Hot Stuff
Ethel Gittlin has explored many different styles through this artistic journey, including oils, photography/oils; from abstraction to semi realism and back to abstraction with spray paint and resin. 

Her newest works are Mixed media. Made with French/European fashion magazines.  Her own photos-altered digitally. Spraypaint. Acrylics. Oils/oil sticks. Stencils-Commercial & her own. With a hand poured resin coating. 

A new vibe. “As I posted on social media, ‘Some things luxe. Some things not. Things I love to see. Things I love to touch. Passionate to the core.’ #fashionartculture. “



About 9 years ago,  Ethel decided to share her passion for painting. And she has been  mentoring foster teenage girls at the SOS Children’s Villages in Coconut Creek, Florida through painting, hoping to make a difference in their lives. She believes this experience is as rewarding for her as it is for   them.



Her work is represented by Walter Wickiser Gallery, New York, and is in many private and corporate collections. Her paintings have been selected for  Embassy collections in Moscow, Estonia, and Qatar, and have been exhibited in many art fairs across the country including Art Miami, Concept Art Fair,Miami, and Art on Paper, Pier 36 NYC.

Blowing Tree
I grew up in Seattle with omnipresent rain and abundant trees. The land around our home featured a cherry orchard, with plum, pear and apple trees growing wild in the back. In early spring, pink blossoms covered the fruit trees. Decades later, after living in various climes, from desert to mountain top to tropical jungle, I discovered my meandering pen drawing pink trees, filled with the blossoms of an early Seattle spring.

When I was young, trees provide protection and nurturing. When I climbed them, they sheltered me from large neighborhood teen-agers. I felt safe with a book, aloft in the branches, grabbing and eating tangy cherries, tart apples or sweet plums.



Individual trees became life-long friends, such as a red-bark Western Red Cedar that was the same height as me when I was eight years old. After I performed a ceremony where I broke open a scab and joined my scarlet blood with the cedar's russet bark, I considered the tree to be my "blood brother". It now towers over our house, more than one hundred feet tall, and I still chat with it, like the older sibling it seems to be.

Recent studies show that the increased oxygen around trees, as well as the phytoncides (plant chemicals) they produce, benefit human health: blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugars lower. Anxiety, depression and anger become measurably less. Immune system strength grows.  I intuitively feel this when I walk among trees and sit under them. I draw and paint all the trees I've known.



In my drawings, I often include the unseen aspects of trees: the sap flowing or underground roots spreading. I depict the sustenance a tree receives from the accumulated debris we discard.  With years of our amassed disposals, a miracle occurs. Miraculous microbes transform our natural wastes (and some synthetics) into food for plants. I visualize these sacred processes in many of my drawings.



Besides providing emotional and medical benefits, trees absorb CO2, helping to cool our overheated planet. In this series of drawings, I honor trees, from the various climates I've lived in, that've personally aided me in my past. From tiny sizes to the gigantic, these helpful beings spread their benefits far and wide to help all of us.

The Course of the Rivers II
Hermann Alfred Sigg was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924. After studying at the School of Applied Art, Zurich with, among others, former Bauhaus master and color theorist Johannes Itten, Sigg, like many art students before and after World War II, went to Paris, where he attended the Acade'mie Andre' Lhorte in 1947. Lhote (1885 - 1962), a member of the Cubist circle early in the century, was a noted writer on art and teacher during the 1940s and 50s. In Paris, Sigg became enamored with French art and culture, and admired the Post-Impressionists, especially Bonnard. While the influence of Bonnard was most apparent in Sigg's figurative paintings of the 1950s, the palette and color fields in his later abstract landscapes still occasionally evoke Bonnard's work. Sigg's development of aerial landscape imagery began in 1968 with travel to Southeast Asia as an "artist in residence in the sky" for Swissair, which had previously purchased several of his paintings. From the singular vantage point of the cockpit, Sigg made sketches from which he developed the abstractions of terraced fields and rivers characteristic of his work from the 1970's. On the ground, the artist visited temple sites such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia and made drawings of the sculpture; he also became a passionate collector of Southeast Asia and Khmer sculpture. As a result of his travels, which also included India and Thailand, Sigg began to explore interior architectural space as well as the infinite space of the aerial landscape in his new paintings. Other study trips to Italy, Greece, the Middle East, Nepal, China, and to Guatemala, Mexico and the American West provided inspiration. Since his Southeast Asia trip, the river has become increasingly abstract and distilled, like shorthand or calligraphy. For Sigg, the river is a "mysterious force" with a spirit of its own. In this series, the river becomes a metaphor for passage through life and the human search for the inner self and enlightenment. In articulating his river imagery, the artist discovered Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha which became an important influence. Throughout the novel. Siddhartha encounters the river as a changing yet constant, regenerating force, something to listen to and learn from, like life itself.

