First Snow

Thanksgiving

Mornings

Green

Fontenelle

Artist Statement
I have spent several years drawing trees from observation; studying how their branches twist and turn, reach and retreat, linger… My new paintings are of trees painted from my imagination. A line becomes a branch, then a line again; it spurts, stops, twists, then breaks. The limbs are sometimes graceful; other times they are awkward, coarse, entangled gestures. Tension exists in reading the marks as both nature-based and pure abstraction.

The trees are painted in oil on translucent vellum stretched over mirror creating a subtle luminous quality and 3-dimensional effect. I try to capture the sublime quality of the Hudson River Luminists as well as the sense of limitless space in twelfth century Chinese Southern Sung landscapes. Within my paintings there are no cultural references; I aim to reflect the timelessness of nature in a fleeting moment.

Website
http://www.MaggieTobin.com

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Shards. 2010, 56 x 72″, oil on canvas
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Highbeams, 2010, 32 x 42″, oil on canvas
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Winter Scene, 2009, 64 x 52″, oil on canvas
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Jello Combat, 2010, 56 x  72″, acrylic on canvas
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Pavilion, 2009, 52 x 6″oil on canvas

Artist’s Statement
I am interested in a kind of space that is fresh, airy, vast and open. For a long time, I’ve felt that a painting is alive when I can feel the space in it. I would like to be able to paint air, but in order to paint air I need to paint the things in it.

I aim to locate the point where form takes on meaning—where a triangle can be read as a road in perspective, for example. Each painting suggests a model or diagram, even as it evokes a particular, fictional place.

Website
lauranewman.com

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Maybe This Will Stop The Tide,   18” x 20”,   oil on linen,  2010

Relative Safety, 18” x 20”,   oil on linen,  2010

They Stood Their Ground, 42″ x 60″,   oil on canvas,  2010

Warehouse Waiting Game, 48″ x 60″, oil on canvas,  2010

No Swimming, 42″ x 48″, oil on canvas, 2010

Artist’s Statement

The people in my paintings are unsettled.  They perch on rooftops, power lines, and fire escapes, inhabiting dreamlike, imaginary cities. Expectations cloud their vision, and, like people in a magical realist novel, they unquestioningly accept the absurd as normal.

Although I use the visual language of a perceptual painter, I mainly work from memories, filtering experiences and bits of autobiography into invented scenarios that would be unlikely, if not impossible, in the real world.  Maintaining an element of fiction is important to me because I am trying to describe psychological places, where characters’ inner worlds shape the physical space and architecture around them. For me, the illogical situations my characters find themselves in embody the frustration of not being able to see clearly.

I work mainly from my imagination; with the help of mirrors, studies from life, and photographs. I usually start with an improvised drawing, through which the imagery evolves organically and spontaneously. The drawings suggest a loose narrative for the paintings – not a sequential story, but a series of related vignettes about the same or similar characters.

Contact

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