Although I’ve always felt firmly rooted in abstract expressionism, my current interest is in a more reductive abstraction, a search for simplicity and clarity in a complex world. I love simple forms, sensitive lines, layers of color, vague space. The fastidiousness of a more formal minimalism escapes me, its not in my nature.  I like to see the hand of the artist and provoke personal narratives--tender moments, high anxieties, fragmented time, sifting realities--told with simplicity.  The inaccessible nature of working in an abstract way, letting the materials be part of the decision appeals to me.  The sturdiness and drama of charcoal tells one story, the delicate lines from a 9H pencil, oIls, so buttery and rich...tell others.

My drawings tend to reflect what I think about:   family dynamics, conversations, the dichotomy of strength and tenderness.

Living on the Cape, the colors, geography, atmosphere and weather contribute to my visual vocabulary. The Cape is home, a part of who I am, this allows my paintings to be just that: paintings.  I want to strip them of pretense, provide no exacting form. seeing where it all goes, failing often, working it out in my own way, no compromises.  Just painting.  Searching for the unknown, trying to be faithful to the work, hoping for a few good paintings.

“What makes a painting work or not work is something I don’t understand:  its the mystical aspect of painting which is part of its power”–Jacqueline Humphries, ARTnews Summer 2011

My main concern is identity: the construction and deconstruction of a person: role playing, breaking stereotypes, and rebuilding the self. I am interested in how culture can manifest itself in our bodies. How it takes over and can become the squatter you never asked for. How it can dominate and contradict your personal freedom, your clear thinking abilities, and your peace of mind. I am also intrigued by the shear amount of comfort people find in habits, rituals, and traditions that link them to the past, a community, and another something larger than themselves.

My current endeavor has lead me to the process of making paintings that are in spirit like the Buddhist Mandalas dedicated to meditation. The constant balancing act of the self versus the world, self and the other, self and the partner, self and the child are the main plots of my meditation.

I honor process. My paintings are the outcome and by product of my pursuits. These pursuits include: finding a balance in contradiction, finding harmony in chaos, finding where the contemporary and history co-exist—breathing the same air, living, dying, and re-birthing within the same space. Pursuits to try and understand crimes, punishments, redemption, and love. Mistakes and how to fix it. The relationship between surface and the underlying history of love, surviving, being, dominance, giving in, giving up, letting go, moving on and returning home.

I honor process like I honor time.

In response to the beauty in the natural world the intention is to express wonder. The process reflects this as the work begins with very little forethought and proceeds with intuition and experimentation. Transitions of color and texture are of particular interest. The medium includes acrylic and glaze on paper or wood or canvas. Multiple colors of paint and glaze are skimmed across the piece creating an irregular surface.

Eventually the paint catches only the upper dimensions and leaves the original layers of color and glaze in the crevices. Pieces are often disassembled and reorganized. The grid is of particular interest. It offers order, which allows expression of formal elements addressed with abandon.

Landis calls his current work a “palimpsest of the processes, materials, and emotions of his existence.” He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and has collaborated with musician Tom Abbs, visual artists Michael Sanzone and Les Seifer, writers Nick Flynn and Fred Schmalz, and others. Landis has taught in the summer workshop program at the Fine Arts Work Center, and is a creative consultant for Northern-Spy Records.

His largest series, ongoing since 1996, called the WD Series (initially the abbreviation for warehouse drawings), reveals how Landis emphasizes process and utilizes the materials at hand. Called by the artist his “most important body of work,” each drawing begins as piece of paper, folded and carried through the day, and marked with the date, place, and daily notes. Kept in chronological order, Landis then draws or paints on each piece of paper “in response to whatever is happening in and outside of my studio.” His artifacts of “transforming the overstimulation of modern urban life into something simpler, direct, and emotional, while still showing the layers of the process,” are now over 5,000 in number.

Landis’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the New York Public Library, the Butler Institute of American Art the Peabody Essex Museum, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, the Naples Museum of Art, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He currently exhibits at Gallery Ehva in Provincetown and with the international traveling artists’ group, VERN.

Landis will hold his two-day workshop at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, located at 335 Main Street. The workshop, “Everything is Teacher: Finding Inspiration Everywhere”,  is open to anyone interested in pushing through creative blocks or ruts, and finding new ways of incorporating experiences into their art. The course is taught through visual means, but is open to all those in creative fields, whether experienced or novice.

For more information or to register for the workshop, please contact Susie Nielsen.

Artist ROA establishes euphoric connections between the visual and poetic elements of Mexican art, from pre-Hispanic into the present. The work references the currents in modern art and the surrealistic world of the jungle and the Caribbean Sea in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

ROA was born and raised in Mexico. As a child, his father worked for the Geologic Institute of Mexico. This transpired into a great interest in scientific aspects of the natural life around him. ROA collected insects, fossils and minerals. He traveled with his father to small villages and to mountains.  He experienced landscapes, history, foods, and traditions from all over Mexico. His mother urged him to read the classic of Spanish literature “Latin American Magical Realism” by Garcia Marquez.

