Soft Light Radiates Across Humble Domestic Scenes and Objects in Leah Gardner’s Still Lifes

All images © Leah Gardner, shared with permission

In her still lifes and avian portraits, Chicago-based artist Leah Gardner showcases the way evening light can transform a humble tomato cluster or pot of tea into an object of intrigue and beauty. Working in oil paint on panel, Gardner’s visible, impasto brushstrokes depict sweeping shadows on tabletops and backdrops skewed through glass. “What excites me most is finding the colors hiding everywhere in plain sight, then deciding how much power to give them to create the mood I am after. It feels like a puzzle,” she says.

Entirely self-taught, Garnder first began painting a few years ago after the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. She gravitated toward still life because of the consistency a static image offers. “As I improved, it became an opportunity to create a narrative of a moment in time and tell a snippet of a story, while also getting to control for factors like light, position of shadows, and experiment with visually pleasing composition from the ground up,” she says. “I enjoy owning the process every step of the way.” Today, her works continue to evolve as she accentuates light and movement and identifies the extraordinary moments within everyday life.

Prints and originals are available in the artist’s shop, and you can follow her latest work on Instagram.

 

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Fungi, Feathers, and Insects Spring from Carol Long’s Art Nouveau Vessels

All images © Carol Long, shared with permission

Midwestern flora and fauna are the foundation for Carol Long’s lavishly adorned sculptures, which elegantly meld Art Nouveau embellishments with natural motifs. The Kansas-based artist (previously) continues her process of pushing and pulling the sides of a thrown vessel to achieve exaggerated proportions. Bublous bases, thin, curvy handles, and wobbly openings are characteristic of her ceramic sculptures, which she garnishes with slip-trail textures evoking fungi gills or bushy bunny tails.

Long has pieces in several shows, including at the Salina Art Center through October 15, 2023, and Fuller Craft Museum through January 28, 2024. She’s currently experimenting with adding molds and casts to her process and preparing to send a few sculptures to the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference this spring with In Tandem Gallery. Explore an archive of her works on Instagram.

 

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RISD Continuing Education Unlocks Your Creative Potential With 7 Online Certificates

By RISD CE Residential Interior Design Certificate student Emily Rives

RISD Continuing Education is excited to continue its online adult art and design learning. This fall, students from around the world can engage in fully asynchronous courses, which offer opportunities to explore new areas of interest, cultivate their creative potential, or develop new skills. For students interested in taking their learning to the next level, RISD CE now offers seven fully online certificate programs for adults:

• Animation
• Graphic Design
• Interactive Design
• Natural Science Illustration
• Painting Studies
• Photography
• Residential Interior Design

RISD CE Certificate Programs are designed to facilitate personal and professional development by engaging students in sustained exploration and learning in specific creative disciplines. These non-credit online certificates equip students with skills, confidence, proficiency, and real-world experience to accelerate creative lives and work. With no entry requirements, students with any background can learn with motivated peers to develop their portfolio, broaden existing skills, explore a new career path or life pursuit, or start their own business and build the network that will help them do it.

Notably, RISD CE certificate programs make it possible for busy adult students to explore a new career direction while continuing to work in their current field, with more flexibility and affordability than a degree, and a focus on building marketable skills and a portfolio. Students complete their coursework at their own pace to fit into their unique life and schedule.

The newly updated Residential Interior Design certificate has become one of the most popular, giving motivated students with a variety of backgrounds the knowledge and skills to get started in a growing professional field. The program was recently redesigned to address the interests and pursuits of students, focusing on residential spaces like kitchens, baths, and outdoor living areas, while ensuring that coursework is streamlined and that the technology utilized aligns with industry standards. The outcome? Students from all over have enrolled to achieve their unique interior design goals, from taking on projects in their own homes to strengthening skills and marketability in related fields like theater set design.

There is still time to get started in a course or certificate program this fall! Courses begin October 30. Online courses for teen students are also available, including the year-round intensive Advanced Program Online.

To learn more, visit ce.risd.edu.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article RISD Continuing Education Unlocks Your Creative Potential With 7 Online Certificates appeared first on Colossal.

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Inky Underwater Plumes Sprawl into Vibrant, Coral-Like Forms in Alberto Seveso’s Collages

All images © Alberto Seveso, shared with permission

Photographer Alberto Seveso (previously) continues his high-speed captures of ink as it disperses in water, this time inspired by marine organisms. As its name suggests, The Reef is a collection that spotlights vivid plumes in shades of greens, pinks, and oranges digitally altered to evoke coral-like forms. The series was born out of a holiday spent in a remote, largely uninhabited region in the Andaman Sea, where Seveso encountered a lush jungle and wide, sandy beaches. He shares:

The island’s fauna is rich with exotic species. It’s not uncommon to spot colorful hornbills, charming spectacled langur monkeys, and elusive flying lemurs. However, it was within its coral reef that I became utterly captivated…I was mesmerized by the beauty and diversity of shapes and colours—a world teeming with life, a glimpse of rare beauty constantly threatened by human activities.

To create the series, Seveso collaged several images of suspended ink and added texture and shape to the specimens. The resulting works reference the supple, sinuous bodies of the invertebrates through lively color.

Seveso is currently living in Bangkok, and you can find more of his work on Behance and Instagram.

