Roy & Barbara Strassberg
Roy and Barbara Strassberg are ceramic artists living in Davidson, NC. After long careers as educators, they have retired from teaching and are pursuing their work on a full time basis in a large walkout studio overlooking a newly constructed kiln house, which houses a 34 cubic foot Bailey gas kiln. Both artists make functional pottery, sculpture, and sculptural vessels in a large, well-equipped 2000 square foot studio and showroom.
Before arriving in NC in 2001, Roy held academic appointments at Memphis State University, Minnesota State University, Mankato, and most recently at UNC Charlotte, where he was Chair of Art and Art History from 2001-2009. He had been Professor of Art and Chair at MSU, Mankato as well. Barbara has held academic appointments at MSU, Mankato, Bethany Lutheran College, Gustavus Adolphus College, and UNC Charlotte. In addition to teaching and educational administration, both artists have exhibited widely including over 200 exhibitions in local, regional, national and international venues. Their work has been widely disseminated and is included in many important private, corporate and public collections. Roy’s work in included in several museum collections as well as the art museum collection of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel, the pre-eminent repository for work related to the Holocaust in the world.
Sharon Dowell
My work captures the energy of place, the economic boom and downturn, and explores the theme of man vs. nature. I am interested in the documentation of memory and strive to find beauty in often overlooked structures and spaces. I incorporate the energy, the tension, and the emotions felt in the environment, from the instant when my feet were planted on the street, in a field, or on the edge of a balcony. At times, commentaries on the changing environment and political or social references surface in the work.
Carmella Jarvi
Carmella is known for her hauntingly beautiful oil and pastel paintings of women in water. She also enjoys teaching painting and marketing to other artists, and is the curator of the Gallery at Packard Place.
Diane Hughes
In response to a childhood uprooted by illness, frustrating
diagnosis, and the stresses of dis-ease, the physical power and
symbolic wisdom of “Trees” have become an enduring source of
inspiration in my photographic work. Drawn to the strength,
rawness, texture, shape, and human-like depth of older trees, the
core image always begins in black and white. I then obscure this
image with organic materials such as tea, dirt, raw vegetable
juice, olive oil and vinegars with the goal of creating color, texture,
a new physicality and an affirmation of health.
My aim is to explore new materials and modes of creating texture,
an enhancement of the work’s dimensionallity, and a deepening of
the work’s content through reflection on the experiences of my
young life and how they actually find their way into the work.
The more authentically rich my relationship is to self and my
expression, the greater the canvas will be impacted and thusly the
viewer..
Scott Partridge
I like to view my work not so much as deliberate motivated action, but rather the natural consequence of my presence in the world.
My genre can be most closely compared to early 20th century surrealism, in that the landscapes and inhabitants of consciousness figure prominently as themes and also as guiding forces that shape my style. It is difficult to assess how successfully I have mined the subconscious, however, and so I don’t make that pursuit the focal point of my activities.
Instead, my work is a means of establishing a personal vocabulary for experiences and feelings too particular, nuanced, or uncommon to have equivalent components in language. This personal glyphic milieu is made up of varied organic and biomorphic figures, entities, and worlds. The imagery may be vaguely associated with factual reality, but is more accurately classified as a visual representation of my reactions to reality, and my meta-reactions to those reactions.
My aesthetic instincts are directed by cues from nature, geometry, the personalities of shapes, as well as the precedents and insular logic a piece establishes for its self as it develops. I gravitate towards what I find beautiful, but also unsettling.
Kyle Worthy
The hallmarks of traditional landscape photography are realism and sense of place. Untethered Land is a departure from those traditions, seeking to remove such context so that the spirit of the land is all that remains. The resulting images capture places as they exist in memory, caught somewhere between reality and dream
Martique Lorray
I tell a story through image. My paintings are allegorical, earthy and darkly beautiful. I have a great curiosity for the human drama. Our motivations and relationships to one another are interesting to me. My artwork reflects this interest. The raw emotion of the story is the vital element to my artwork. It is the reason I create.
