Karlene McConnell
Summer Heat, 24 x 18 in., mixed media
In April 2020, the world shut down. It was then that I realized how blessed I am to live in Florida, to have a big back porch and to have a husband who I like to share time with.
Although I could still easily go to my studio without being in contact with others, I chose to stay home at first. Home was safe, home was familiar, but where was home for my art? I found refuge by working on paper. Paper was smaller and more portable.
My earlier work had always been on paper, first graphite drawings, then watercolor. My new paper pieces were fresh and different, yet they still felt like home. This past year proved to be very introspective and as an artist, I find that these pauses only help us to clear our path and move forward.
Cleansing Rays on my Face, 4 x 18 in. mixed media on paper
Wildflowers, 24 in. x 18 in. mixed media
Morning Marsh, 24 ix 18 in.
Patty Meriam
My second birthday during COVID was my sixtieth. While my high school classmates all hit this milestone with me, many lamented (on Facebook) how old we were getting, but I celebrated my birthday with new classmates! I began an MFA program in Visual Art at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in July 2021! I am having a blast being in a supportive and intellectual art community. VCFA is one of the oldest low-residency programs in the world so they were extremely prepared to tweak their model for Zoom.
Like all of us, I have been involved in making art since I was a child but encouraged to take a “practical route” by my father, I got an MS in Historic Preservationist. I used my artistic talents as a private consultant on restoration and conservation projects for thirty years.
Through my involvement in preservation projects in my local community, I became politically involved in state politics and considered running for the legislature. But before I made that leap, I engaged in a year-long leadership program with the Snelling Center for Government. The first third of this program concentrated on self- discovery, and I emerged from the program as an artist. I decided to make art with the intentionality of political messaging focusing on climate change. I built a collection of oil paintings and had my first show in 2015 where I sold 24 pieces! In 2018 I was thrilled to be juried into NAWA which gave me much needed validation.
Reaching From Grout,oil on linen, 30 x 40 in.
My MFA program is self-directed which means I work with faculty advisors to develop a course of study which is directly related to the kind of art I want to practice. My current research and writing have been a discovery of feminist writing, research into the sublime experience, Afrofuturism, political satire, and catching up on the contemporary art world. In the studio I am combining painted pieces with time-based animation, so I am learning all the tricks in the Adobe Suite program (Photoshop, After Effects, and Premier Pro)! Not bad for an old broad! My goal is to create augmented reality from paintings; in essence bringing painted work to life. Art is being shared digitally more than it is in galleries these days, so I want to be able to use the media to convey my political concerns. In a gallery setting I will be able to show both painted works and digital manipulation to them.
I am grateful to the NAWA community. You gave me confidence to pursue my dreams.
Best wishes to you all for a healthy and productive 2021!
One Eyed Ghost, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in.
Democracy’s Gate 2021, Photoshop, based on Duccio’s 13th “Christ Entering Jerusalem”, Digital Art
Colossal II, 20 x 20 in. oil on linen, 2021
Veronica Kurian
Bracelets, Stampington Press by Veronica Kurian
“It has the precious quality of jewelry”. Those words were spoken by Professor Finkelstein when I handed him the first maquette for my senior project in sculpture, Queens College, 1969.
It was a maquette, a little glass sphere filled with twisted wires in botanical shapes, but I didn’t plan on making the final piece much larger. And much later, when I took my Masters degree with a concentration in Collage and Assemblage, the objects I collected to assemble continued to be diminutive. Moth wings, cicadas, stamps, rags, and bones were my chosen materials. A fellow student once commented, “why don’t you use a car muffler instead of a car key?”
In 2011, fifteen years after being inducted into NAWA, it seemed a natural transition to start assembling jewelry. Using the same tiny objects, I created wearables and submitted them to Stampington Press, a craft publisher. My work has appeared in thirty plus periodicals since.
My journey is not a direct result of COVID, but it did carry me through the worst of 2020. No gallery needed. Work submitted by mail. Publishing somehow continued.
Is that a comedown from creating pure art? I think not. As one of my teachers once said, what separates art from craft is content. Each piece of my jewelry tells a story. Each stimulates a visual dialogue. And each challenges the boundaries of traditional craft.
