Eight Artists Who Have Received MVCC Support
Artists’ Reception Saturday November 9th, 2019 4:30 – 6:30pm
BELLA | Oil Paintings
Bella is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker and musician.
From a childhood passion for drawing and all arts, later being a part of an architectural group, to successful designer of window displays in her homeland, it was eventually her connection to music that led her to Martha’s Vineyard in 2001. Oil paintings started in 2005, with a portrait of her son. Among her many artist pursuits, painting has recently become more and more an exploration of a new universe. She says, “I paint the nature that is inside me” – a manifestation of “a living thought”. Her intuitive approach allows her to listen to what she calls “messengers” – allowing them to influence her choice of subject. – “To paint a bird, is to catch a bird”
KATE FEIFFER | Drawings and Doodles
Feiffer is a writer and illustrator.
“I call what I do doodling, since my drawings, paintings, and multi-media work is derived from the free-flowing lines, loops, swirls, cross-hatches and zig-zags of doodles. Every drawing or collage I do is launched by a doodle. I have recently taken to layering doodles on doodles and mixing multi-media with doodles. I am interested in the purity of line that falls from a pen, without significant forethought or contemplation, and emerges as people, birds, and dogs, along with loops and squiggles that can be dressed up and readied for the outside world. (Received MCC grant for documentary film “Matzo & Mistletoe”)
BILL O’CALLAGHAN | Mixed media | Photography | Ceramics
Folk Artist, Bill O’Callaghan’s vessels and sculptures are greatly influenced by the Folklore that permeated his childhood in Cork, Ireland. He draws inspiration from the beings of Celtic Mythology, like the Tuatha de Danann, as well as a belief in the Other World of Faerie and Spirit. His artwork captures the soul of a piece, transcending the physical.
In his photographs, he brings into focus what might be happening, unseen, when we aren’t watching, in those quiet moments when the veil between worlds thins.
SUSAN JOHNSON | Paintings
“How might a single image unfold into a deeper narrative? For me, Island is a traditional metaphor for the inherent alienation as an embodied subject, yet shares a sense of something being passed through time, across generations – of connection that is both disrupted and reabsorbed by water and the passage of time. How does one voice emerge from a multitude of narratives? To this end, regardless of medium, my process trajectory has turned out to be about peeling away layers to reveal a personal vulnerability, like a pentimento, or ghost – an erasure in contrast to an absence. My key topics are ethics, public art, spirituality, memory and everyday experience”
RICHARD LIMBER | ink on paper
“Most of my output is a reaction to something. Sometimes a face, or a body that is in front of me. Or an image in a newspaper that jumps out at me because of its depiction of an important moment in time, and also possessing a strong graphic quality that ties it with iconic art of the past…
Another source of material has been stills from experimental movies from the fifties and sixties. At times I combine some of these various pictures with doors and structures to create a dramatic theatrical construction with a political edge.”
JULIA MITCHELL | Tapestries
Mitchell, an island native, is an established weaver with more than 50 years experience. Her subjects are inspired by the natural world around her, and her interest in the nuances of light and shadow, elements and forms. She illustrates the beauty she encounters, whether in urban settings, historic sites, or fields and woodland paths. Mitchell blends her palette on and in her tapestry, using high quality, all organic materials – silk, wool and linen.
Cheyanne Vandall | Acrylics on canvas
Vandall’s non-representational, boldly colored, organic shapes manifest subconsciously on the canvas. She is less concerned with interpretations, narratives or conclusions than the therapeutic act of creating.
She hails from an artist family in Pennsylvania, studied art at Indiana University, PA, with a focus on printmaking and ceramics. For the past sixteen years Vandall has been working with acrylics.
DAN WATERS | Tisbury street scenes preserved in the Photographic Time Capsule funded by the MVCC
Waters’ black-and-white series “Tisbury” is extracted from a larger project: a photographic time capsule of Martha’s Vineyard. The project aims to preserve a true record of life in our time on black-and-white film, with negatives to be stored in climate-controlled archives at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.
The series includes photographs of places, interiors of places, and people, and people in their interiors and work spaces so that people 50 or 100 years from now can look back and say — that’s what it was like back then.