Erik Dahlager
Erik Dahlager’s gumoil prints. In the early 1990′s the gumoil printing process was developed by Karl P Koenig and is not to be confused with similar pre-modern processes such as gum bichromate, gum color, oil and bromoil printing. The gumoil process consists of several steps: first a positive transparency is contact printed onto gum-coated watercolor paper. Black oil paint is then worked into the paper, followed by etching the print in a bleach bath. Colored oils can now be worked into the paper followed by a final etching to remove any gum and reveal the white highlights. The process is crude and far removed from modern technology, and although the same image may be printed many times again, the results are different with each print. Pictured above is “Live Ocracoke” a work that Erik deems to be the nations largest known gumoil monoprint.
Tiffany Whitfield
Exploring sacred space provides a venue of understanding
spirituality beyond that of traditional means.
This exploration has allowed me the opportunity to broaden my
views of relationships both worldly and spiritually. The
traditional use of the vessel as a means of containment is a
starting point for my forms and imagery. It is important for me
to build the forms interacting with the images, paths and a sense
of life lived. This draws the viewer into the piece to explore the
inner layers. It also gives the piece a sense of weight both
physically and emotionally.
My images and vessels are often a hybrid of figurative shapes,
animal traits and horizon lines reminiscent of the southern
landscape. This creates a scale that offers a perspective of both
the intimacy and vastness of an environment.
I use color to express “enlightenment” and “purity” to emphasize
the importance of the interior layers. I often crowd the exterior
surface with multiple color schemes and/or rough textures to
portray a sense of life’s ability to overwhelm. By pairing the
works, I create a relationship, dialogue and interaction between
the forms.
My symbolic inspiration is drawn from water features, floral
forms and human characteristics. The characteristics is a symbol
of primal power and worldly time. The floral form is a symbol of
delicate life and the water is continuity throughout the piece;
together these forms coupled with the viewer’s imagination
create a sacred verses secular space.
Verna Witt
Pottery began as a means to create functional vessels for everyday use. I now enjoy stretching the limits of the clay to reach beyond the functional to create works that challenge the senses in both form and texture. My current work draws from my career as a textile designer. What started as a simple button at the collar of a vase has evolved into endless possibilities of ‘dressing up’ or ‘fastening down’ clay. Exploring the possibilities of incorporating other natural materials as reeds, pine needles, sea shells, and beads into my work allows me to experiment,” adds Witt. “However, the whole of the piece must be more than the sum of it’s parts. Harmony and beauty are more important than conventional prettiness. -Verna Witt
Jonathan K. Rice
Jonathan is editor and publisher of Iodine Poetry Journal, which he established in 2000.
Although he spends much of his time writing and editing, Jonathan is also a visual artist. He works primarily in acrylics on canvas, but also works with mixed media and assemblage. After Iodine Poetry Journal changed cover formats with the Fifth Anniversary Issue, Jonathan decided to feature his art on the cover of the magazine, garnering some attention. In a review, Philip Miller, writing for Literary Magazine Review, commented on an issue, “Its handsome cover…features a sophisticated fusion of post-modern textures and colors with mid-twentieth century non-objective abstraction.”
His work has been exhibited at Hart Witzen Gallery, Green Rice Gallery, and Jackson’s Java, a café in the University area of Charlotte. Some of his work has been featured in the online magazines The Pedestal and Referential Magazine.
to find out more about Jonathan visit his website at www.jonathankriceartist.com
Tim Sheaffer
The subject matter of my painting jumps all over the place, although there are a few recurring motifs. I like to take an idea and create a group of paintings that reflect the many different views of that particular moment. Each series is an experiment in theory of color, composition, or style. In the near future I am going to work on more city landscapes and how the things we build as a society reflect or obscure the landscape.
Henry Schreiber
I was born in Fairfax Virginia and spent my childhood in the suburbs of Washington DC, the mountains of West Virginia, and the gulf coast of Florida. After receiving my MFA from the University of Central Florida, I established a studio on a family farm in the Appalachian Mountains. Following my two years of learning the ways of the groundhog; I packed up my studio and moved to Charlotte, NC.
Aleandra Loesser
Specializing in oil figurative paintings Alexandra’s work is dynamic and compelling and though we don’t currently have a bio for her I’m sure you’ll agree that her work speaks volumes for its self.
Mary Digby
Mary’s profession as a graphic designer translates well into her oil paintings, they have a wonderful sense of whimsy that sure to bring a smile to your face with a simple glance.