Denise Cormier Mahoney
Cosmos in Chaos
2020 Trauma and the Healing Nature of Art
They say that each of these events alone causes trauma in a person’s life: Events such as the death of a loved one, a job change, the emotional and physical shock of an accident, selling a home and moving to a new location. Add to that a worldwide pandemic and you’ve summarized our year.
For seven years, we’ve been planning to leave the Northwest in March 2020. The plan was to sell our home and take a leisurely vacation across the United States, dipping low into the country’s southern states, visiting friends from the West Coast to Eastern Canada. A big horseshoe shaped, month-long discovery as a retirement gift for my husband and a desire of returning to the East Coast for me.
Everything changed when the country went on lockdown and all our plans were cancelled. We embraced it at first because the work of boxing an entire household was exhausting and we enjoyed the few weeks of staying in our PJ’s and watching movies. We thought it was a temporary situation.
But then came the phone call. My sister had cancer. Not the type you treat with chemo, hoping and praying for healing or remission. No, this one had a death sentence and a three-month expiration date.
We hustled to fill the last box, got in my car, and took five days to drive from Seattle, Washington to Boston, Massachusetts where I put my husband on a plane back home. Our house sold the first day of the drive, so he was returning to put things in storage and attend closing. Then he got in his car and drove the same route across the USA again, arriving at the Canadian border just as it opened to family members.
Two weeks of quarantine each, mandated by the province of New Brunswick, and I was able to say goodbye to my beloved sister.
She died in July.
In October, my husband fell off a 35-foot rock cliff while fishing with a buddy, broke his ankle and bruised his body severely. The trauma of knowing he could have died was real, but the miracle of survival was not lost on us. Who knew retirement could be so dangerous?
Living in our northeast home for the summer half of the planned Snowbird retirement brought us to a leisurely drive south for warmer weather. Two new homes, two new kittens and off we went.
Our daughter who lives in New York City encouraged me to respond to the trauma by creating during the storm instead of afterwards.
This seven-panel piece represents seven sisters in my family. One panel for each as well as for each month through the foggy cloud of April to October, 2020. I call it Cosmos in Chaos because of the redemptive and restorative nature of creativity which helped me walk through trauma coming from all sides. This year, life hit hard and close to home, but doing what I love allowed my positivity and hope to be reignited.
Cosmos in Chaos Explained
April- International symbol of Chaos as eight arrows pointing in different directions
May- Long walks in the Marsh brought the hope of life’s continuing pull forward.
June- Impending doom and the weight of upcoming loss
July- The first of seven sisters vanishes.
August- Moving one foot forward…life goes on but lacks color.
September- The quiet nature of loss.
October- Renewed chaos as my husband falls off a cliff.
Denise Cormier Mahoney is a narrative artist, exploring the significance of story through shared experiences and human interactions. Her contemporary folk-art paintings are narrative, colorful, and visually textural, focusing on themes that unite rather than divide.
You can see her work at www.dcmstudios.org, on FB at Denise Cormier Mahoney Studios and on Instagram at dcmahoneyart.
Jeannine Cook
Promise of Spring – Almond Blossom, silverpoint, 7.5 in.x 5.5 in. 2018
The start of the pandemic caught me at my family home in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Mallorca quickly went into total confinement for nearly two months, and we could hardly stray beyond our front doors.
Ironically, for me, it became a time of peace, delight in following the evolution of a garden as it opened and flowered in spring and summer, and wonderful support and daily contact with Spanish and French friends locally through Whatsapp, with a plethora of music and art videos to share.
Nightly, at 7 pm, we all stood on our balconies to applaud the healthcare and other front line workers caring for us: the swell of handclapping rose through the city to a background of ships’ sirens sounding around Palma’s spacious harbor. We all had friends affected by Covid in one way or another.
This time also meant that as an artist, I felt hugely privileged that I had an untrammeled period to create, drawing in silver and thinking about the future as planned 2020 exhibitions around the world evaporated. I could pick elegant calla lilies from the garden to draw, I had “treasures” of all descriptions squirrelled away and I had time and peace. Such a gift.
