Tory Cowles creates beautiful, colorful abstract paintings and raw, gritty sculptures you can dance with.
When Tory Cowles talks about her work, she is animated, joyful and full of life. It’s no surprise, then, that her paintings and sculptures are animated, joyful and full of life. She works from the heart. …
Gale Wallar: An Artist Not Bound by Boundaries
Gale Wallar draws on a lifetime of traveling, living abroad and crossing borders, both geographic and artistic, to create the enchanting urban landscapes, city scenes and traditional landscapes that comprise N-S-E-W, her new show at Touchstone Gallery. A master of many art media, she matches technique to subject matter to create haunting portraits of places that have touched her heart. In a style known as contemporary realism, she paints pictures of the world not as it is, but as it should be.
Read moreAmy Sabrin Takes A Fresh Look at the Beach
Retired attorney Amy Sabrin is a watercolor and acrylic painter who divides her time between Washington, D.C. and Bethany Beach. She is drawn to nature as subject matter. With A Fresh Look, she distills landscapes to geometric forms. She first paints in plein air, then takes a lot of photographs and finally perfects concepts in studio. Sabrin Is known for bold color, glowing light, strong patterns and shapes. She aspires to remind people of the beauty around us.
Read moreRosa Vera: Painting Narrative Paths to Peace
When hearing about immigration, the word “crisis” comes to mind. Perhaps it’s because so many people are migrating everywhere in the world now. It seems like a new humanitarian predicament, but migrations have occurred in every age and time stirring the human population pot and generating conflict as well as new traditions and cuisines. In the late 1800’s for instance, the multinational population of Peru was transformed by an huge inflow of Chinese indentured laborers.
Read moreCarol Moore: A Printmaker's Response to the Natural World
Printmaker and Touchstone Foundation for the Arts Fellow Carol Moore presents her solo exhibition during the month of May 2018. This accumulation of work reflect's Carol's long standing exploration of nature in which she searches for a personal connection with the plant specimens that she collects and manipulates. As a child she always felt at home in nature, she would spend long hours in the woods playing in trees, foraging for “natural supplies” or crushing rocks under bushes. As an adult she continues taking refuge in the natural world and reveals her encounters and imaginings in her original lithographs and intaglio prints.
Read moreSusi Cora: Art from the Earth
Susi Cora’s May 2018 show Highwire at the Touchstone Gallery at 901 New York Avenue, Washington DC is a study of the impact of memory on one’s physical presence. The show features ceramic figurative and coneptual work, and composite photography.
Read moreShelley Lowenstein Links Science and Art Through Paint
Albert Einstein said that mystery is at “the cradle of true art and true science” In her new solo show opening April 6 at Washington, DC’s Touchstone Gallery “(as far as we know),” artist Shelley Lowenstein explores the mystery and wonder of the human beta cell, a major force essential to human life, and sometimes a victim of autoimmune attack.
Read moreMeg Schaap Paints Joie de Vivre
In her first solo exhibition, Marie Antoinette, at Touchstone Gallery Meg Schaap explores the personality, beauty and power of the last Queen of France. This project began by a reading of Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser and then viewing Sophia Coppola’s 2009 movie Marie Antoinette. Both portrayed the compelling story of an Austrian teen who was forced to enter a political marriage with King Louis XVI, an introvert, pretty much her opposite. Meg’s painterly portrayals explore the quandaries Marie faced as she was swallowed up by the new French Court environment bound by outlandish rules, extravagance, and unbending traditions.
Read moreMakda Kibour: Raw Paintings
Makda Kibour, a quiet gentle woman who immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia by way of Zambia, has under gone many transformations on her way to becoming an artist. After reaching Pennsylvania, she become part of a Mennonite family for five years, learning to navigate that religion’s discipline of “the simple life." This austere Bible-based faith was quite a contrast to ancient traditional rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church she grew up knowing in Ethiopia. Her artistic sensibilities responded to the expert woodworking and hand sewn quilts pieced with deep reds, blues and other dark colors that were part of the Mennonite culture.
Read moreRosemary Luckett: exploring the terrain within
In her February 2018 solo exhibition Landscapes: the terrain within, Rosemary Luckett steps back from exploring the environmental landscape to make art about the archetypes she recognizes in her interior landscape. Over time she discovered the inner guides or archetypes portrayed in art, literature, mythology, and religion, heroes that have been with humanity everywhere since the dawn of time. Inspired by female contemporary heroes and writer Carol S. Pearson's book on the topic (Awakening the Heroes Within), she constructed collages about the twelve archetypes, putting herself into the picture. They percolated in a drawer for years until she decided to explore them further in larger format.
Read moreElaine Florimonte: Layering and Balancing
Elaine Florimonte is drawn to the simplicity and consistency of the horizon, specifically the proportions of sky, water and ground in paintings comprising her solo exhibition, The Pursuit of Balance at Touchstone Gallery, February 2018. Through her use of acrylic media and collage, she creates landscape images in an effort to find balance in an ever shifting world.
