Art & Culture

The Eldorado Studio Tour is celebrating its 25th anniversary.  It is one of the oldest artists’ studio tours in New Mexico, and this year will have the largest number of artists participating in any tour. We have brought together 3 representative artists from this impresseive group to share a little about them and their journeys as artists.

Susan J. Hyndman – Studio 55

“Innovative Lively Paintings” http://www.susanhyndman.com

“Be who you are. Be free. Integrate spirit with quality of life not quantity of possessions.”

I have always been an artist. It is in the genes. I draw, doodle, color, paint and experiment with a myriad of techniques. I studied Textile Design and produced a small collection of fabrics. I have worked in mixed media, collage and pastel/crayon/inks and watercolor. This year I also published my first book featuring my images and prose.

I am passionate about integrating colors and textures. I have always been very visual. I grew up surrounded by art, architecture, nature and music. I love the water, earth, sky and stars.

Surrender to your innermost desires to create and sustain yourself through Art. As I draw breath, I inspire my imagination.”

Julie Nocent-Vigil – Studio 40 “Mixed Media and Book Arts” http://www.highdesertps.com

“As an artist, I draw upon the notion of palimpsest in my art-making. Historically, palimpsests were scrolls or books, from which text had been erased, scraped, or washed off so that the surfaces could be used again for new text.”

In a contemporary art context, the process of creating a palimpsest connotes memory, fragmentation, and dissonance as traces of early stages emerge and interact to suggest new meaning in juxtaposition.

I create works that recall palimpsests by incorporating fragments of text, erasing, and adding new layers to communicate the experience of memory, meaningful connections over time, and records of passage through space and personal geographies experienced in the Southwest.”

Andrea Sharon – Photography Studio 57 http://andreajsharon.net

I have been very fortunate to have lived and worked in some of the most spectacular places in the country. From the depths of Death Valley to the foothills of Denali, my career with the National Park Service has been a door to the world of photography.

Starting out with scientific photo documentation in the field over 20 years ago, I have expanded the scope of my expression to include fine art and “street” photography; Polaroid image transfer, historic alternative processes; and I am currently exploring high-resolution digital scanning and archival printing.

Photographic images have an incredible power to capture our hearts and influence our attitudes and actions. Through my work I hope to follow in the footsteps of these early artists and continue to influence the viewer towards a sense of wonder and appreciation.

On The Cover – “Raven Sunset “ – a quilt by Placitas artist Judith Roderick

“I am an Artist, a Silk Painter who also makes quilts. I have been painting on Silk for over 30 years, and I batiked for 20 years before that. I draw well, and love to depict Nature, the flora and fauna of the natural world. I have a great Love of the Earth and a great concern about the current trajectory of life on Earth. I love the beauty and diversity of what still exists here, and I do all that I can to preserve it, which includes its depiction in my work. I intend my Art as a Blessing.

 

I taught myself to make traditional pieced quilts in my 20’s. I made quilts from my children’s art in my 30’s, and occasionally created batiked quilts. I did about 1 or 2 silk quilts a year during my long Wearable Art career of creating silk-painted clothing. Those are all in private collections. In the mid 90’s I stepped out of the Art world and spent 10 years on a Spiritual path of meditation and travel, an inner time of more BEing than doing.

 

I started out hand-quilting, and after the first 3 quilts, which took over 2 years to do, I bought a new machine that could drop the feed dogs. Now I can do more of what I envision. I continue to love the complex, multi-layered and meditative quality of making quilts.”

Judith Roderick – Artist . Silk Painting . Art Quilts
rainbowpaintr@comcast.net

A FOCUS ON ART – Santa Fe Studio Tour 2016

The amazing diversity of talents of our resident artists consitutes a great asset for our state and should be a cause of celebration for all New Mexicans. On this page we feature three such artists, residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who will be featured on the Santa Fe Artists’ Studio Tour in 2016.

It is of some interest in learning about artists in New Mexico to find out how many “partner” art teams exist. One such team is the husband and wife team know as “Shutter and Brush”. The “Shutter” part of the team is Dave Robinson, a fine art photographer. The “Brush” member of the duo is Teena Robinson, an accomplished painter, specializing in encaustic (wax) and mixed media painting. Individually they represent two of the most popular art mediums to be found in New Mexico. Together, they support each other as a team in providing their livelihood and promoting their art in order to live and thrive in the Land of Enchantment.

