Club Competition This Wednesday, January 6th, 7:30 p.m.
Our next competition of the season is this Wednesday, January 6, 2016
The assigned subject for January is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
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 evening will be:
Olivia Graham – www.oliviagraham.com
Since her “lucky break” twenty years ago photographing her first commercial job for Neiman Marcus, Olivia has been shooting editorial and commercial jobs non-stop. Her photo shoots have recently taken her from Havana to Costa Rica to Cape Town and beyond.
Olivia graduated from Cornell University with a duel major in painting and photography. After graduating Olivia returned to New York City where she got a job at Harper’s Bazaar Magazine in the fashion department working as an assistant to the Creative Director. Olivia left Bazaar after two years and worked for five years assisting some of the fashions world’s best known photographers.
Olivia’s client list is long and diverse. She shoots editorially for Glamour UK, Marie Claire, Grazia Italia, Town and Country and international editions of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Her commercial clients include Bloomingdale’s, Urban Decay, Neiman Marcus and L’Oreal UK, among many others.
Olivia is based in NYC and lives in Greenwich, CT with her husband and three children.
David Land – www.davidlandphotography.com
These are a few excerpts from David’s website:
“I have been an artist for over 30 years working with oils, gouache, photography, and mixed-media. I studied at Silvermine College of Art and Connecticut College. When the combination of digital photography and digital manipulation software arrived, I found the opportunities fantastic and unlimited…
“When I switched from film to digital, the digital darkroom opened up whole new vistas for expressing my visual ideas. My two main areas of focus, currently, are the reinvention of the still life and the reimaging of the portrait. My training as a painter is solidly reflected in my work as a digital photo artist. As a painter I built my canvases using layers upon layers to create the depth and complexity of the composition and the colors. Each work required understanding about how each layer would interact with the paint beneath it. I use the same technique in my digital art. I build the image using layers of images, colors, and textures to create my vision…
“I continue to hone my craft shooting a variety of subjects. Equestrian, polo, landscape, and traditional portrait photography are some of the areas in which I work at constantly looking for a fresh approach, a new angle, or a new combination of styles to give my art a fresh and contemporary look while retaining a solid grounding in classic techniques.”
John Arabolos – www.garrisongunter.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 since1991 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.
About the Artwork
John’s artwork is an investigation of “Chaotic” patterns found in nature. These are patterns that have what 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.
Recent and Current Activities
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 principals 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.
