I have always loved paper - stationery, notepads, paper bags, and especially tissue paper. Actually, wrapping paper started my career as an artist. I was amazed to find that a friend had framed the wrapping paper I had made for a birthday present. Soon, other friends asked that I forgo the actual present, and instead gift them only un-creased, and un-taped wrapping paper. Their strong, emotional connection to my work inspired me to start thinking and creating, both literally and figuratively, on a larger canvas. My paintings have been called Dreamscapes, ambiguous, healing and absolutely meditative. The actual process can be playful, sometimes intense and is always experimental. I appreciate the liberation of working with scrapers. Initially, brushes intimidated me. But the flow of the scraping welcomed me, freed me. Even though my process has become more sophisticated as I have evolved, the work is still essentially rooted in an intense desire to express something raw and emotionally charged. Where will my paintings take you?

"Norwegian Nights" is the first of a projected series of installation pieces entitled “Outside Inn”. This series of environmental art pieces brings the vastness, greatness and beauty of the outdoors indoors. It brings the mountains, ocean and woods to the viewer in the urban and suburban areas. It reconnects the viewers with the natural world, with the grand open spaces which she might not have had the opportunity to experience. The pieces are meant to remind the viewers of the amazing world of which we are a part, by putting them in the middle of it. They are what I dub “green art” - their purpose to remind the onlooker in a way that is neither preachy nor overbearing, but experiential and meditative, of the world we share and are the stewards of.

A photographer in training, an artist in the making.

www.tonatosart.com

AMERICAN SPIRIT will feature the creation of a documentary video. This video will feature the visitors and participants in Artomatic 2008 as they express themselves about Life in America. The video that results from this exhibit will be available in the summer of 2008. Watch www.RedSkyArt.com for an announcement.

Artist Statement

As a photographer and a mixed media artist, I’ve always been drawn into the depth and the mysterious side of the psych. A side that can only be expressed by a language that transcends the spoken words.
My work consists of multilayered and patterned surfaces that I consider as topographical maps of the mind or what I `d like to call innerscapes. I also believe that there is as much to uncover beneath the surface as to discover on any surface. Our minds lay between the conscious and subconscious, I look at it as an interface that conjure both what is beneath the consciousness and over the sub- consciousness, it is the place where my visual safari takes place.
Another aspect of the human mind that I ‘d like to evoke is its independence of the macro and micro scales and its infinitesimal infinitude, a criteria conveyed by the non- started and open-ended perspective of my innerscapes.

I make narrative glass and mixed-media sculptures focused on contemporary issues and politics. Lately, we have been besieged with news detailing the mortgage market crisis—a sharp contrast to three years ago when housing prices were at an all-time high. My Artomatic 2008 exhibit presents our complex relationship to housing in the 21st century in cast glass and astro-turf.

2-D Visual

Tina Duryea is an arist living and working in the greater Washington D.C. area. She studied in New York at the School of Visual Arts and also at the Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut. Working primarily in Oils, Tina has two main bodies of work. The first consists of large paintings of horse and rider, the second being primarily minimalist landscapes. She is available for commission work.

Gregory Ferrand is a native Washingtonian and self-taught painter. He received a degree in film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1997. His background in film is evident in the strong use of narrative he employs to tell stories about characters and situations that do, have, and will exist; gently unmasking the psychological or emotional state of the subject, inviting the viewer to share and/or identify.