From Teena Robinson

“I interpret the world around me to create a feeling, rather than a realistic representation. Moving to Santa Fe opened up a life of adventure and creating. Every day something is added to my being that affects my mood, psyche, and state of mind. I keep changing. Sometimes I express myself with images, sometimes with words. Memories are triggered, feelings surface. Life is a wonderful place to be as the sum total of me keeps growing.

 

I work in several mediums, Encaustic wax, acrylic and watercolor, and am fortunate to have a recognizable style. It is the best of all worlds.

 

Art has been an important part of my life from early childhood on. My first official art assignment at age 14 was to create window displays for my hometown library. I realized from that early age, that art was a very important part of my being.

 

As part owner of Shutter & Brush Fine Art, my husband and I offer workshops for local as well as visiting artists. Our studio is open by appointment.”

From Dave Robinson

“Art is a means of interpreting the world around us. Photography, which I consider an art form, is no different. As a Digital Fine Art Photo Illustrator I’m able to draw on years of commercial photographic experience to have pre-visualized most of the images that I capture with my camera. That is only the beginning of my lengthy process so I can’t wait to get back to the studio, download my treasures and begin to bring my fantasies to life. There is such magic in nature and my job is to interpret the wonders that I imagined when I first picked up the camera.

The transition from commercial photography to Fine Art Photo Illustration has been a lengthy process. It took a move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a new and very artistic wife to begin the process of redefining myself. After a lengthy career I now consider myself once again an emerging artist, it is a bit strange, but my vision is clear and I know where I’m going with my new view of the world around me. I’ll still offer my services commercially to the artists around me as a means of supporting the local art community but my focus is on a somewhat imaginary future for myself artistically.”

“Vibrations”

by Biagi

There are two things I am certain of: I exist and I am conscious. From here I move into speculations regarding the world we live in. These involve both art and science, ultimately leading to a vision of who we are and where we come from-in other words to questions of spirituality.

My recent book “The Woman Out of Now” starts from this point of view.

In “The Woman Out of Now” I write:

“In Being, outside all the universes, there is only vibration. There is no near or far, all is one. We are all one. The only differences are differences of vibration.”

Physics may not be able to give us direct information about the spiritual world but it does point in certain directions. Quantum theory tells us that underlying our world of concrete objects is a world of moving vibrations, quantum waves. I think of them as waves of existence.

The basic building blocks of our physical world, the stuff of all matter and forces, appear as these waves. Quantum waves give us the probability one of these entities will appear at a particular place with a particular energy. But as waves they are in multiple locations at once or move with multiple speeds and energies at once. It is not until some process collapses all of these possibilities into one actuality, one place and time, or one level of energy, that we see the actual entity. What does this say about us and about our world since it is physically made of these entities?

The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called these entities enduring objects. He distinguished between these and what he called eternal objects. These are the objects of our consciousness: shape, beauty, goodness. Our reality is a coming together of these enduring and eternal objects.

In The Woman Out of Now these appear as the physical and the conscious stream and they come together in us as mind and matter.

In the case of quantum waves, what is waving? What is vibrating? To me a quantum wave is an oscillation between existence and non-existence. The wave itself contains no matter or energy. It is pure information. They are a bridge between consciousness and matter.

But in what space is this wave moving? The answer may seem obvious. We assume in the ordinary space of the world we inhabit. But it is now evident that particles can influence each other instantaneously over great distances. This brings us to the deeper issues of entanglement and non-locality. These are topics I will cover in further articles.

About (Paul) Biagi

Dr. Paul Biagi is an accomplished painter, poet and physicist. His most recent book is The Woman Out of the Now, a metaphysical fantasy in which he describes the power of art to bring about an evolution of consciousness and the transformations of society. He has a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Colorado, a post-baccalaureate certificate in fine arts from the Maryland Institute College Arts and studied the humanities at New York University. He was a member of the theater group Theater Lab West and directed a project supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. He brings these interests to this novel combining contemporary physics, cosmology, art and spirituality. He is also the author of a collection of paintings and poems in which the union of images and words re-creates our origin at the core of the universe and our journey into this world. Dr. Biagi resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he practices the movement art, NIA.