THE PASTOR'S OFFICE by Jason Stark
“I am a firm believer that every picture tells a story, and should, as the work of every artist, evoke emotion. There is neither lens wide enough nor film vivid enough to capture the true beauty of God’s presentation of nature. For me, this is the reason that we as artists will die unfulfilled and longing to take one more shot.”
Beginning his self-education the summer of 1981, Stark focused his thirty-five dollar Zeiss-Ikon on the ordinary and mundane scenes surrounding him. Never achieving the razor-sharp, technically-perfect style of his idol, Ansel Adams, a new style, part documentary, part social statement, emerged. Social commentary became Stark's subject for the next several years. Highly acclaimed in creative circles, his work lacked the necessary marketability for the New South. Photographic and technical skills were not wasted. Over the next many years, he worked his way through the graphic arts and commercial printing field by interpreting and creating publishable imagery dictated by art directors and marketing VP's. Now with thirty-plus years of practical experience, Stark is reentering the scene as one of the oldest, most experienced "emerging" photographic artists.
The Pastor’s Office is the first image in a series documenting the decline and decay of a once vibrant Arkansas community. “Poverty, economic depression, and landmark decay have not changed. We have.”
After holding, then inhaling a copy of Stark's Images of Perception Vol. 1-Issue 1-January2012, an extraordinary collection of museum-quality art, you'll find yourself forgetting to exhale. I highly recommend it to anyone savvy enough to know Stark is one of this century's photography masters, sure to join the ranks of Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, and Margaret Bourke-White.
Stark and his wife, Ju, own and operate a small advertising agency in northeast Arkansas. They are currently preparing for a solo exhibition, Images of Perceptions, set for spring 2012.
View Stark's work at magcloud.com, behance.net, and imagesofperceptions
ALAINE BENARD
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"My interest in primitive art plays an important role in creating my art. Each weathered piece conveys a history. I find sophistication in the simple lines and forms used by past civilizations. Some of my charcoal lines seem to unravel, while other forms contain bold marks that add strength. Each painting evolves in an unexpected manner, unfolding and coming together."
Klein, who earned her B.F.A. from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, is a fine arts painter who works with oil and mixed media. With Forever, she offers a bold, primordial vision of form, color, line, shape and volume. It is a complexity of creation that serves to stimulate the viewer’s senses at deep aesthetic levels.
Lee works at her studios in Saint Louis, Missouri, and Santa Barbara, California. She is currently exhibiting at the Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary Fine Art Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming and the Watergate Gallery in Washington, D. C. Her works can be found in fine art galleries throughout the United States, as well as corporate and private collections internationally. A 2010 edition of Homestead Magazine featured Lee Klein’s paintings in the White House.
Visit her at leeklein & artmo.com.
STEPHEN CRAIG ROWE
stephenpaintingstudio, paintingstudio, stephenrowepainter
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WALK by Manfred Juengling
Manfred Juengling is a fine arts painter who signs his work as Bluebird. Born in Germany, he has resided in Tehran, Nairobi, Lagos, Douala, Moscow, Karachi, and London, in addition to other cities and countries. His experience of diverse cultures gives an international feel to his works.
walk is an evocative optical illusion of light created by the movement and mixture of its stimulating colors. One can literally see the longitudes and latitudes, the topography and intensity of Juengling's sojourns. A former aircraft engineer, Juengling infuses this acrylic on canvas with airiness and the feeling of flight.
His most recent exhibitions have been in Geneva and Hachenburg, Germany. He has been greatly influenced by Kandinsky, Dali, and Picasso. Manfred currently lives in Barcelona and Santiago de Chile.
View more of Juengling's work at skyart and his books at lulu.com.
STEPHEN CRAIG ROWE
stephenpaintingstudio, paintingstudio, stephenrowepainter
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WINDOW OF SPRING by Julieann Nordstrom
Window of Spring by Julieann Nordstrom illuminates, literally, the generational expressions of hope that give this photograph a spring-like feel of renewal and promise. Its classic composition, color, and quality of light are reminiscent of an Andrew Wyeth painting. Nordstrom’s vision allows for her subjects to be viewed as real and symbolic at the same time, evoking from the viewer an instant and intimate connection. Nordstrom is a fine art photographer who lives in a cottage on a polo farm near Atlanta, GA. At an early age, her father began instructing her in photographic techniques, which led to a life-long passion for the camera. Her portfolio holds an extensive and varied body of images and subjects ranging from landscapes, wildlife, farm-settings and equines, to portraits and family.
When not immersing herself in nature, Nordstrom is off in pursuit of whatever captures her artist’s eye through the camera lens, transforming it with her own style, care, and grace.
View more of her fine art photography at janordstrom and juleannnordstrom, or connect with her on Facebook
or YouTube.
STEPHEN CRAIG ROWE
stephenpaintingstudio, paintingstudio, stephenrowepainter
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Winter 2011
Life Cycle is a bas relief in clay and is part of James Day's Life Cycle series. This intricately carved mask is appealing because of its complex simplicity, which causes the viewer to pause in absorbing and exploring the heavy lines that move and flow almost continuously through the piece. Struck with a visual poetic response, first to its one eye open and then one eye closed, the viewer's own eye and thoughts are drawn within and without, an exchange that is paramount as one views fine art, which the piece certainly is.
Day was introduced to the fine arts at an early age through the influence of his mother, an accomplished sculptor. As a child, he received hands-on experience while watching her work in her studio and has carried this love of art throughout his own life. Day is first a sculptor who concentrates his efforts on the creation of abstract and surreal art in clay. Like any classically trained artist, he is also well versed in painting, drawing, various mixed media, as well as being the founder of the website Art of Day.
