Vessels, Painted Stories

JAY WILFORD

Jay Wilford grew up painting.  He was taught to see and draw the world with an artist’s eye by his mother, a gifted painter in her own right, and was raised in a house filled with paintings, including the works of his grandmother, the Dutch impressionist Hanny Van der Velde. He is largely self-taught working in pastel and oil. Mr. Wilford’s favorite subjects are land and seascapes and nautical themes reflecting dramatic light, unusual perspectives, and dreamy compositions. Mr. Wilford has exhibited, won competitions and sold internationally. He currently resides in Cincinnati, where his paintings are owned by numerous private and corporate collectors

Running With the Wind

ELANA HAGLER

Artist’s Statement

…Artist’s Statement
My family's history, and my own, has been one of nearly constant change. The countries in which my family has lived during the past seventy years include Russia (Moscow as well as Siberia), Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Israel, Romania and both coasts of the United States. I was raised by Holocaust survivors. Like theirs, my life has also turned out to be one of nearly constant nomadism, and this transience has been partly responsible for connecting me so deeply with the history of my family, which is represented by the worn and dependable objects and books which have followed us from country to country. These objects present a solid stability where life otherwise was anything but stable, and a connection to both the myths and realities of the experiences of my family. In these past few years, as I have made my own transition to motherhood, I have also lost most of the members of the family into which I was born. These inherited objects have consequently become that much more precious and poignant to me.  As time passes, I have added my own books and objects to those which I have inherited, and all together, rich with both symbolic meaning and the potential for visual poetry, they have become the building blocks of the mythological language of my inner life.  I hope, through the embodiment of my personal mythology in these still-life paintings, and in the quest for a particular vision of beauty which they represent, I can touch upon something deep and universal—a felt experience that can be communicated to others.

Biography
Elana Hagler was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and immigrated to the United States at the age of five. She received her Bachelor of Arts in both Studio Art and Psychology from Brandeis University, Boston, and continued her studies for two years at the Master Class of the Jerusalem Studio School and in Umbria, Italy. She then received her Master of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Elana has won multiple prizes in painting and drawing and has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Israel, and widely across the United States. She has taught fine art at the Delaware College of Art and Design, Cornell College, and Swarthmore College. She currently teaches online for the Academy of Art University in San Fransisco and is a staff writer for the art website Painting Perceptions.

 

Vessels

Cathy Cebulski-Sacco

Cathy Sacco is a fine artist, writer and teacher. She works in oil, pastel, charcoal and other media to create paintings that evoke drama, contemplation and mystery. Cathy holds a masters degree in education from Xavier University, certification In Montessori education, and a Bachelor of Arts In English and communications. She has studied art with M.K. Hurley, Greg Storer, Michael Scott, and Cole Carothers. She has also attended classes at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Arrowmont School Of Arts And Craft, Villa Nova University and The Provincetown Art and Writing Workshop.

“The arts are places to explore ideas and feelings, and to be contemplative — something we don’t often have the opportunity to do in our current culture. The arts should not be isolated, but integrated into our lives so that we find meaning.”

Cathy works with classroom teachers to help them embody mindfulness and integrate the arts into their work with children. She is an adjunct professor of education at Xavier University and has held workshops for the Cincinnati and national Montessori societies as well as for local schools. she is also currently in a year long training program on mindfulness in education, working with teachers such as Jon Kabat Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Linda Lantieri, and Susan Kaiser Greenland.

She is a native of the new york metropolitan area and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two daughters.

Courage by Cathy Cebulski-Sacco


Lydia Larson

Void

” ‘I speak and speak,’ Marco says, ‘but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.’

‘At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.’ ”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities  p. 106

…

I believe there are multiple realities that exist at the same time. I feel that the physical world is not all there is. I imagine many simultaneous events that link together in a highly organized way, even though everything can seem so utterly random. Perhaps our everyday events fit among a higher order and just maybe, there is a common thread weaving in and out of the lines of every history there ever was, tying us all together. Perhaps, we are these very threads stitched into a colorful and profound synchronistic quilt.

I am interested in the visual possibilities that result from taking pieces of information that are seemingly not related and translating them into a new image. Within this process is my attempt to forge connections in belief that a grand connection indeed exists. My most recent work borrows from various histories, images, memories, and tales. Each painting is a little world, an isolated but necessary stage in which a story will unfold, intimately connecting to the next. I am engaged in an ongoing investigation concerning: rootlessness, voyages, spiritual forces, displacement, what it means to sojourn, place, time, and the great struggle and triumph of communicating.