CAA

In my head my paintings are about my need to connect to a landscape and a desire to bridge the constructed gap between humans and nature, between Ajax and excrement. That is how I think about painting. What I do is: paint over, scrape back down, veil, obliterate, unearth, and restate. I am a process based painter. I respond to what is in front of me - color, marks, the rectangle with its surface and edges.

My paintings inhabit their own unique space, while drawing from numerous sources, both traditional and contemporary. Straddling the line between abstract and representational imagery, my work contains elements of refined craft while also embracing an intuitive technique and a certain amount of crudeness. The imagery leads to a subconscious terrain, where elemental forces offer insight to the struggles and joys of an earthly existence.

From the time I began making non-objective work I found it necessary to work within self- imposed parameters. After a while I began to chaff at those restrictions and more elements were slowly introduced. For me, this is the crux of good painting- the powerful contrast of the need for boundaries with the need to go beyond them. But not only go beyond the self imposed rules in increments---to need the parameters, and yet want at the same time, to exceed them by miles and miles. The tension created around a need to include everything and nothing is what keeps the act of painting interesting and relevant.

Working on a multitude of paintings at a time; Karl Bielik’s brew of abstractions are developed in batches. Irregular canvases cover his studio walls, where he shifts from one painting to another, experimenting playfully with mark making. Formal lines taken from photographs and diagrams contrast loose oily wounds, thick emulsions offset light glazes and dribbles. Bielik fluctuates between techniques, pushing and challenging the paint until a kind of harmony is met. In contrast to this emotive imagery, banal solitary words form Bielik’s titles, tempering and balancing the melancholy character of his paintings.

My recent work is concerned with interior spaces; it attempts to express the less tangible aspects of the interior complex. Suggestive fragments coexist with abstract marks in dense spaces. I consider my paintings to be intimate and personal visual documents of my experiences. I like to focus on the physical act of painting itself, exploring its natural process. Play & chance take center stage. Painting for me is about possibility.

SB earned her MFA from the University of California Berkeley and her BA from Wesleyan University. In 2010, Sara attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and in 2007 was an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch Art Center. been shown in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, the SFMOMA Gallery, Verge Gallery, and the UCLA Wight Gallery. In 2009, was awarded the Calder Hayes / Tevis Jacobs / BAM Council Founders Award from University of California Berkeley. Her work is represented by George Lawson Gallery in LA.

Campbell Thomas's work has been exhibited nationally, in venues as the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000 and her BFA from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. She has twice been an artist-in-residence at the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia, as well as at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine.

When I'm in the studio and I start working, that act becomes the point of investigation for finding those abstracted forms that trigger personal affinities in the created work. I respond to the various relationships in the artwork through process, experimentation and instinctive reactions. My imagery is informed through the intuitive gestures, culled geometry, and repetitive mark-making while drawing and painting. These forms and their figure/ground relationships form the basis for a lot of the resolution I'm trying to find in my work. I want the work to breathe an unknown familiarity.

I like to make inquiry's through paint. I set up situations in which I try to be mindful of choices - what to leave and what to take away. My works are imagined worlds which I develop out of looking at things in the everyday - objects, scratchings on the wall, a tree's shadow and even a tiny corner of a beautiful painting by another artist can spark a reaction - My paintings are new worlds that are made up but based on some reaction to a sensory experience – I bring memories of these into my studio and work on a number of different formats and materials at one time

Rupert’s work evolves through a broad approach to making; re examining conceptual and process-based practices, he questions current modes of experience, notions of territory, materiality and spatial production. Through a shifting and sporadic working process he negotiates the spaces he inhabits, the objects and images he encounters, and how he encounters them. Setting up systems and conditions for making work he undermines them, re working, re configuring or repeating actions, improvising through materials, finding their limitations in reference to himself and the spaces he is working in.