ROA studied art in his teens at the Art Institute of Guanajuato. There he became very interested in the work of the surrealists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, as well as the Mexican artists Jose Luis Cuevas and Francisco Toledo.

Through his teens, ROA continued to travel around the country. He visually connected with the color and tastes of Mexico, and his mind captured the soul of his magic country. He prefers mystical places and mountains, archeological sites and beautiful beaches; which is why he decided to settle in Cozumel in 1993. In Cozumel, ROA met artist Galo Ramirez who became his friend and teacher.  Then, in1997, he moved to San Cristobal de las Casas Chiapas and continued to work on his art. He decided to study in Oaxaca at the Rufino Tamayo Art Institute. There he studied under artist Juan Alcazar. This move would define his career.

ROA creates abstract work by way of realism; the emotional thing by means of intellectualism; spontaneity by way of strategy. ROA takes the artifacts from everyday culture and transforms them into extraordinary compositions.

ROA was born left-handed and when he was a little boy he would write everything in reverse. His teachers thought he had dyslexia, but in fact he learned to read and to draw at a very early age. A love for drawing persisted and the backward writing reappeared in his work in his early twenties. ROA plays with images and texts in reverse, creating encrypted messages.

The imagery in ROA’s work is a collection of messages, poems, letters; scientific formulas, magic recipes, classifications of ants, medicinal plants and herbs; addresses, numbers, cities, arrows, signs, compasses, names and places that inhabit his world; words in Spanish, Nahuatl, Maya, Latin, or English that have no absolute meaning but rather move and connect within his paintings, to be considered as part of a window to their worlds.

ROA’s process is chaotic because he works on several pieces at once. He always has dozens of pieces in the process at once. He works on opaline paper with acrylics, ink, charcoal, pencil and crayon art, which are then fixed with acrylic sealer finish. He works on paper because it allows him to create accidents, effects, textures and pictures. He believes that all the works relate to the others

Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, Asya spent her early childhood summers at her family dacha, a Russian country house. A gathering place for friends and family and surrounded by her grandmother's carefully tended gardens and apple trees, the dacha is a source of endless inspiration for Asya's organic shapes. 

Built in the 1930's by Asya's great grandfather, the dacha was presided over by three sisters, and a hub of activity during the summer months. Almost all meals were served in the garden, with guests contributing to the menu. This was Soviet Russia, and delicacies, or even every day necessities, were hard to come by, but somehow each meal seemed like a feast. Veggies were grown on the dacha, and pickled or preserved for the winter months. The apple trees provided heaps of apples which filled rooms in the fall. Rich with family history and daily interactions among relatives, Asya’s childhood summers are embodied in her ceramic work. 

Asya began working with clay in 1992 while studying graphic design at University of Cincinnati. Ceramics was love at first touch, and after graduating, she continued to build sculptural vessels on her kitchen table. After many years in New York City practicing graphic design for such inspiring places as Pentagram and Martha Stewart Living, Asya decided to attend RISD, earning an MFA with a concentration in ceramics in 2004. Due to her graphic design background, typography and imagery are an integral part of Asya's porcelain pieces.

Influenced by her Russian upbringing in St. Petersburg and her graphic design experiences, Asya merges classical and modern to develop objects with a purity of form that compel people to touch and use them.

In response to the beauty in the natural world the intention is to express wonder. The process reflects this as work begins with very little forethought and proceeds with intuition and experimentation. Transitions of color and texture are of particular interest. The medium includes acrylic and glaze on paper or wood or canvas. Multiple colors of paint and glaze are skimmed across the piece creating an irregular surface. Eventually the paint catches only the upper dimensions and leaves the original layers of color and glaze in the crevices. Pieces are often disassembled and reorganized. The grid is of particular interest. It offers order, which allows expression of formal elements addressed with abandon.

Sand T's solo exhibit Breathing Sublimity, consists of a series of epoxy resin art objects utilizing the fundamental visual elements of dot, line, color, surface and light. Sand T creates work that contains a fluidity that virtually breathes on the wall. Minimal and meditative, the work is a multi-sensorial experience. The artist utilizes a combination of UV resistant epoxy resin, graphite, and paint on archival tempered clayboard panels.

Monk's solo exhibition is a series of paintings consisting of materials from his continuing collection of those discarded and found. He uncovers and infuses new meaning into them through manipulation of mediums by the addition of paint or glue and the methods of scraping, sanding, tearing, erasing,correcting and patching. Each Monk piece portrays its own descriptive history in its evident layering of visually surprising materials and processes.

Oakland-based artist Pablo Manga, exhibits his series of work, Linescapes at FARM. In the Linescape series, Manga uses "a different kind of transparent adhesive tape, layered horizontally, to create a quietly undulating landscape of line, form and tone. These landscapes allude to vast expanses of sand, sea, sky and snow, as well as suggest inner meditative space.

Manga began using tape as an artistic medium in 1998 while living in Mexico City, where he encountered varieties and colors of adhesive tape that he had never seen before. Using transparent and semi-transparent adhesive tapes, he mimics the essence of both painting and drawing. He considers his work a meditation between the formal properties of his materials and the commonplace exterior world from which he has drawn them.

