QUINT-ESSENCE
May 11 - June 30, 2012
Artists transform perspectives drawn from their lives and compress these visions into work they hope will also have meaning for others. The five artists in Quint-essence come from different worlds and backgrounds and use different media to share their experiences.
Georga Garside, who has a background in printmaking and teaches high school art and ceramics, has always loved to draw. She completed the colorful and imaginative drawings in this show during a year-long struggle with radiation and chemotherapy for cancer. These pieces provided both a path to peaceful meditation and a chance for play. She is convinced that "art saves lives."
For Steve Long, a self-taught artist, painting has been a life-long hobby while he earned his living as Director of Locomotive Maintenance for Union Pacific Railroad. Upon retiring a year ago, he decided to devote the rest of his life to being an artist. Inspired by an abstract view of things, he is currently using a modeling medium along with paint to portray not just color and texture but also depth and the irregularity of the shapes he creates. His current body of work is entitled "The Red Series."
As an artist and sculptor, Jay Reed looks to create a strong visual impact on the viewer. Most of his art is large in scale and is concerned with structure, shape, materials, texture, and color, and he often uses materials that have come from his career in construction. Some of his work deals with human social or political conditions and makes a statement about them from his perspective. Bringing into existence physical objects that express his vision of possibilities and realities in this world is his primary desire.
Mervyn Seldon began painting in 1985 alongside a career in book publishing and fund-raising. Since retiring in 1990, she has focused on painting and gallery management. In her compositions, relationships between colors and shapes are often a metaphor for human relationships in all their mystery, color, and ambiguity. She is also exploring the meanings of patterns and symbols. For her, art is both a search for unexpected beauty and a time to play and remember.
Yi-li Chin Ward, born in Taipei, Republic of China, spent her high school years in Manila and her college years in Los Angeles. For the past 15 years, she has painted models. In one meaningful portrait after her father's death, she sketched a figure with its arm falling and falling from over its head--an image that felt both natural and alright. In a portrait of herself watching TV, she painted over the figure until it had almost disappeared. Her models are both themselves and her, linked in a common experience of "who they are" and "who we are."