Where's There?

 

Where’s there? 

Cherry Red Palette

The Other Side

Dream Crusher

Amber

Developing

Checkmate

Paperweight

By Tom Wachunas

 

“The theme of “Are You There?” revolves around the idea of self-discovery amidst the unknown and resisting external influences. The series features window-like viewpoints, overlapping layers, and explosions of color, each representing the myriad decisions we make in life. These layers symbolize the diverse aspects of human existence: physical, energy, emotional, and mental, capturing the essence of different periods in our lives in an abstract form.”  - Emily Orsich

EXHIBIT: ARE YOU THERE? – recent paintings by Emily Orsich / at Strauss Studios Gallery / 236 Walnut Avenue NE, downtown Canton, OH / Through closing reception on Friday Jan. 3, 2025, 6-9pm. /Viewing Hours: Mon-Fri 10am to 5pm, Sat. 12noon to 5pm/ 330-456-0300

Background:  https://john-strauss-furniture.myshopify.com/collections/emily-orsich?fbclid=IwY2xjawGgXZNleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHTJwWB3QH0LTp642gnL67cktN5__fRcQe-87wb7kokAs-OrtSt19u4PBLw_aem_4kN41ZlhczwkKboeghzGng

 

   Let’s away. To back then. To right now. To not yet. Or maybe to a place, a state of being, wherein present moments, past memories, and anticipated futures exist together all at once. Where tensions and harmonies, confusions and clarities, are recognized, processed in the mind, and expressed through the heart. Where we roll with the punches through all manner of experienced affirmations, denials, peace, turmoil, despair, hope, agony, joy, doubt, certainty, losing, searching, finding. In short, life.

  Emily Orsich paints that.

  Her exciting polychromatic compositions speak – indeed sing - to the vicissitudes of being alive. Her paintings are symbolic, metaphorical fusions, supple and intriguing, of organic and geometric configurations, intertwined and traversing both physical and ethereal realities. A blending of materiality and spirit.

   I appreciate this distinctive dialect of abstract painting as a form of poetry. Consider what Robert Frost once wrote: “Poetry is when an emotion found its thought and the thought has found words.”

   Now, let’s go somewhere a bit farther with that. Emily Orsich paints metapoetry. It’s when painting finds that ineffable, piquant place where words leave off.

   Have you been there?

#ROYGBIV RSVP#

 

#ROYGBIV RSVP# 

 

By Tom Wachunas

 

“In 2020 I started a series of mini paintings focused just on color, creating a little spectrum of paintings on my social media feed. I always loved the idea of doing a show with an entire wall of mini paintings, but it was just too ambitious to try to do myself. So last year I decided to invite 11 other artists to join me. Over the course of a year the 12 of us created 225 pieces…”    - Heather Bullach

 

EXHIBIT: SPECTRUM, at The Hub Art Factory, 336 6th St NW, downtown  Canton

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Heather Bullach, Sally Priscilla Lytle, Jake Mensinger, Todd Bergert, Steve Ehret, Dyanne Williams, Christopher Triner, Erika Katherine, Clare Murray Adams, Jo Westfall, Sharon Mazgaj, Emily Vigil

HERES A FINAL CALL TO WITNESS A DELERIOUSLY DIVERSE, GLORIOUSLY UNIQUE GRIDLOCK OF 225 6”X6” MARVELOUS PAINTINGS BY 12 LOCAL ARTISTS FROM 7:30 P.M. TO 9:30 P.M. ON TUESDAY, NOV. 12 at THE HUB ART FACTORY. THANK YOU, HEATHER BULLOCK, FOR YOUR CONCEPT AND YOUR CURATING! STUNNING AND SPECTACULAR AND SUPERB AND SSSSSIZZLING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Fill in the blank: Once more, with _____

 

Fill in the blank: Once more, with ____ 

Drift in Harmony

 

Calm Like A Bomb

  

Whispers Underneath The Waves

Falling Into Midnight's Shadow

 

Snake Charmer

 

Tangled In The Sun's Last Breath

Flicker Of A Firefly's Lament

By Tom Wachunas

 

“I want to paint the feeling of a space. It might be an enclosed space, it might be a vast space. It might be an object.… Feeling is something more: It’s feeling your existence. Painting is a means of feeling ‘living.’”  - Joan Mitchell

 “I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.”  - Willem de Kooning

  “Art is an experience, not an object.” - Robert Motherwell

Artist background/ interview: https://artsinstark.com/interview/joe-ostrowske/

EXHIBIT: HIGH VELOCITY – Paintings by Joe Ostrowske /  through  January 10, 2025, at Cyrus Custom Framing and Art Gallery, 2645 Cleveland Avenue NW, Canton, Ohio / Gallery Hours are Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

   In an ArtsinStark “Self Portrait” interview (link posted above - from August of this year), painter Joe Ostrowske was asked to tell what inspired his creative process. He answered, “I find the blank canvas is what inspires my process. I never know where it is going to lead me, but I love the journey it takes me on with every new canvas.”

    So he’s about painting the journey rather than just replicating a pristine final destination. Ostrowske’s gestural abstractitudes aren’t so safe and predictable as that. They’re adventuresome explorations of colliding crossroads. They boldly depart from well-beaten trails to familiar comfortable places. Instead, they navigate more complex terrains   articulated with all the loose and visceral expressivity that acrylic paint can give him. His paintings are busy, sometimes explosive agglomerations of stratified marks and scattered, amorphous shapes that seemingly burst and dance to the rhythmic motions of sizzling bright colors. It’s as if he is sojourning in the dense and diverse landscapes of a consciousness not always his alone.

    Who else’s consciousness, then? As if,…what if. And here’s where I feel compelled to admit (and encourage) a sort of ‘magical thinking’ born from my own engagements with the process and methods of making a painting. Here’s an enigmatic, inexplicable, unreasonable, absurd proposition, but… What if paintings – ostensibly inanimate objects with lavishly decorated and marked-up surfaces – are themselves conscious entities capable of actually speaking to and being heard by the painter as they come into being? Granted, maybe only other painters will fully apprehend this idea, but give it a try anyway: The painting wants what the painting wants. It’s not just a static document of the painter’s past decisions, not just a silent witness, not merely an eye-popping wall adornment. It’s a continuing performance in the sense of performance being the motivation for, or execution of, an action, or the behavior of reacting to sensate stimuli, in real time.

   At that moment when you decide to look at that thing on the wall, the painter’s performance in real time has only paused, not ceased altogether. It has simply flipped the script as it looks back at you, now a fellow performer. The painting wants what the painting wants, which is to give you your turn too, in real time, to act, to get into it. Intuit. Let the painter’s performance lead or inspire you to make what you see continue to keep playing out on the stage of your perceptions - to write a message, feeling, or narrative on the blank canvas of your imagination.

   You might even experience looking as if playing a game of hide ‘n seek, or capture the flag. Better yet, let’s play tag. You’re it.