*Excerpted from The Art of H.A. Sigg by Robert M . Murdock

Asphalt Light
Soile Yli-Mäyry is a Finnish artist with an impressive international CV. Immensely energetic, she has had more than 250 exhibitions worldwide. Her work reflects this energy. Made with a palette-knife, it is physically bold, one might almost say impatient, in its handling of the artist’s material.



Finland had a tradition of mythic and symbolist painting. Its best known painter of the Early Modern period was Akseli Gallen-Kallela [1865-1961], who made illustrations to the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. His paintings have a Symbolist element, but this is much stronger in the work of a younger and shorter-lived contemporary, Hugo Simberg [1873-1917]. Simberg once defined the function of art in this way: He said it was ‘the ability to transport oneself from the midst of a cold winter to a lovely summer’s morning and sense it all, feel how nature awakens and your own harmony in tune with it. That is what I require from a work of art. It must say something and say it so loud that it carries us away.’ I suspect that this is a sentiment with which Soile Yli-Mäyry would agree.



Simberg’s affinity was with the artists of the Vienna Secession, Gustav Klimt [1865-1918] and Egon Schiele [1890-1918]. After a period of quasineglect, these two painters have beeen catapulted into the limelight again by a series of enormous prices at auction, which mark a shift in public taste away from the masters of the Ecole de Paris and towards Austrian and German Symbolism and Expressionism. One can easily see that Yli-Mäyry has links with both Symbolist and Expressionist impulses. Her work combines strong color and impulsive handling with an interest in patterning that recalls some of Klimt’s techniques in particular. When she paints the human figure, however, she gives in a tense wiriness and angularity that recalls some of the early drawings of Schiele. One can also perhaps detect some influence from the work of another Viennese artist of the same epoch, Oskar Kokoschka [1886-1980], whose handling of paint is much looser than that of either Klimt or Schiele.



One of the hallmarks of the first decade of the 21st century has been a return to figuration, often of a slightly twisted and eccentric kind. However, there has also been a lack of direction, especially [it seems to me as a European] in the United States. A recent issue of Vanity Fair, devoted largely to the New York art world, hymned a new group of young artists as ‘international, unpredictable, deeply individual.’ In journalistic terms, this amounts to saying that no-one at this moment knows which way the cat is going to jump, or even if it has any power to jump left in it. To be blunt, the Modernist/Contemporary project looks as if it is in trouble, sustained more by hype and wishful thinking than by any discernible or definable new departure.



It is situations of this sort that provide genuinely international artists like Soile Yli-Mäyry with an opportunity to strut their stuff. She is a genuinely international painter. She can pick her influences and exemplars from wherever she choose. She has no obligation to belong to any school. The paintings in this exhibition are the product of a purely personal impulse. That, without question, is their strength.



Edward Lucie-Smith

Taliesin Unleashed #1
Chicago-born artist Dennis Kleidon paints robust abstractions that unleash the imagination and explore the possibilities of paint in action. Kleidon is obsessed with transforming the creative spirit into an explosion of dynamic forms and colors dancing on the canvas. Movement, action, and carefully positioned brushstrokes appear as violent gestures within his paintings, but have an underlying composition that is fluid, yet balanced

.

The forms within his paintings are almost sculptural, emanating from his background in architecture and sculpture. Built on a textural background, influenced by the textured boulders in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, Kleidon’s paintings display a tension between a calming background and the violent application of direct, but well-planned brushstrokes. Each painting is an experiment, integrating color, bold strokes and the beautiful dynamics of flowing textures within. These explosions of grace and power create an unexpected visual counterpoint. Dissonant, yet composed, the paintings display nuances that stretch the imagination and stoke the dreams of the viewer. 



In his most recent series, paint explodes out of the graphic borders to express an aggressive dynamic over the relaxed, meditative background textures. Appropriately enough, this series is called “Unleashed,” a title shared by a book Kleidon has written called, Unleash Your Imagination: Transform Your Life and the public presentations he gives, encouraging others to unleash their imagination as a way of unlocking their hidden passions.

Always the teacher, Kleidon wants the freedom, power and optimism of his paintings to enrich the lives of all who see and own them. “Experience the excitement of bold colors in motion and their abstract implications. Become saturated in their visual potential.” 



Kleidon received a Master’s degree in Art from Illinois State University, a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from Illinois Wesleyan University, studied architecture at the University of Illinois and taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Akron where he developed Designer Grids, a three-point perspective drawing system for architects, designers and artists. He is the founder of Kleidon and Associates a marketing communications firm. He has exhibited his work in solo and joint shows in galleries, museums and juried exhibitions throughout the United States. His Designer Grids have been used by professional artists and designers around the world. He now divides his time between his studios in Phoenix, Arizona, and Akron, Ohio.