First Club Competition This Wednesday, September 21
Our first competition of the season is this Wednesday, September 21, 2016.
The assigned subject for September is Stand Out in a Crowd.
Print submissions are accepted until 7:15 pm the evening of the competition. The meeting will begin promptly at 7:30pm.
Our judges for this competition are:
Joseph Fama http://www.rhythminpainting.com/about.html
From 1984 to 1996 I was President and Creative Director of Fama & Associates, Inc. I also, served as an Art Director for several advertising agencies in New York city, designing Christmas ornaments for Christopher Radko and illustrations for Wild West magazines.
I earned a bachelor’s degree from Iona College in 1978 and attended Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts and the Reilly League of Artists. Cesare Borgia was my instructor. I am a member of the American Artist Professional League and Oil Painters of America.
I am always on the lookout for picturesque scenes for my landscapes. If a view has merit and is gratifying, I want to capture the mood immediately with plein-air color sketches. Later, working from the color sketches, a finished oil painting is completed in my studio. It is a challenge to capture nature with all its wondrous colors and subtleties of shade — dark and light. When a person views my painting, I want them to get the same emotional feeling that I experienced when I first viewed the scene.
Richard Ventre rventre.com
Dick, a resident of Norwalk, completed his 45-year career as a Scenic Artist in 2012. He was a Master Scenic Artist on more than 50 movies including the Emmy Award winning Death of a Salesman, and the Academy Award winning Sleepy Hollow. He completed that career painting for the Metropolitan Opera.
His work in photography is in the medium of photomontage and exclusively in the school of dramatic narrative. By applying decades of theatrical experience, each image depicts the painted female nude set within a unique context. Each work is rendered from multiple images that are digitally woven together.
In 2016 the series IN THE MOMENT: AFTER THE PAINTED NUDES OF ANDERS ZORN had its first Solo Show at the Ridgefield Guild of Artists, Upstairs Gallery. In 2014 GODDESS OF THE HUNT: AFTER AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS’ DIANA was the Solo Show at the same gallery.
Work on the current series, DICHOTOMY / BRONZE, will continue through 2016. The next two large series are in the planning stages for 2017 and 2018.
More of his work may be viewed on his website: rventre.com
John Arabolos arabolosart.com
John Arabolos is an Assistant Professor and Professional Interior Designer & Artist in residence” in the Department of Art and Design at the University of New Haven. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in Connecticut in 1974 where he studied under Professors Christopher Horton and Rudolf Zalinger and was awarded the Ruth Chaney Goodwin Award. In 1980 he obtained his Masters of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute of Design in Brooklyn, NY where he studied under Professor Robert Zakarian, was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Grant, and was named Pratt Studio Scholar.
John has been a practicing professional artist and designer since 1969. He has exhibited his work throughout the country and since 2001 has been a member of the Silvermine Art Guild in New Canaan, CT. He has won numerous art competition awards and has had his work published by Art New England, Gallery & Studio and Direct Art periodicals, the New Haven Register, and the University of New Haven Alumni Magazine.
He has been a registered practicing Interior Designer in the State of Connecticut since 1974, and is the principal of the West Haven, CT design firm, “Arabolos Design Associates”, founded in 1982. He has provided Interior Design services throughout New England and as far west as Phoenix Arizona and south to South Carolina. Design specialties include: residential design for new construction and additions, kitchens, master bedroom and baths, home media rooms and contract design for new building construction and additions restaurants, educational and institutional facilities, offices and strategic site planning. He has been a professional member of ASID (American Society of Interior Designers since 1991 and served as the Connecticut chapter President from 1997-98 and was the recipient of many awards including the chapter’s prestigious “Medalist” award. He has also been a board member of CCID “The Connecticut Coalition of Interior Designers since 1997 and served as president from 2000 – 2003.
John’s artwork is an investigation of “Chaotic” patterns found in nature. These are patterns that is described as, “self-similarity”. That is to say; compositional elements that are readily identifiable as the same, yet varying in size and scale and existing randomly in placement within space and time. He investigates these phenomena, by utilizing symmetry as a tool, thus forcing and creating order out of randomness. The resulting patterns, though organic in origin, become manipulated abstractions from nature, defying identification relative to their size, scale and lack of subjective reference. Consequently this leaves viewers no tangible content to grasp in order to identify the images they are confronted with. This forces the viewer to subliminally rely on their own past empirical experiences and observations to formulate a response.
In many ways the artwork is an investigation about size or more specifically; how we perceive scale and rate of change. John posits, “Because the phenomenology of intuitiveness is inextricably linked to Chaos theory and the idea of randomness, my investigation becomes a profound insight into how nature works and how we as beings of consciousness realize our environment. This is the crux of perception, art making, and the experiencing process. What is size?…and in relationship to what? How do we determine scale, when through abstraction we do not have a frame of reference to base our perceptions and observations? What is size – but an individual’s physiological intuitive response to his/her own environment?” In a limited capacity, John’s work represents a small part of his quest and search to document a universal aesthetic language through an analytic approach in the perceiving, manipulation, and the illustration of an intuitive set of naturally evolving and organic circumstances.
John’s recent artwork, “The Fabric of Life Series”©, utilizes multiple generations of complex image symmetry in natural unaltered color, to create very intricate patterns on a grand scale with methodology based upon the science of symmetry, universal geometric morphological sequencing, and related mathematical algorithmic principals to aesthetically control and create both order and systemic structure from random organic imagery.
In March 2005 John published his first book about his art titled, “Chaotic Symmetries – The Artwork of John Arabolos”©. A second Book relative to his current artwork and titled “The Fabric of Life Series“©, is planned to be published within the next 2 to 3 years.
Based upon the underlying principles within his artwork, in July of 2008 John filed a patent for a new “Disruptive Technology” for creating systemic morphological pattern sequencing. This design methodology enables the creation of an infinite number of self referential patterns from any given pictorial reference. The forthcoming applied technology currently being developed, will be for use in the creative development of pattern sequencing within the “Graphic Image Terrain” and for utilization by the fine and applied arts of the Interior, Textile, Graphic Design and Education industries.
