Joan Becker’s watercolor and gouache drawings of flowers, plants, and birds pay homage to the open fields and forests from her childhood in upstate New York. These densely detailed botanical compositions contain numerous micro-narratives, forming a complex tapestry of pattern and form united by splashes of bright, saturated colors. Her practice also encompasses large-scale figure drawings painted outdoors or in her studio. Becker hopes her keen attention to detail will encourage viewers to “linger and connect…There can be great satisfaction in savoring the visual feast of a painting.” She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, and also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. She has exhibited widely throughout Pennsylvania.
– Cara Enteles –
Using a unique technique that blends silkscreen printing and oil painting, Cara Enteles layers boldly silhouetted botanical forms inspired by her surroundings and travels. This practice traces back to her childhood when she pressed and painted wildflowers she collected on bike rides. Enteles employs industrial supports such as aluminum and acrylic, which act as reflective surfaces to capture sunlight while also creating an inherent tension between the work’s organic subject matter and its materials. This dichotomy between the natural and manmade is embodied in Enteles’s symmetrical arrangement of Cascade Dream’s flowers, branches, and leaves. Read More
– Gilbert Gorski –
Gilbert Gorski is an architect and landscape painter who depicts the forests of his home in rural Western Pennsylvania. “[N]ot unlike the human mind, woods are self-contained interiors, while at the same time, infinite in scale and complexity,” he says. For his labor-intensive style—in which form is structured through thousands of individual dots of pure color—Gorski draws inspiration from pointillism, a technique employed by late nineteenth-century French artists like Georges Seurat, and the pixelation of digital images. Despite his interest in digital media, he insists that his work is best viewed in person, as his brushwork emphasizes the tactile qualities of applied paint. Read More
Nancy Hershberger is a fiber artist and instructor who creates quilts inspired by the dairy farms, cornfields, streams, and forests of her home in rural southern Pennsylvania. While Hershberger began her practice employing the traditional quilting method of piecing fabric scraps, she later transitioned to experimenting with different techniques and tools to capture the light, texture, and color effects of the outdoors. In addition to the landscape of Pennsylvania, Hershberger frequently portrays scenes of U.S. National Parks. She has held several artist residencies at National Parks across the nation, including the Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee; Petrified Forest, Arizona; and Shenandoah, Virginia. Hershberger has exhibited extensively in juried exhibitions across the United States, and her quilts are held in numerous private and public collections, including the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Bedford, Pennsylvania.
– Sue Reno –
Sue Reno is a fiber artist whose rich and intricate quilts reflect her local environment and incorporate imagery drawn from her studies of botany, wildlife, and historic architecture. She combines traditional patchwork quilting methods with unconventional decorative techniques such as cyanotype—a photographic print executed on light-sensitive paper or cloth that captures an object’s silhouette after being exposed to the sun and then rinsed (as seen in The Organic Landscape and On the Verge). She also often incorporates hand-painted fabrics, stitching, and beadwork. Reno has exhibited extensively at such venues as the New England Quilt Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts; the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg; the Monmouth Museum, Middletown, New Jersey; and the National Quilt Museum, Paducah, Kentucky.
Arguably a legend in the pop art movement, Andy Warhol produced experimental works that observed cultural trends and American post-war advertising, while challenging traditional notions of fine art and creativity. Warhol is iconic for his whimsical, multi-colored iconography of consumer brands such as Campbell’s soup, flowers, and portraits of American celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. In his photo-silkscreens, he repeatedly printed a grainy black image on a colorful canvas, sometimes organizing the work in a series of rows, grids, or pairs and replicated it through an assembly-line system. Although he famously reported to ARTNews in 1963 that “the reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” every canvas that Warhol silkscreened or printed was one-of-a-kind, resulting from creative decisions related to composition, color, and format. Read More
DP Warner is a landscape painter who works primarily outdoors, or en plein air, in the Western Pennsylvania countryside. He employs the wet-on-wet technique, in which layers of paint are applied quickly before they to dry, facilitating a more spontaneous approach to artmaking. Warner views his time working in nature as a “collaboration,” in which he seeks out scenes that “may go unnoticed, or an intimate setting.” He earned a bachelor’s degree from Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia, and a Master in Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona, Tucson. He spent thirty years teaching art at the University of Arizona; the University of Montana, Missoula; and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His works have been exhibited at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, and the Erie Art Museum, Pennsylvania.
