Painting & Photography

Our first Art competition “Painting & Photography” started in November 2020 and concluded on December 20, 2020. Art Room Gallery received entries from many countries around the world: USA, Russia, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, France, Serbia, Austria, Taiwan, Australia, Poland, Romania, Germany, Italy, Azerbaijan, Ecuador. The Painting & Photography theme in this competition included a diversity in types, styles and mediums (oil on canvas, acrylic, photography, mixed media, pastel, watercolor, collage and alcohol ink on yupo). The following evaluation criteria has been used for judging the artwork: creativity, interpretation of the theme, originality and quality of art, overall design, demonstration of artistic ability, and usage of medium. Jury decided to select 81 artworks for inclusion in the exhibition. Aside from First, Second, and Third place Jury also presented Merit awards and Honorable Mention awards.

Thank you, and enjoy the exhibition!

First place

Statement:

Laura Roser is an award-winning artist, best-selling writer, and businesswoman. She is drawn to bright colors, surreal elements and themes that capture the awkwardness and beauty of the human experience. Laura is an expert in legacy development (i.e. passing on wisdom, values, and beliefs) and has written and spoken extensively about it. This study of how people live their lives and pass on their wisdom is a great influence on her artwork as well. She currently lives on a boat and can be found anywhere between the Bahamas and New York depending on the time of year. When she's not working, she and her husband enjoy sitting on the bow and pointing out interesting cloud shapes.

Statement:

I seek to share images with which I has a strong and instinctive personal connection. Images may be simply documentary, invoke a sense of time and place, or resonate as an abstract blend of color, shape or form. Others provoke an indefinable question that does not readily yield answers without further study and reflection. My creative process follows an intuitive yet patterned path, searching for the combination of elements that produces an instinctive but undeniable connection. Most often the images that provoke the strongest connection are those that do not produce an immediate reaction but provoke a response through repeated contact and consideration over time. I have exhibited widely in local, regional, and national exhibitions have won commendations for merit ranging from Honorable Mention to Best in Show. My photographs were also selected to hang in the Michigan Governor’s Mansion as part of a year-long exhibition highlighting State of Michigan artists.

Statement:

I have always worked almost exclusively with acrylic on canvas, or occasionally on masonite or paper. I have always worked using unconventional methods, as well. This has not been for purposes of being different for different's sake, but in order to express what I want (need?) to express. Somehow, applying paint to canvas with a brush has never been adequate to express what I want to express. Consequently, I have made it a habit over the years to play with paint in order to learn more about what it is capable (and not capable) of doing. This has led me to paint on glass, then transfer that paint into "paint assemblages", extrude paint from modified syringes creating webbed paintings that resemble bent, colored wire, and most recently, to sling paint from ultra-fine straight pins, at very high speed, onto canvas. The mark created by doing this just blew me away the first time I made it. Its defining characteristic is electric energy, but the incredibly fine nature of the mark is also striking. It immediately struck me as the perfect visual signifier for string theory. I decided to use the mark in the expression of the ideas I had been dealing with for years. Beginning around 2006, I used this mark to create images of "the universe of mind and spirit" as I envisioned it, inspired by images of the physical universe produced by the Hubble space telescope. I worked for several years to refine these, especially the spatial aspects, then moved on to a series of radiant "figures" set against a web inspired by the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters in the early universe. (A web, I might add, that looks remarkably like the web of neurons in the brain.)