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FEATURING:
Nan Hass Feldman
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Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
Medium: Painter and Mixed-Media Artist
Experience: Full-Time Artist since 1972
Background: Bachelor of Fine Arts at SUNYat Buffalo (4 years), Master of Arts in Painting at Goddard College (1 year), Master of Fine Arts at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier (1 1/2 years).
Inspiration: Feldman's draws on a lifetime of visiting and teaching in museums for 40 years. She could name 50 artists as her inspiration, but her top ones are the Fauves, ie: Matisse, Van Gogh, Vlaminck, Derain, Dufy, and Nikki de Saint Phalle, Dubuffet, and David Hockney.
Alexander Gassel
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Birthplace: Moscow, USSR
Medium: Gassel uses an ancient technique: egg yolk tempera. He makes his own color pigments by grinding natural stones and minerals, such as malachite, cinnabar, or lapis into powder, which he then mixes with egg yolk. He often applies gold or silver leaf on the paintings.
Experience: From 1970 to 1980, he worked at the Grabar Center for the Restoration and Preservation of Art in Moscow, restoring and copying medieval tempera paintings. Influenced by this experience, the artist began to create his own original paintings – for the most part personal interpretations of Biblical events. At that time, it was absolutely forbidden in the Soviet Union to exhibit contemporary religious paintings. In 1980, Alexander Gassel left the USSR to start a new life in the USA.
Background: Stroganoff Art Graduate School. Department of Art History, Moscow (1 year), Grabar Restoration and Conservation Center of Russia, Moscow (1 year), MA in Fine Arts - Institute of Arts and Graphics, Moscow (5 years).
Inspiration: Based on traditional Russian artistic values, Gassel's new art works often employ a surrealistic combination of details from different civilizations. Old symbols are joined with contemporary subjects, reflecting more and more his new experience of life in America.
Berio Gizzi
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Birthplace: Abruzzo, Italy 1932
Medium: Painting and Restoration
Background: The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (4 years), studied drawing with the sculptor George Demetrious in Gloucester, MA summer of 1962, The Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy (2 years) and traveled to various countries to study the Old Masters.
Mary Hughes
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Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
Medium: Painting and Drawing
Experience: Mary Hughes is a native Bostonian who began her painting career at ten years of age when on vacation in Maine with her grandmother. Her grandmother, an amateur painter, gave her a postcard of the Atlantic coast with a wave crashing on rocks, which Mary then meticulously copied in oil. Her awkward teen years thankfully involved high school art classes and summer art programs at local museums and art schools. That eventually led her to the painting program at Boston University, where she earned a BFA. She later pursued a MFA at Massachusetts College of Art.
Background: BFA, Boston University and MFA, Massachusetts College of Art
Inspiration: The landscape has remained a constant inspiration in Hughes' artwork, from the direct pleine air painting she did in locations such as southern France, the west coast of Ireland and inland New Hampshire. Even in the abstract imagery that has dominated her work for the past decade or so, references to nature are evident.
In her current work, Mary explores mapping, mark making and the passage of time. The drawings and paintings are built upon meandering lines formed in reaction to previous layers, recalling contour maps, topographical lines and nautical charts. The organic forms reference the landscape while also referencing abstract patterning — mark-making as an act of confirmation.
Gedas Paskauskas
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Birthplace: Rhode Island
Medium: Painting
Experience: In 1975, Paskauskas began a career as a commercial photographer and later as a mural artist. Co-founding Bopas, Inc. in 1981, a mural and decorative painting company, he branched out to form Gedas Paskauskas Studios, Inc. in 2005. He divides his work and time between his studios in Boston and Little
Compton, RI.
Background: Robert Douglas Hunter, atelier. Private study in landscape and human anatomy (2 years). School of the Worcester Art Museum, graduate - painting major (3 years).
Inspiration: Paskauskas' personal work reflects his observation of nature, but transposes light and form to convey a more personal sentiment, reducing visual information to the elements of pure expression.
Christopher Volpe
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Birthplace: Glen Cove, New York
Medium: Oil painter
Experience: Volpe moved to New England from Long Island, New York, to earn a graduate degree in poetry at the University of New Hampshire. He worked for 15 years as a professional writer and taught college English and poetry before falling in love with American landscape painting while teaching a class in art history. Drawing upon the New England landscape, his work has roots in 19th century traditions such as Barbizon and Tonalism yet extends to abstraction through a contemporary sensibility.
Background: Studied with contemporary masters Eric Aho, Stuart Shils, and Dennis Sheehan.
Inspiration: Volpe sees painting as a vehicle for a poetic fusion of perception, sensation, improvisation, and “the real.” His paintings are the fruit of an emotional engagement with the visual world combined with exploration of the expressive formal properties of design, movement, color, and mood.