 

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A Colossal Interview: Morel Doucet on Beauty, Gentrification, and Why He Uses Poetry to Tell His Story

“God Told Me Stars Used to Be Audible Through the Window Sills” (2023), mixed media on wooden panel, mylar, aerosol paint, metal, steel, and indigenous flora patterns, 70 x 62.5 feet. All images © Morel Doucet, shared with permission

Whether working with porcelain or spray paint on wood panel, Morel Doucet begins with beauty. In a new conversation with Colossal, he discusses why he wants to entice viewers and tempt even the most unexpected audiences to engage with issues of displacement, the climate crisis, and what it means to be an immigrant in the U.S. He approaches his activism similarly because, to him, they’re one and the same. He says:

As an artist, the work that I make is inherently political. I consider all of my work to be double-edged swords: they entice and lure the viewer with beauty while reminding them of their complacency within the dying environment. I don’t have to say I’m an activist. The work that I make is inherently that.

This conversation occurred in September 2023, a few months after the artist closed his first solo exhibition at Galerie Myrtis and premiered his works in Chicago in At the Precipice: Responses to the Climate Crisis. We discuss those milestones, how his upbringing on his grandfather’s farm laid the foundation for his work, his proclivity for poetry, and why it’s important for him to tell his own stories.

Read the conversation. 

 

“Gardenias” (2019), porcelain ceramic with cast altered forms, 10 X 12 x 15 inches. Photo by David Gary Lloyd

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A Colossal Interview: Morel Doucet on Beauty, Gentrification, and Why He Uses Poetry to Tell His Story appeared first on Colossal.

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Roomy Toadstool With a View: Nicole Gustafsson’s Vibrant Mushrooms Are Move-In Ready

“Amethyst Deceiver.” All images © Nicole Gustafsson, shared with permission

Nestled in the stalks of toadstools and fans of turkey tails, illuminated doors and windows invite us in to Nicole Gustafsson’s growing collection of mushroom dwellings. The artist, also known as Nimasprout, creates vibrant paintings and illustrations of fantastical worlds (previously), and she recently returned to a theme recurring in her practice since the beginning: home.

During the past few years, this theme spurred a series of small paintings featuring houses nestled into the forest floor. When Nucleus Portland supplied Gustafsson with a couple of basic wooden mushroom shapes earlier this year for an exhibition titled Clusters, she created 3D pieces for the first time. She says:

I found smaller wood mushroom shapes that I could keep trying out different ways to alter and make even tinier little houses from. The smaller size also allowed me to make more of an environment to nestle the mushroom sculpture into…It was around here that I started thinking of the project as ‘mushroom summer,’ and I was going to keep working on mushrooms until I tried everything I wanted to.

 

“Cozy Turkey Tail”

Gustafsson often draws on other peoples’ interests, which inspire miniature circle paintings customized to their favorite species. “Part of the fun of talking about nature with others is finding out what types of mushrooms people really enjoy imagery-wise, cooking with, foraging, etc.,” she says. The commissions are determined using prompts, such as mushroom types, colors, time of day, and weather.

“The idea of being immersed under leaves and tucked away in a cozy space is really appealing,” the artist says. “At a small size, every little leaf and turn around a log can be a whole new world to explore.”

While commissions for new custom paintings are currently on hold, Gustafsson has a range of small works, prints, and stickers available in her shop, and you can follow her on Instagram for updates.

 

“Dew Drop Glade”

“Lighthouse Mushie”

“Mushroom Grove”

“Mushroom Marsh House”

“Pixie Mushroom”

“Tropical Mushroom House”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Roomy Toadstool With a View: Nicole Gustafsson’s Vibrant Mushrooms Are Move-In Ready appeared first on Colossal.

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An Expansive New Volume Cultivates Our Global Love for Gardens

Ebony G. Patterson, “…below the crows, a blue purse sits between the blades, shoes among the petals, a cockerel comes to witness…” (2019), mixed media, 110 × 98 × 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Monique Meloche Gallery, and Hales New York/London

Spanning more than four millennia of horticultural heritage, a forthcoming tome from Phaidon celebrates the diverse mediums, trends, and traditions of gardens around the globe. Brimming with more than 300 full-color illustrations, Garden: Exploring the Horticultural World encompasses how geography, time periods, and purpose influence myriad landscape designs and gardening culture, along with numerous other art forms.

Garden highlights a vast range of art and ephemera, including plans for historic royal properties, how-to guides, maps, and representations in pop culture. From a Japanese tea garden fashioned from LEGO to an 18th-century Mughal garden in India to Monsieur Plant’s hydroponic system inside an iMac, the expansive tome showcases the immense breadth and imagination in gardens of all shapes and sizes.

Pre-order your copy on Bookshop.

 

Casey Boyden, “Japanese Tea Garden” (2007), LEGO, 10 1/4 × 17 3/4 × 11 3/4 inches. Image courtesy of the artist

Hafiz Nurallah, “A View of Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar, from the Polier Album” (c.1780), opaque watercolor heightened with gold on paper, 9 ½ × 14 ½ inches. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s

Christophe Guinet (Monsieur Plant), “Plant Your Mac!” (2020), mixed media, 23 5/8 × 12 5/8 inches. Image © the artist

John Haynes, “The Physic Garden, Chelsea: A Plan View” (1751), engraving with watercolor, 24 ¼ × 18 ¾ inches. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London

Bernardino de Sahagún, “General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex” (1577), ink on paper, each page 12 ¼ × 8 ¼ inches, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division

Claire Takacs, “Trompe l’oeil, Schwetzingen Palace, Mittelbau Schloss, Germany” (2016), photograph, dimensions variable. Image © the artist

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article An Expansive New Volume Cultivates Our Global Love for Gardens appeared first on Colossal.

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