The works appear differently when viewed from different angles and in various ambient lights. Such properties invite a heightened perception and awareness of the present moment. Treated in an archival varnish to increase the longevity of their humble materials, a dynamic tension is promoted between their pristine surface and some inevitable patina garnered by aging, which Manga says is integral to their character.

In Manga's words, "I delight in the unexpected sensuality of the tape and aim to unleash its aesthetic resonance while also letting the material be itself. I have tried to make something which, in the words of critic Donald Kuspit, one can return to again and again as a resource for inner life.".

A former New York City public school teacher, art lawyer and Academy of Art instructor, Manga's work has been shown at Galería de la Raza, Queens Nails Projects, and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco.  He has also been exhibited in group-shows curated by jurors from the Dia Art Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Describing her work as visual poetry based upon nuances, Trepp states, "I am interested in making art that is lyrical, fragile, yet tensile and sturdy – art that reaches deeply but with gentleness into that quiet reserved place residing in each of us."

In focusing on that space which lies between the perimeters and illusion of present and past, Trepp implicitly refers in her work to the philosophies of Buddhism and Existentialism. It is there where the past and future marry that Trepp’s work seeks to capture an altered and altering moment in time. While at first glance, the work appears of the momentary, a closer examination opens the path to a visual discussion of creative responsibility in the context of historical endurance.

Judith Trepp's works on paper are made with 100% handmade cotton paper from a small mill in Aurangabad, India that has survived over 400 years. Four families are engaged in an ardent effort to keep the handicraft alive. The paper is thin, making manufacturing difficult, and it functions in har "The paper is not a repository for the ink, but rather has a life of its own. It is an active surface with its own story onto which I place my line, and has an integral part in the finished work," says Trepp.

She explains that her lines, both the fine and the substantial, "must be completed in an instant and must sit. Any faltering or mistake is immediately and completely revealed. Each drawing either succeeds or fails – completed in the moment and for all moments, or consigned to trash." She says, that to her, drawing is indeed a “radical art.”

Trepps’s paintings are worked upon in a careful but intuitive process for over a month, during which time layers of egg tempera and oil paint are applied, built up, erased, and applied again, until the area begins to resonance and fills with life.

Born in NewYork City, Trepp attended Syracuse University and graduated from Bard College. Since 1970 Trepp has lived in Switzerland and travels regularly to India and Japan. The summer months are spent living and working in Provincetown. She has exhibited extensively in Switzerland and also in the United States, Europe and Asia. Trepp is scheduled for a 2011 exhibition at Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Her work is in private, corporate and museum collections in the United States, Switzerland, India and Korea.

The exhibition will be of large chromogenic prints of organics, many actually harvested on the outer reaches of Cape Cod, including from the artist’s garden in Truro. Dubinsky’s prints show a continued fascination with the lines, textures and colors found in natural forms. By enlarging, isolating and enhancing what there is to see in common and less common plants, Yvette Drury Dubinsky shows in a simple way why artists and designers throughout time have used the natural world as inspiration for making art whether it is abstract or representational, sculptural or two dimensional.

What begins as a meditation on lines, textures and forms can also be metaphorical. There is a political and social concern as well as a general feel that mimics both an aging, chaotic internal state and the current diversity and tumult in our economic and political world.

Yvette Drury Dubinsky has exhibited widely, throughout the US and Europe. She received a BA, MA and MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis (Now Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts). She has also studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Santa Reparata Print Studio in Florence, Italy, The Maine Photographic Workshop, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 2006, she had a residency and exhibit at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Since January, the two artists have been invoking each other's artistic response by beginning 5x7 pieces before sending them to the other and then adding on in turn. Alongside collaborative pieces, recent independent works by the artists are being shown as well.

Pothier's work is a series of colored ink and pastel drawings on paper, in addition to several graphite drawings, inspired by her appreciation of the outside world during daily walks along the seashore and in the woods.

She describes her work as, "an accumulation of expressive marks on paper which give form to my impression of small areas of the landscape that I pass during my daily walks. As I am walking outside in the environment, I visually and emotionally capture fragments of my surroundings. By deeply observing a particular area, I inwardly capture its essence, so it becomes a part of me to be carried within. I bring this essence back to my studio where it is then expressed on paper."

She explains her love of line as "my earliest creative response. I've always preferred drawing to painting or sculpting. I feel an intimate connection to line, but my lines are rarely straight; they need to wax and wane." She continues, "My drawings are an accumulation of expressive marks in response to the natural surroundings that I observe."

In regards to her recent collaboration with Elizabeth Pothier, Susan Lefevre says she "approaches the empty paper with a sense of suspense... of inquiry." She continues, "I allow the paint and my inner self at that time to create the visual reality."

Lefevre describes her new independent works as "a series of heads." She explains, "In one sense they are seen as heads, but may also be seen a abstract forms dominating the 12 x 12 inch space within which they exist. for me these heads-as-forms convey, through subtle gesturing, our human vulnerability, a range of psychological moods."

While describing her craft, Lefevre gushes, "Art fills my life with the joy of seeing everything intensely...it is my challange and my joy."