Colors of Life - Music

I use a variety of found and scavenged objects in multiple hydraulic pressings to create embossed pentimenti in copper. Working intuitively, with curiosity and intention, but no plan, I watch for imagery to emerge in the metal surfaces as shapes merge and overlap. These pieces are then combined with some kind of support - usually wooden - natural or man-made, and other enriching materials.In the dialogue between the pressed metal images and their supports or containers, I discover what these things mean to be. My hope is that they are appealing as objects, and that they evoke a sense of the surprise of their creation and the mystery of their presence.

Born in N.J. Lived and worked many years in N.Y. Moved to Santa Monica in 2001. Studied at Douglass College, N.J.(B.A.) and New York University (M.A.). Adjunct Faculty NYU; Master Teacher in Lincoln Center Institute; Staff Development Training and Program Developer at The Studio In A School, NYC. Solo Shows at Atlantic Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; New England Center for Contemporary Art, Conn. Group Shows: Brooklyn Museum; Bronx Museum; Dayton Art Institute. has shown in many National Juried Competitions, and galleries in N.Y. and Connecticut. Her art has been chosen for St Johns Health Center Art Wall, and meditation rooms in Hospices and hospitals, and is represented in many private collections.

My style, consisting of many various ornaments, dictated by the concrete appearance of the environment, the presence of interesting combinations like faces, houses, flowers, and other things. These fragments you can find in most of my current work.

- Elena Beresnjak

Elena was born on November 03.1962 in Odessa, Ukraine, on the Black Sea, capital of culture, where famous artists, musicians and authors like the violinist David Oistrakh and the artist Wladimir Strelnikow had their start.

In Odessa, Elena Beresnjak attended Stolyarsky State Music School and gained a degree as a concert pianist from the Odessa High School of Performing & Applied Arts.

While studying Elena discovered her passion for painting and took lessons at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art. The contemporary artist from Saint Petersburg Ilya Glazunov praised them most profusely after which Elena attended the Academies of Art in Saint Petersburg and Moscow to improve her skills.

In 1985 she won First Prize in a chamber music contest in Kiev, in 1992 she moved to Diekholzen (Germany) to rejoin her husband, the artist and violinist Oleg Zubarev.

While Elena has had many exhibitions of her art in Germany and Russia, her life still is very affected by art and music. So in 2004 she had the great idea not just to paint canvas but also to paint musical instruments. Elena's ten painted violins, violas and cellos, with their distinctive names and evocative musical associations, have already becoming prized collectors' items.

Of course, Elena always insists on time for playing the piano in Oleg and Egmont Heinzmann's salon 10-member Wir Salonloewen, organized "as a contrast to the otherwise usually more serious work in the cultural orchestra".

Using found objects to create sculptures brings resources to my disposition that are as varied as the material realm of the world we live in; they provide an interesting mirror of our time and society.

My work is frequently narrative or symbolic and deals with social and spiritual issues.

A recent series – 18” x 18” squared – aims to explore the energy of matter and its relationship to the action/manipulation of the artist.

Annemarie Rawlinson, an award-winning artist, works primarily in mixed media and collage and has shown her work nationally and internationally. In 1994, she founded the L.A. Assemblage Group. This group currently has 17 members and networks and exhibits at least once a year together.

Using discarded objects as art materials, Annemarie aims at raising public consciousness of the need to conserve resources and preserve the natural environment. These objects, once useful, bring their own beauty and vibrations with them, expressing symbolic or narrative content.

Approaching art history with a flair for abstract expressivity and a designer's confidence in choreographing fundamentals of color and shape, Schwartz wields a palette knife along with brushes to animate prismatic color stories in thickly applied oil paint. Her Crystal Auras series are opalescent mixed media paintings created with countless layers of acrylic saturated with mica, interference pigment, and natural minerals that glisten like geodes, and bounce light across their auric topographies. Her largest project, Ricordi d'Italia, merges her explorations of the mellifluous properties of color, light, and surface with direct inspiration drawn from travels to Italy. While these paintings still possess the ethereal presence of Crystal Auras, they demonstrate a more formally definitive, architectural sensibility, being derived from photographic source sketches highlighting geometric details culled from vistas and ruins. At the same time, operations of memory, deconstruction, and fantasy combine to render them in an abstract language, producing moody palimpsests and evocative scenic impressions. With Burst, Schwartz's newest collection, we see small, intimate sections of works from Ricordi d'Italia enlarged into wholly new paintings -- gestural compositions whose exotic rhythms are deeply influenced by her studies of Asian Sumi-e ink painting, which reveal their inner lives as she teases their essences forward from within their faceted depths.

Anne Brawer Schwartz is a dedicated abstractionist whose painterly imagination remains grounded in the world of places and things. While pursuing a degree in Graphic Design from the University of Oregon and further studies at the Gemological Institute of America, Schwartz always maintained a painting practice, which she kept up during her 25-year career as a renowned couture jewelry designer. The legacy of her expertise as a designer is apparent in her abstract paintings and their considerations of detail, drawing, design principles, color, texture, and refracted light. Having some years ago rededicated herself to her painting studio, today her canvases have been shown in numerous group shows and are represented in collections around the world. She frequently works with art consultants and interior designers, placing her works in businesses, hotels, private homes, and design firms. Being based in LA, her paintings have naturally also been featured in numerous television shows and motion pictures.

I love to do watercolor, oil and ceramics. I paint from my head, and mostly everything that is good comes out by accident. I enjoy the color's more than the drawing.

Freelance Photographer

Ariyana is an interdisciplinary visionary artist who paints, writes, and creates sculptures & assemblages. During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Ariyana was an artist in residence in San Diego City Schools for seven years. She pioneered what she calls Eco-Peace Walls. Painting murals for about five years, these art and word murals had images and messages about global harmony, ecological sustainability, and universal friendship. This art series and her work with students was very well received and written about in the LA Times, San Diego Union, Whole Life Times, KPBS On Air Magazine, Better World Magazine and other publications. Her art has also been featured on the front cover of three publications. One of her murals in Santa Monica was commissioned by the California trendsetter Fred Segal. Nissan Motors commissioned a series of 12 drawings for a 1995 calendar which was distributed to Nissan customers in Asia. She has also worked with the United Nations Environmental Art Program (UNEP).

In October 1994, 20 years of art was lost in a fire that burned her home and studio to the ground. After this tragedy she became an artist in recluse. She returned to painting, writing, designing, yoga, and meditation. These activities helped heal the trauma of tragic impermanence and broken dreams.

Her current art work is a series of acrylic and mixed media paintings, stone sculptures, and mixed media assemblages. Mystical landscapes and Stone Spirits are the themes that she creates through a unique combination of paint, crystals, feathers, black coral, and other found objects gathered over a period of many years. Ariyana is also working on a series of mixed media works where the components came from her own fire side debris and from the Station Fire.

Ariyana sees beauty in everything. This ability fuels her love for mixed media, the art form that she has focused on. She has worked directly on the Earth creating Earth Art, and now she works on a variety of different textures, painted styrofoam, canvas, wood, and handmade papers.

For her, mixed media is like gathering the beauty and wisdom from different cultures, nations and traditions, bringing them together in one place where they meet and intersect in a harmonious way, creating something new, like the fusion of East and West or the combination of the ancient with the modern.