Dana Volkert - Pattern and Process .....

Dana Volkert

Pattern and process play in the work of Dana Volkert.  Sometimes in her paintings I feel I’m looking at the earth from the outer atmosphere.  She works with swirls of paint and achieves an effect that has the luminosity of a pearl or precious stones.  Her paintings glisten.

Dana is a native of the Virginia countryside and studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as Georgetown University.  Both she and her husband are artists and they travel between the US and Italy to work.

Dana’s paintings have a wide range that can depict a startlingly realistic beetle with its elegant beauty, or patterns of flowers, or seedpods.  I always feel her eye working a visual poetry no matter what the subject.   Marsha Ralls

The Intimacy of a Journal

Melinda Stickney Gibson 

The brushstrokes and marks in the paintings of Melinda Stickney-Gibson parallel the marks of life and of nature.  Sometimes it’s frozen earth with a crust of snow or ice and sometimes it’s like a summer meadow full of the sun and flowers. But no matter what temperature it is in Stickney-Gibson’s work I feel the paint and the act of painting is always passionate.

Stickney-Gibson now lives in the Catskills outside of New York City in the solitude of nature.  She states,  “My work always begins with the question of relationships; the messy human ones, and those found in the natural world, which are then translated into my version of the formal artistic ones (color, line, composition, material, scale, etc…).”

I feel that Stickney-Gibson’s work has the intimacy of a journal.   It’s watching her thoughts and reflections as she strokes and marks the surface of her pictures with her brush.  One of the pleasures of looking at art is the sharing of the delight of being and I get that from the work of Melinda Stickney-Gibson.                     By Marsha Ralls

Rise Above the Clouds .....

Emma Goodman O'Rourke

Emma Goodman O'Rourke opens my eyes to the width of nature.  O’Rourke’s personal use of imagery makes for her vision.  In a poem you take words and through placement and juxtaposition you create art.  In O’Rourke it’s done through putting lotus petals with peonies in a landscape that perhaps has nothing to do with either, but in throwing off the context she comes up with something totally fresh.

Words themselves play a role in O'Rourke's painting.  She dares to write into her work what we all wish: "Love me forever."  And it renews the eye and the heart and the spirit.  O'Rourke's use of the paint itself retains the freshness of its making.

Sometimes she will put the nude into her painting or a skull.  It can dare us to look differently.  We will always be challenged and thrilled by the art of Emma Goodman O'Rourke.

Marsha Ralls

We Could All Use a Super Hero

Nicole Charbonnet

I feel when I look at the work of Nicole Charbonnet that it is like peering into memories from the past.  Charbonnet’s paintings are built up through many layers over long periods of time.  In this way time is actually an element in her work.  Her work is familiar to me because it portrays bits of rural America I grew up in.

Charbonnet is a native of New Orleans where there is much layering of culture and identity as well as history.  She went on to study in Boston as well as the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  Studying in France in Paris and Lacoste completed her education.

In her most recent series of paintings Charbonnet is working with images from popular culture.  There is a cowboy, and a desert highway, or a gangster.  Sometimes there is a couple embracing, or you see a rabbit running across the road.  Her color is always evocative and poetic.  Nicole Charbonnet’s use of paint and texture make for a lyrical vision that embraces and holds a rich and diverse subject matter.     Blogger:   Marsha Ralls

Maryanne Pollock

Exuberance and delight feed the work of Maryanne Pollock.  Her spontaneous whirl-of-the-dervish gestures open a kind of synesthesia.  I can feel in her painting the measures of dance and the intervals of music. They put me in mind of jazz or hip hop. Pollock’s paintings are always magical whether they are pure gesture or infused with geometry or plein air Washington landscapes.  It’s a magic that is open and marvelous.

Significant to Pollock’s work is the fact that she spent 1997-2003 in Zamalek and Cairo in Egypt.  Earlier she had studied at the Tyler School of Art as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, and then she came to Washington and studied further at the Corcoran and American University. 

Maryanne Pollock’s latest paintings are some of her strongest work. In “Black Sand” there is a painterliness that resonates with the dash of line and color.  It makes me feel like I’m running my fastest or dancing my hardest!                                                            By Marsha Ralls