Laurie Skantzos

I first saw Laurie Skantzos at the West Hamilton Artist Tour. Her work is inspired by wild gardens, urban landscapes and gritty graffiti and strives to make the invisible visible. She incorporates a wide variety of materials and media in her work. Japanese paper and tissues, powdered pigments, lino block printing, acrylic paint and oil sticks are some of her favorites. She is showing at the upcoming One-of-a-Kind Show, so look for her work there!

Here is what she says about her work:
"The process of creating a painting, watching as it unfolds and seeing it as a finished product is both exciting and meditative for me. This duality that I experience in my engagement with the work interests me in other areas as well. Order and chaos vie for dominance; beauty gives way to decay only to emerge once again, deliberation retreats as intuition takes over. I find that the act of painting eventually reveals to me what is really going on in my inner world even as I react with or against the outer world, searching for inspiration.

I'm interested in organic life on all levels, as well as expansion and procreation. As I get older, I seek to break open and expand on my experiences and ideas rather than begin to shut down in complacency. My painting is an expression of that and also an investigation."

Laurie Skantzos

Kate Rivers Collage

I want to share with you another amazing post from my new favourite art blog, Art, Artists, and Galleries.  I highly encourage you to subscribe to this blog, as the art is fresh and the writing is very insightful!   This time it is the work of Kate Rivers who creates very unusual collages of birds nests, subject matter that I love and that has appeared in my own work in the past.

From Art, Artists, and Galleries:
"What other animal is known for creating collages? A bird, of course.Kate Rivers knows this and reflects this in her work. These nest works caught me off guard, because I didn't even think about this fact about birds collaging until I saw her work. But enough about birds. Kate Rivers work is attractive as a collage, because she is taking a fresh approach to an art form. I mean, typically if you have seen one collage you seen them all, but Rivers really shakes it up with a more representational approach, rather than something purely abstract or something that uses to much of the recognizable part of the images in the collage. Not Rivers, she plays with these cutouts and creates an amazing composition of strips of paper.

On her website, I found a very eloquent artist statement.  Here is a section of it, where she explains her source material and her symbolism of the nest:

"I collage fragments of these things that I collect: maps, notes, cancelled stamps, old books, children's drawings, clothing labels, love letters, buttons and pins and weave them together as a bird constructs a nest. I use the image of the bird's nest as metaphor. The nest is a symbol for home and that space becomes synonymous with memory, loss and nostalgia. I use maps frequently because they link the body to the land and to the physical space represented. The individual is divided and classified within these geographic spaces. The map represents my struggle ,a type of resistance and a search for ownership of self, separate and unique from what I see as a deluge of banality of images within our culture. However, I understand that separateness only exists within my own idea of myself.

The collage elements that I use are deliberately selected from that which would have been or was thrown away, discarded or set aside. I specifically include things that are given to me and things that reflect that day or week that the piece was created. I work on paper, wood and canvas. Objects are sewn, nailed, or glued in place." 

Kate Rivers website link