Day's favored artists are the classic sculptors Bernini, Michelangelo, and others in that vein, but it is the work of Picasso that inspired him to realize he could (with such a strong foundation in the arts) move on and create new works of his own.
More of James Day's work may be seen here.
STEPHEN CRAIG ROWE
stephenpaintingstudio, paintingstudio, stephenrowepainter
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Fall 2010
YELLOW PALM SEED POD by Robert Neff
Yellow Palm Seed Pod is the work of Robert Neff, a photographic artist whose contemporary images transcend traditional photography and cause the viewer to experience the relationship of art and design in a manner that is most pleasing.
The initial visual impact of Neff's art is stunning. One is drawn into the piece to experience an elegant design connecting the eye and mind in perception. There, a rather poetic connection is made in a space between the words and the seemingly complex image, becoming a unique part of the whole.
Robert Neff employed a technique that he created, Kaleidoscopography, to produce this print. He is a photographer, contemporary artist and poet/writer located in St. Petersburg Florida.
STEPHEN CRAIG ROWE
stephenpaintingstudio, paintingstudio, stephenrowepainter
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There is something profoundly disorientating about Jock Hunter's photograph of Tossa de Mar, Spain. The slight blur and the shape of the trees give the scene an almost dizzying stilled movement. The piercing, overexposed dots of light not only dazzle but provide a light-source that gives the illusion that the entire piece is staged - perhaps even a miniature. And, with its Grimshaw-esque moonlit sky and its Cezanne-like tumble of abstracted buildings, one would be forgiven for mistaking the image for an oil painting. Even when considered in photographic terms, there is distinct uncertainty as to whether the piece is a snap taken on a hot Spanish evening or a carefully rendered sample of the unique and inspiring Spanish night. In summary, Hunter's photograph seems as urgently rendered as it is engineered and we, the viewers, cannot resist its spellbinding mystery.
LIAM WILKINSON
3 Lights Gallery, Modern Haiga, Notebook
I MADE THE RAIN by Penny Goring
“I make odd machines I call stories. I make odd machines I call pictures. I make odd machines I call sculptures. I make,” says Penny Goring – painter, sculptor, writer and creator of all sorts of everything.
This dedication to artistic expression is reminiscent of what the New York Times said of the poet John Ashbery: “[he] is a collector within his poems, assembling curiosities and profundities, jokes, confessions, tricks, inventories of objects, the names of small-time actors, the names of films, the names of flowers, and so on.” – a description that could very easily be applied to the last half-century of visual art.
Penny Goring is very much a part of that world – she is an artist whose work, and whose artistic philosophy, is firmly embedded in a willingness to let everything in. “Cinema usherette, deep-sea diver - I'm interested in how we think,” she remarked in a recent interview. I Made The Rain is a collage by someone whose thought process and expression is suited to the piecing together of life’s indiscriminate offerings. In the tradition of Schwitters, Hamilton, Blake and Rivers, Goring offers us another piece of her existence, made entirely of pieces of her existence.
Surely this is where the many branches of the arts become entangled? Whether with word or paint, paper or stone, we are expressing ourselves by cutting and sticking, no matter what "odd machine" we wind up building.
More about Penny Goring and her work can be found online at Twitter and Temporary Passport.
LIAM WILKINSON
3 Lights Gallery, Modern Haiga, Notebook
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Winter 2010
BARN DOOR by Stephen Craig Rowe
His paintings are abstract, his palette vibrant and the movement of his brush lively. And yet, in these bold and seemingly energetic pieces, there is an underlying calm. At his website, Rowe mentions his love for the poetry of Dylan Thomas, which isn’t surprising – while Thomas’s work played with abstraction, one notes the constant presence of the serenity of the poet’s Welsh landscape, particularly the sea and coastline of his birthplace.
While Thomas’s Under Milk Wood is a pulsating work, permeated with images from the dreams of its characters, its setting is a small, serene Welsh village. Similarly, in Rowe’s Barn Door, one may sense unrest, but the turbulent nature of this piece, with its bold, rusty reds and sharp blacks and whites, seems to be performing against a quiet, almost tranquil backdrop. It may put one in mind of the scars left by time on an old door – the violence of rust on metal or rot in wood – but it would seem that Rowe cannot disguise his own love, or even longing, for peace and tranquility.
Perhaps this is why his website, as it appears on one's screen, is tenderly backed by a gentle folk tune. Rowe's work reminds us that life may be a struggle, perforated now and again by strife and loss, but standing back from it for a short time may reveal a quiet beauty in what many would perceive as disorder and confusion.
LIAM WILKINSON
3 Lights Gallery, Modern Haiga
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Fall 2009
PENZAI by Francisco
Still a major branch of Chinese popular arts, the creation of miniature
landscapes via the potting of dwarfed trees is now a familiar sight in the
Western world. Penzai translates as ‘plant in a pot’ and in Francisco’s piece,
entitled ‘Penzai’, the miniature tree is set against the light and shade of the
deep purple background, creating in itself a vivid, abstract landscape.
The shape and detail of the plant, almost caught in a quiet explosion of earthy
colour, crossing the threshold between the two contrasting shades of the
background, is as expressive as Pollock’s approach to his canvas. The central
form of the tree is reminiscent of Joan Mitchell’s brush work, as are the
purples, reds and greens that give this piece its unique ambience. However, the
‘action’ in this work, the movement and the articulation is the work of nature
itself – but a nature that is, thanks to the art of Penzai, a collaboration
between man and the natural world.
Francisco, originally from Venezuela, is a resident of Asheville, North Carolina. Whether he's painting (oil, acrylic, etc.), sketching, designing a home, or taking photographs, he enjoys the creative process. His work can be seen and purchased at his blog, One A Day, where the goal is to produce and publish a unique piece daily.
LIAM WILKINSON