Chromatic Wonder and Pitch Perfect Composition: Photographic Artist Jeffrey Sklan

Posted on by Diversions LA
From faces to flowers,  Jeffrey Sklan is a photographic artist who makes his visions bloom. The artist says that implausible or not, “almost everything inspires me at this point. I have set it up that way. First, the obvious: unique light and beauty surrounds us in Los Angeles. I watch almost every sunrise and every sunset. There is an endless cascade of interesting faces and talented people to observe and create portraiture with.”
Sklan notes that past perceptions are coming to the forefront for him as an artist today. “Increasingly, ideas that had their roots in a moment or season years ago have been providing inspiration. It is not nostalgia, it is perspective. And that can only come with time and distance. Revisiting the work of  artists who contributed to my aesthetic is a bottomless well. Likewise, the young artists with whom I collaborate or envy– so many talented people are doing beautiful and thoughtful work.”
On the same subject, it is no accident that his work seems to provide an almost musical catharsis for the viewer. It’s a visual soundtrack to joy and existence. “Music is my wellspring for emotional content,” Sklan attests.
The artist’s work has gone through many changes over the years. “For the past ten years or so, I deliberately have tried new things, new techniques, and reworked the classical portraiture styles that are my foundation. My preference is still simple, unaffected portraiture or botanicals. But, I consciously take different roads to get there and to avoid getting stale,” he explains. “Stasis is death for creativity.”
According to Sklan, he works in medium format cameras. “Mostly they are digital but film is still important for certain instances. I don’t care about the gear or the technology – the priority is actualizing my intuition.”
He is deeply involved in many upcoming projects. “I’m very excited about the next few books that are in varying stages of layout – and sharing them with a (hopefully) wide audience. Restarting my artists’ portrait project is a priority, also. Later in autumn, I will be returning to a botanical project and building out a dedicated space for it. I need to find a representative that can keep up with me,” he stresses.
Sklan describes his work as “originating in my heart, which is is my north star. Hopefully, it both resonates with others and finds new homes. Art is like a favorite meal: best when shared, not when hoarded.”
Come feast and share the artist’s stunning botanicals at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery August 1st through 30th. Opening reception is the 1st from 4-7; regular gallery hours are 12-4 Sunday-Thursday, and the closing reception will be held August 30th from 1-3. Stay tuned for information about a book sale and signng for the artist as well.
– Genie Davis; images provided by the artist

