Madonna Phillips

'Sinuous' Quadriptych Abstract Architectural Painting

2021

Natasha Zupan beautifully unites the old and new, combining the innovation of her highly crafted technique with her wonder for tradition and the great Masters. This body of work expl...

Natasha Zupan beautifully unites the old and new, combining the innovation of her highly crafted technique with her wonder for tradition and the great Masters. This body of work explores the manipulation of surface texture, light, and the interweaving of time. It is not about translating a world that already exists, but about an entrance into a different universe. A timeless, tactile world of sensation and overlapping memory. Combining Renaissance ideals and concepts with images taken from contemporary media, Natasha Zupan beautifully unites the old and the new in her collage work. Natasha combines the innovation of her elaborate technique with her charm for tradition and the inspiration of the great Masters. Her clear, bright brushstrokes and her play of light and shadow are both rhythmic and youthful. The female figures in her paintings have an undeniable Renaissance character at the time, but they are reborn in our understanding of contemporary aesthetics. Their classic faces become modern nymphs when combined with symbols of nature and beauty. Each figurative work harbors a unique and intricate personality. Powerfully expressive, they are at once pure, sensual, innocent and seductive. From Tactile Memory Series silk leaves, acrylic, glass on canvas...

Natasha Zupan beautifully unites the old and new, combining the innovation of her highly crafted technique with her wonder for tradition and the great Masters. This body of work expl...

Natasha Zupan beautifully unites the old and new, combining the innovation of her highly crafted technique with her wonder for tradition and the great Masters. This body of work expl...

This depicts civil rights icon MLK, the Statue of Liberty, Iwo Jima, an assemblage of mixed media photographic images and painted collaged elements. A powerful, moving work, an ode to the black civil rights movement. John M. Mitchell is originally from North Carolina, and as an art student at North Carolina Central University, he was involved with the Civil Rights movement including participating and getting arrested at a sit-in protest in Durham in 1963. After graduating, he was one of the first art teachers to take a position at the newly integrated schools in his home state. Mitchell continued his education in the 1990s and earned an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1993. He later served as a professor there from 1998-2006. Of his inspiration to create, Mitchell says: "A lot of my work is based on my experiences during the Civil Rights movement," he says. "I see art making as a 'record' of experiences. My bittersweet past, growing up in the segregated South, inspires the content, focus and narrative of my work." Savannah-based artist John Mitchell believes that a home is more than a simple edifice. Rather, he argues that the sociological, psychological, architectural, and historical associations embedded in the structure “tell us about our culture, our lives. It tells us about where we come from.” Mitchell's signature shotgun house constructions, crafted from found materials and scraps of newspaper headlines, reference his childhood in North Carolina, where such modest architectural structures were once commonplace. In "ALA 1963," he uses the shotgun shape to create a heartfelt memorial to a group of African-American girls killed in a racially motivated church bombing in Alabama nearly 50 years ago. He also incorporates the shotgun symbol in "Victims," a powerful reflection upon crime in Savannah in the early 1990s, which reveals how little has changed over the past two decades. Mitchell's mixed media constructions operate, in many ways, like memory itself. Scraps, fragments and pieces loosely cohere around a central idea, making symbolic and metaphorical connections. In these richly narrative and boldly stream-of-conscious assemblages, the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. Mitchell's jazz collages...

My World is Full of Possibilities - Green 2021 Mixed media, acrylic paint and archival print on acrylic, recycled plastic, gold leaf, and mirror. Arica Hilton's "My World is Full o...

My World is Full of Possibilities - Red/Green 2021 Mixed media, acrylic paint and archival print on acrylic, recycled plastic, gold leaf, and mirror. Arica Hilton's "My World is Fu...

My World is Full of Possibilities - Green/Yellow 2021 Mixed media, acrylic paint and archival print on acrylic, recycled plastic, gold leaf, and mirror. Arica Hilton's "My World is...

My World is Full of Possibilities - Blue 2021 Mixed media, acrylic paint and archival print on acrylic, recycled plastic, gold leaf, and mirror. Arica Hilton's "My World is Full of...

My World is Full of Possibilities - Black/Red 2021 Mixed media, acrylic paint and archival print on acrylic, recycled plastic, gold leaf, and mirror. Arica Hilton's "My World is Fu...