Phoenix, South West U.S. Conceptually influenced by historical mosaicists, my abstract work personifies the ephemeral and eternal qualities that exist both physically and spiritually. The repetition of shapes provides structure to the organically formed compositions. Each piece of glass I hand cut, and each cut is intentional as I sculpt in a methodical process that is both intuitive and experimental.

Recently I have been parring back to basic drawing with line and colour, thinking in terms of structure and form and how it can represent my own experiences. I practice through trial and error, I see improvisation as the most creative way to remain open to the emergence of visual statement. It interests me how stuff gradually evolves out of the everyday experience and finds its way into the work.

searching for expression through form and structure, I find myself bridging between the contemporary context and the most basic form of hand made images - drawing. The power of drawing, through its constant relevancy as a form of human expression is at the center of my work. form and frame within a semi architectural environment these are my tools of research in a well defined yet intuitive process"

People have a big influence on their surroundings. Human nature makes the world an amalgam of chaos and horror and at the same time of beauty and ingenuity. Cultural and natural processes can hardly be distinguished from one another. This is what occupies me and the processes mentioned are reflected in the working process. I vary extremely careful decisions with intuitive and only partly controllable actions. Every picture is a result of forces affecting each other, in each work compelling meetings of heterogeneous elements take place. Growing and building, flowing and clashing.

beyond the physical presence of the works and the apparent gestural brushwork, an internal logic establishes itself, the paintwork condenses and unites, as a translation of the sensitive that uses the ductile and resistant character of the paint itself. Each work bears the echo of a movement, an unfolding, a sort of supple stratification of the texture itself. The works may be read as making allusion to geology, the enlargement of a floral detail or the memory of an enigmatic image referring to micro or macrocosm, at a fragile point of equilibrium between control and the accidental, fusion and a possible engulfing.

When I start making a new work, I do not aim at some previously marked result. The process is prior. The mainframe principle is chance. As a basis for my works I prefer cheap paper, tarpaulin, wood, paints building pigments and colors, oil and alkyd, pencil and oil pastel. The problem I am interested in is the interaction of pictorial componentry and technical drawing. The possibility of co-existence and discussion of incipient shapelessness and geometrical structures. Every work moves through the time, like living organism, getting new features.

For me, drawing and painting are direct ways to negotiate just about everything. Many forms that I deploy in painting and sculpture first appear in small drawings. I do drawings as improvisatory meditations. Little emblems emerge, which could function as generally as familiar symbols. At the same time these figures have the specificity of something new and nameless. A powerful ghost-thing, a metaphor, will sometimes arise when sounds, smells, colors and definitions are rubbed together in surprising ways.

What sends me are moments when looking becomes a consuming and urgent activity, when engagement on multiple levels and the possibility for contradictory understanding makes the act of looking a creative one. The decision to paint and draw is not self-conscious, contrarian, or ironic—merely funny. The works do not function as critique but rather may be approached as ready-mades, more found objects waiting to be repurposed. The paintings sometimes take minutes and sometimes weeks and months to arrange themselves, ending with the unavoidable image, the one suspended in becoming.

My work is more and more about trying to break a habit when it comes to painting. It´s also about combining the need for harmony with the desire to express the ugly and the raw. Each painting is a seperate piece of work but some of my pieces are made at the same time so in a way they become a sort of family. I have no preconceived idea when i start working, it´s all down to colour, layers, space and shapes. What I enjoy most of all is the fact that I can be playful and take risks and when it doesn´t work out I just paint over what I don´t like. This is freedom! I work with acrylic paint on canvas and wood.

I am inspired by emptiness and space. Spatiality and infinite space must be present even in the smallest work. It is often small trivial items, unimportant to other people, that are the basis of my work. I collect images seen in a cursory glance in the street, on the television or as film stills in the paper. I always ask myself while making a work of art how much can be excluded. My work must express a feeling of monumentality and spatiality. There is often a balance between spatiality and two dimensionality resulting from my use of irregular dimensions for example long and narrow.