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DONNA K.
MCGEE
Cranberry Hill Acrylic on Canvas 38”x 48”
Artist and art educator
Donna K. McGee
creates acrylic paintings
in the American
abstraction tradition,
confounding impressions
of depth or
spatial definition. Using
a sometimes bold
but generally muted palette of earth and rust tones, her paintings
evoke surfaces marked by the passage of time. McGee’s
manipulation of acrylic creates simultaneous illusions of flatness
and experience: colors grow into each other; planes are inscribed
with abrasions and fissures. She thereby carries the project of
abstraction beyond the abolishment of figure and background.
Instead, McGee subverts the surface of the canvas and evokes
crumbling, peeling and fraying materials. Where different planes
meet and surfaces seem scratched or rusted, her paintings inscribe
abstract art in the cycles of history. Her surfaces’ initial
calm betrays the possibility of implosion; that these façades will
give way to the unknown beneath. To say that Donna K. Mc-
Gee’s works are history paintings would be an exaggeration, but
they are certainly abstractions with a historical awareness.
Website: www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Donna_McGee.aspx
MARIKA BERLIND
Red Hole Oil on Canvas 48”x 48”
Layers in nature
are not something
one often takes into
account. But Susan
Eck defines the strata
of her environment
into entities that
Violet River Oil on Canvas 24”x 36” a r e s e p a r a t e
yet inseparable,
contagious in beauty and color. Using her genuine excitement,
sensitivity, and simplification of nature as more than an artistic
device, Eck establishes a complex relationship between viewer
and view, as well as between foreground and background and the
space in-between. Her wide pallet of color is often used as a multimedia-like
element and the bold contrasts she employs work like
the medium of collage: each layer stands out from and cooperates
with the next. Her landscapes are never two-dimensional in the
physical or the emotional sense.
In Muskoka, Canada, Eck immerses herself in the nature she
translates onto her canvas. In her playfulness with the textures of
her environment, Eck creates a new reality which she interprets
with distinction and insight as if into the layers of our own lives.
Website: www.susaneck.ca
SUSAN
ECK
An artist with U.S. and Greek nationalities, based in San
Francisco, Marika Berlind has found a way to combine her
love for Astronomy and Mathematics with her love for Art, both
of which she studied in her university years at Princeton, RISD
and Yale.
Berlind’s goal is to present various interpretations of
astrophysical-cosmological and mathematical concepts, in order
to reveal their visual, theoretical, and philosophical implications.
She wishes to provide an alternate means by which to explore
science, through a momentary visual experience of ‘living in
the universe’; or, of living in that indefinable space between the
universe and our earth, our ‘selves’. She is interested in issues of
‘vastness’, ‘the infinite’, ‘chaos’, ‘multidimensionality’, ‘parallel
spaces’, and the ‘relative role of Earth and human consciousness
within the Universe’. She hopes to open a door for the questioning
of our role as observers in our formation of scientific ‘truth’.
Berlind believes that ‘talent’ is more a matter of mind than
hand, and is cultured through education and analytical thinking.
She hopes her art will stand out for the original, intellectual and
aesthetic treatment of her subject matter. Deeply connected with
her subject, she aspires to contribute to bringing science to art and
art to science. “...We are literally made of the dust of stars. The
universe is beyond our reach and awesome to our minds; but it
is also ‘us’...”
Website: www.marikaberlind.com
www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Marika_Berlind.aspx
39 ArtisSpectrum