Summer was a careful normal, swimming and celebrating this beautiful island freed of tourists and thus the world of yore to a large degree. Collecting elegant masks to wear became de rigueur, meeting artists and making new friends in the art world – all aspects of a Mediterranean life. A more limited life once more as Covid surged again, but this time, at least, we could all go for long, wonderful walks along the beaches and cliffs and up the magical mountain slopes to explore wilder parts of the island.
The Coming of Spring, Silverpoint, 11 in. x 15 in.
Now we are getting vaccinated, art exhibitions are on the calendar and limited life opens up. I am preparing a video on the strangely parallel histories of olive growing and silverpoint drawing, linked by Pliny the Elder’s presence on this island and his subsequent writing about olives and silver in his AD 77 Historia Naturalis, another source of fascinations, beauty and new friends.
As an artist, I have been truly fortunate this year of such trials and sadness for so many. I actively count my blessings.
Lolly Owens
As the pandemic began and we started a year of self-isolation, I gained a new perspective on my creative life. I realized my spirit was unhappy living in Florida. I needed a larger sense of community and diversity of art making.
Moving is never an easy task, but with faith and determination we decided to return to Pennsylvania, our home state, during the pandemic. Both my husband and I have medical issues and are in the high risk group. I had the J&J vaccine just before driving over 1000 miles to our destination. He had none.
As I write this we have arrived and found a place to live. We plan to convert a former party room in the house into a 252 sq. ft. studio (the 108 sq. ft. bar will remain for open studios.) There is also a fireplace in the future studio! Hearing and following my spirit have brought us safely to a new home and the largest studio space I ever had. I am so looking forward to creating again.
Maidy Morhous – MIA ARTIST FOUND!
Door #13,2021, acrylic, 12 x 12 in.
Artist lost for the past year only to be found, where else, but in her studio(s) painting and working on metal sculptures. Maidy Morhous, a bronze sculptor/ painter has spent the past year, as she usually does, in her studio working daily on creating artwork.
For some Covid was hard, yes, it did scare her as to how she might pick up the virus; she followed suit and ordered food delivered, washed, sprayed surfaces, and stayed away from friends and family. Galleries closed so sales dried up, and the bronze foundry she relied on to cast her artwork was MIA as well; she has 14 months later heard that they are starting up again. In the meantime, she needed to feed her creative juices, not only by painting, but in a 3D way! She turned to something she had not done for over 30 years – metalsmithing – dusting off a few leftover tools from classes, she began to pursue a 3D direction that she could control herself. The direction is still evolving but it has been an adrenaline rush to say the least.
“I forgot how unforgiving metal is when parts need to fit together, but I also rediscovered the beauty of forged and etched metals. In an earlier life I was a Printmaker, so it has been fun to experience the new methods of etching metals and incorporating them into my designs.”
My painting took on a “series approach”, as I spent the last 9 months painting a “door” series which has morphed into somewhat of a surrealist feel, which hints at the world we live in today. Covid has definitely transformed the world we live in, but I feel people long to return to the gallery to view artwork versus buying online. 3D wall mounted work is especially hard to photograph and relate the elevation to viewers, so gallery display is a must. Gallery and online shows are popping up, although I’ve stayed away from entering European shows for now because they are struggling not just as a society but with their shipping services.
Time-Ode to Dali, 3D Wall Sculpture, mixed metal 12 x 12 x 3 in.
The 20th Japan International Art Exchange Exhibition, which I participated in two years ago in Tokyo, has extended an invitation to me this year. It takes place at the Chiba Museum of Fine Art, Japan August 3-8, 2021 this year (the Olympics are in Tokyo in August). I will be displaying two (2) of my pop art bronze sculptures. Die Zeit – Wissen Magazine, Frankfurt Germany – purchased the rights to display the photo of my bronze sculpture “Empty Dreams” in their publication planned for later this year.
3 second rule, contemporary bronze sculpture, 3 x 9 x 7 in.
Life is beginning to breathe, and the art scene gaining ground, so keep creating and enjoy another day!
www.MaidyMorhous.com