Read moreBD Richardson: Repetition, Pattern and Form--From Intimate To Immense
In what turned out to be a prescient decision, BD Richardson, fresh from earning a master’s degree from American University, began a habit of carrying a camera everywhere she went. Beginning with a trip to China as part of a women’s press group in 1980, she captured bits and pieces of that huge country just prior to its national efforts to modernize. After that, no place in the world was exempt from her restless eye: Paris, South America, North America’s heartland with its aging buildings and big skies, and coastal villages replete with fishing boats and seamen. Lately she has focused her camera up close on plant forms turning their growth patterns into mandalas.
Read moreMaureen Squires: Partnering Painting with Words
While writing Touchstone blog essays, I ask the question, ”How do artists arise in America?” The answer, of course, is that exceptional artists come from small towns and large all across the land, predictably and unpredictably. I thought about this recently while driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where my attention alternated between fast-moving 18-wheelers and glimpses of green pastures sculpted from long-ago deciduous forests when horses were the main mode of transport. Road signs mention the small towns that are quickly by-passed.
Read moredana brotman: capturing the confluence of humble materials & insightful gaze
If we each open our eyes a little wider and really look at our environment, we begin to see a lot of packaging “stuff” that might be falling to the floor as we open a gift or other everyday objects--the worthy and useful objects we think important. We throw that packaging away mostly without really looking at it. But, even if the rest of the world ignores it, Dana Brotman does not. She’s actually attracted to many of those “stuffs” and now actually uses it in her art processes.
Read morePatricia Williams: Ordered Complexities
“Both science and art have to do with ordered complexity.” –L. L. Whyte, 1957
My September 2017 solo show was originally intended to be an abstract landscape series, but it turned into an homage to math and science. This happened because the people who decide such things declared March 14, 2015 to be the official pi (π) day. (Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and always equals 3.14159265359….) I met my husband Andy in engineering school, and while neither of us claims any particular STEM skills at this point in our lives, we had a vigorous discussion of this important issue over breakfast one morning, and we vigorously dissented. In our opinion, the official pi day should have been March 14, 2016. That’s because 2015 is truncated, and we believe it more appropriate to round up to 2016.
Read moreClaudia Samper Mixed Media Stories
Argentinian-born Claudia Samper reminisces on her early life in Buenos Aires. “As a youngster I was always drawing and creating things with my hands,” she recalls. “By the time I entered the university I didn't have many choices in Buenos Aires except for traditional career paths--medicine, education, law, etc. We of course did have a wonderful art institute, but it never crossed my mind to pursue art then.” The one track that suited her the most was architecture. After completing that 6-year degree program, she had acquired a solid base in both the technical and the art spheres of the curriculum.
Read moreJeanne Garant: Parallel Paintings
Touchstone oil painter Jeanne Garant paints abstractly. For a painter like Jeanne, abstract means to focus on a particular shape and color noticed at any given moment and then to discard the rest. She draws from the jumble of life rather than trying to capture it all in a photographic or three-dimensional way. Garant's attitude in creating the flat or one-perspective paintings, 275 Stripes, mirrors that of New England painter Milton Avery. “I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.”
Read moreMarcia Coppel: Conversations
Marcia Coppel's paintings are influenced by the color and spontaneity of Mexico. She loves to sketch in restaurants, cafes and on the beach. Her May 2017 solo, Connect/Disconnect 2, is about communication and the lack of it in today’s digital culture. The interactions (or isolation of individuals in the same space) could have been situated anywhere in the world. But since she loves Mexico and spends a lot of time there, she made drawings and paintings situated in that country.
Read moreJanathel Shaw: Portraits of Courage
Janathel Shaw’s April solo show, SOLIDAREity! is a reflection upon the status of Blacks in America: a series of figurative pieces and portraits of men, women and children looking boldly into the present and the future. Inspiration for this new series derives from the lost souls, activists and community of people who are part and parcel of the American landscape—people who enrich that landscape in both hidden and overt ways. The portraits incorporate texture, rich deep lines and are anchored in contrast. Several are rooted in a defiant solidarity of consciousness, soulfulness, and personal voice. Some are dark in tone in recognition of ongoing struggles.
Read moreLisa Tureson: Curiosity ---> Exploration ---> Creativity
Lisa Tureson
Once Lisa Tureson decided to leave her career in the insurance industry, there was no stopping her from exploring and learning about the many techniques, materials and tools artists use to express themselves. Actually, she probably always did have a curious and exploratory bent. At age four Lisa often watched her artist-teacher mother at the easel. Thusly inspired, her first murals were created out of her mother’s lip stick on her sisters’ bedroom walls. Whether she was chastised for her use of the lipstick medium or praised for her ambitious wall-size art expression, this “project” proved a precursor to the large paintings in her present day solo exhibit Scribbles: An Urban Art Expression at Touchstone Gallery during March 2017.
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