Angelica Sotiriou Creates Spiritual Wonder in Deeply Layered Art

Posted on by Diversions LA
Deeply wondrous, luminous with light, and shimmering with meaning, Angelica Sotiriou’s art touches the eye, heart, and soul of the viewer. Her work embodies a sense of spiritual presence, generating a collective awe in those witnessing her paintings, drawings, and mixed media pieces.
According to Sotiriou, “My work has always come from the deepest place of my prayer life. Be it finding beauty in the world or the darkness that invades our good intentions, my works take the sacred and secular and use them to create my abstract narratives.”
Her sense of purpose and meaning has not changed over the years, even as her techniques or mediums shift. “My works have not deviated from my internal focus of one’s life journey. I started out painting, using other-worldly, intensely brilliant color transparencies on canvas. I continued with creating bigger than life handmade paper bas-reliefs, dealing with the  plight of young womanhood and the spiritual journey of transfiguration,” she says. And in the meantime, she notes that she’s “always loved [the] energetic movement of soft graphite on large sheets of rag paper. Early in my career, they were autobiographical abstracts. These works eventually evolved into spiritual landscapes with the focus on the visceral search for Light.”
Today,  the artist has combined these techniques and mediums, shaping thematically imagined landscapes. She relates that she is “still searching for Light…still energetic…still [creating] larger than life narratives.  Thematically, I have attempted to meld the secular and the sacred in each new work using mixed media.”
Asked which mediums she prefers, Sotiriou says that she loves “the energetic line work of soft graphite, acrylic brushwork, interference pigments, transparencies and I have incorporated the line work into my subtle mixed media painterly abstract narratives.” She wants viewers to “look long enough to see the multiple layers of dark to light pigment, water soluble graphite, and interference pigments” that make up individual works.
Sotiriou’s newest works “deal with the notion of longing for home and the familiar, our earth as home, stewardship, the sacred, the secular and the ache that comes from wanting to go home to a place that may not have ever existed.”
As profound as it is beautiful and involving, Sotiriou’s stunning art will be on view at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach,  August 1st. In September, she will be sharing another large body of her work at Kipos Gallery/Trinity San Pedro, as well as several works at the Pacific Unitarian Gallery in Palos Verdes. In November, she’ll be showing some work at “Art At Dark”,  St. Katherine GOC, Redondo Beach.
The artist has been creating her powerful work for 56 years, and for each of those years, she says that her images have asked “my viewer to sit with them for more than a few moments and to explore the layers of marks and pigments, to tap into the energy of the compositions and to explore where their own sensibilities reside in each work.” She adds that “There is a narrative in each work; if you listen close enough you will find your answer.”
For all those seeking answers, or simply the beauty of life itself, visit the artist’s exhibition of both large scale and small works at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery, 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach. Opening reception is 4-7, August 1st; regular gallery hours are 12-4, Thursday-Sunday.
– Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Michael Stearns Creates Contemporary Color Dazzle

Posted on by Diversions LA

Michael Stearns is a contemporary artist whose practice explores fundamental questions of existence, origin, and the forces that animate being.  His rich work operates at the intersection of metaphysical exploration and aesthetic investigation, seeking not only to articulate these universal, eternally relevant questions but also to implicate the viewer in their contemplation.

Stearns says that he employes a painterly language that consists of both organic forms and vibrant, saturated color. The artist constructs visual fields that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, amplifying the phenomenological impact of these thematic concerns.

Whether creating entirely abstract, lush and brilliantly colored canvases or more precise maps, roads, grids…or a mix of recognizable, impressionist and abstract landscape, Stearns work is a riveting fairytale, a narrative ripe for the eye to take in and the heart to feel.

In his sculptural works, he often employs the most prosaic of found materials, from cereal boxes to bits of colored cardboard and wire. What he makes from these humble textures does not just elevate the material but transforms it, making it something almost ethereal, an accordian of light and color. His natural and industrial materials are synthesized, generating a dialectic between the primal and the constructed, transforming dissonance into a harmonious duality.

Color shimmers, shape mutates, image mesmerizes. Galvanizing is one way to describe the layered luster of Michael Stearns’ art. Filled with a glowing joy, his work explores questions of profound meaning with dazzling aesthetic forces that fill the viewer with a profond sense of wonder amid its heightened chromatic intensity.

Stearns’ work is reverant in its respect for nature, form, the miracle of life, and the fecundity of nature. Moon shapes, seascapes, rose colored trees, orange mountains, purple coastlines and blue roads dissect, diverse, and blossom. His work is both intelligently precise and voluptuously open, images of land, sea, sky, and the universe itself, all fragrant with color, steeped in memory, imagination, and an inveterate belief in the miraculous.

Whether painting mystical shapes, congruent maps, highly textured landscape, or sculpting with cardboard and newspaper to bring both nature and urban society together, Stearns is a force to be reckoned with.

To view his work is to be immersed in it; the pulse of life and the power of his art run through each image like a current. Stearns’ radiance and accessible yet deeply resonant work is a slice of both California life and magical light. Of course, maybe that is one and the same.

Stearns’ work is currently on exhibit at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach through July 26th., as well as at his own studio and gallery in the Los Angeles Harbor Arts building in San Pedro. DFA Gallery is open 12-4 Thursdays-Sundays, with special open house programming from 12-4 July 25th and an artist’s talk and closing reception on July 26th from 1-3.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and as provided by Michael Stearns Studio.

