. Concurrently, to pursue his artistic goals, Nicholas studied figure drawing under Olga Nielsen. Nicholas supplemented his classes with weekly figure drawing studios in the northern Delaware countryside, helping to coordinate these sessions as needed. He started to paint, first in watercolors and then in oils. He entered his work in the local art center shows, winning first and second prizes at the non-professional level for his figure drawings.
Now living in Lakewood Ranch, Florida, Nicholas seeks to expand his technical expertise and range of work. He continues his studies, most recently under Stephen Perkins. His goal is to further develop his skills in figures, portraits and landscapes so that he can build a body of work that is narrative driven.
Nicholas Keen currently has no website.
Cassia Kite is an interdisciplinary artist who created Soundstitching, a multimedia project that transforms color from a hand-stitched image into a musical composition that can be interpreted by a musician and/or performance artist. Kite has collaboratively produced large-scale work for chamber ensemble and dancers using color-coded graphic scores derived from her hand-stitched tapestries. Kite’s work was premiered at KANEKO in Omaha, Nebraska in July of 2017. She has been featured as an experimental composer and visual artist in music festivals, museums and universities. Kite has been awarded artist in residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in 2018 and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences Residency Program in 2019. She is the recipient of the Paul J. Smith Excellence in Fibers Award from the Fiber Art Network 2018 and the Dixon Ticonderoga Award of Excellence from the Florida Art Education Association in 2019.
Jie (Jay) Li attended the Catholic University of America for his graduate studies in cello performance in 1987. He freelanced and taught in the D.C. area until he became the principal cellist of the Liaoning Symphony Orchestra and later a cello professor at the Shenyang Conservatory and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Jie now lives in Sarasota, Florida, and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with his wife, Tracey.
Jie has loved drawing since childhood and never gave it up, even while attending music school. Although self-trained as a portrait artist, he has been drawing and painting portraits for years. More recently, he has become involved in plein air painting and large-scale oil compositions. An avid admirer of great artists such as Sorolla, Sargent, Zorn, Lazlo, Repin, and many modern masters, Jie is constantly striving to capture form, light, color, texture, and character in his subjects—whether portraits, landscapes, animals, figures, or still lifes—bringing the beauty of the world to canvas or paper.
Jie works with charcoal, pen and ink, pastel, watercolor, and oil. He currently works at SPAACES in Sarasota.
Having lived in Manhattan for thirty years, Carol Lewis developed an appreciation of architecture and its elements. Her current work is a distillation of those elements. Within a basic structure and working in oil, she pursues variations in an attempt to find balance between chaos and calm using color, pattern and foreign objects of personal significance.
Ellen Mason continues to explore her interest in the landscape. Although not site specific, her paintings on canvas and paper using acrylic, oil and conte-crayon evoke her time spent in Connecticut and Florida.
The abstract approach she implements in capturing the essence of her natural surroundings, results in passages dealing with mark making, tension, and references to organic forms.
Jessica Mowery is a practicing contemporary artist with a Spaaces studio. She has a varied professional background that has included selling vehicular armor, running an accomplished interior architecture studio and is currently a cryptocurrency analyst. Jessica is also the co-founder of a private NFT investment fund launching in 2022. The fund is committed to bringing together unique talent and licensing opportunities for artists, creators and investors. Jessica will provide a broad overview of the NFT market. She will break things down in layman’s terms explaining the technical basics, why NFT’s are important to the art market and how to comfortably purchase your first NFT.
Instagram: @jessica_e_mowery
Larysa Myers studied drawing and painting at Grand Central Academy and textile design at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and developed a love for classical drawing methods and pattern making. After leaving the city and moving to Beacon, NY she started a family and began a new body of work focusing on drawing. Recent exhibitions include “Second Nature” at Dinner Gallery, New York, NY (2024), “Aura” at Wilder Gallery, London (2023) “Paintings of Common Objects” at Fortnight Institute, New York, NY (2023), “Charta” on the Fortnight Institute Salon (2022), “I Walk Through Walls” on MePaintsMe (2022), “Night Scenes” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY (2021), and “Soft Temple” at Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY (2019). Her work has been featured in Maake Magazine, ArtMaze Mag, and Southeast Review.
Growing up in Oklahoma, I found refuge in the magnificent sunsets and storms of the Great Plains. There I discovered my love of the purely aesthetic/abstract/wordless experience that I express through my artwork. Working in various media including water-mixable oils and colored markers, I focus on color, pattern, and strict systems to develop non-representational paintings. My work highlights the gap between “what is” and “what could be”. It is an homage to hope and possibility.
Laine holds a BS in math from the University of Tennessee and a BFA in painting from the University of South Florida. Her work is in the collections of RBC Wealth Management, SRQ Media, and Hillsborough Community College. She is the recipient of the 2017 John Ringling Towers Fund and Hermitage Artist Retreat residency award.
Dottie Petrilak is a contemporary artist whose work blends modern techniques with imaginative current themes. Traveling across the US and abroad has given her a rich cultural experience that deeply influences her artistic style. Her paintings often explore light, texture and movement with a focus on rich color palettes. Her creative vision ranges from abstract seascapes in expressive hues to Impressionist inspired interpretations of nature inviting the familiar and the unexpected.
Dottie has a BS in Interior Design from Florida State University. She also spent time working toward a Fine Art degree at University of Tennessee Chattanooga. She has painted murals and commissioned art pieces throughout her career. She continues to develop her practice through exploration, experimentation and visualization. She shares her evolving body of work with art enthusiasts working from her studio at SPAACES in Sarasota, Florida.
Dottie Petrilak’s website is under construction
Claudia Ryan was born in Washington, D.C. in 1952. She received a Certificate of Fine Art from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California in 1984, a BFA from the Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida in 2002 and an MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida in 2006. She explains her artistic approach as follows: “I don’t start with a final image in mind, although sometimes I have a feeling about what I want to come out. I work until something does, or I keep trying. I expect failure. I get anxious, so I do something. I am drawn to my own private world.” She lives in Bradenton, Florida and works in Sarasota, Florida at SPAACES studios.