The Zen of Neon: Linda Sue Price

Posted on by Diversions LA

Abstract neon artist Linda Sue Prices sees herself as”an investigator of cultural phenomena; one who endeavors, with the aid of
observations, history/science/philosophical readings, to arrive at a point of reference that connects the human experience with all of the other parts of the environment.”

The beautiful zen of her investigations is infused in so much of her work. She notes that in the past she created a series of work  about “Connections and Enlightened Systems” that featured a quote from Black Elk, “All Things are our Relatives.” More recently, she reports that she read a book by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink.

“It was an exploration of intuition. I didn’t think I was intuitive, but have since come to recognize that I am and have relied on that
and trust to make my choices. I had always thought of myself as fearful and pragmatic. It has been an interesting process discovering my core,” she explains.

The artist’s current series of neon works is titled It’s Always Something. “So far, I have completed three pieces. I am using a new process of just letting the work reveal itself,” she says.

Her bending process is always developing. “Even benders with years more experience than I, share that they are still learning, too. My bending style is free-form, not to pattern. Most people who bend, do it to a pattern on a work bench. I typically heat the glass and then bend in the air. It has been described as having a conversation with the glass or as dancing with the glass.”

Describing this process, she says “There are three things you have to do: heat the right amount of glass, get it hot enough, and heat it evenly. Sounds simple. I struggled with even heating until recently. It turned out I was too low in the fire.” Price adds that “At times, it feels like therapy because you can’t bring any attitude with you as you enter the fire with the tube. No expectations, no willfulness, you just have to learn how to ‘be’.  Once I finally got to that space, I finally started to really seeing the glass and recognizing what the glass was saying to me. I finally got the message.”

In the past several years, Price has made other changes to her work as well. “I started adding a digital frame with an animated video to some of my work. I realized that when doing video animation, after the structure is defined then I moved into a ‘play’ or ‘flow’ space where I experimented and discovered moments that appealed to me. That caused me to recognize that I don’t do that when I’m bending.”

According to the artist, “Bending, for me, was structure and process. I decided to try bringing flow to my bending once the process was taken care of. I’ve spent the last year moving in the that direction. That triggered a change in how I approach making a piece. Mostly everything is flow now except specific things that have to be structure and process.”

She likes texture and uses a variety fo elements to create the right texture for neon light to “play with.” She says that material can range from “paint to washers, to acrylic rods and spheres, mirrors and chains, fake gemstones, beads, scrub cloth, electrical tape… you name it… nothing is safe.”

Thematically her current series It’s Always Something, serves as a commentary “about the increasing challenges we all face just doing typical activities like paying bills, almost getting hacked, unexpected aches, illnesses, traffic, the cost of everything, the list goes on and on.”

Currently, Price is exhibiting at Diversions Fine Arts in the Manhattan Beach gallery’s exhibition Midsummer, but she has plenty of other opportunities to show ahead, from an art fair in Oregon to a solo show at a downtown Los Angeles.  Regardless of wehre she is showing, the artist’s work is always as fresh, vibrant, and alive as she is herself.

“Each tube I bend can be considered custom because it is. I can’t duplicate most of the tubes I create. My moods change so my conversation with the tubes change. As my skills develop, I do new moves and can’t go back to what I was.” She notes that “Neon light is a peaceful calming energy. It is different from a painting; activating it involves plugging it into an electrical outlet just like you would do with a floor lamp.”

And yet so much more beautiful, experiential, and lustrous. To see Price’s literally and figuratively brilliant new series, is not to be “blinded by the light” but to be enLIGHTened by it.

Midsummer, with Price’s lustrous neon, is on display through July 26th. Open house at Diversions Fine Arts, 12-4 Saturday July 25th; artists talk/closing reception July 26th, 1-3. DFA is located at 1069 N. Aviation in Manhattan Beach.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Linda Sue Price and Genie Davis