Werner Bargsten

"These pieces have been coming out of me for the last 30 years without any explanation as to why they are here so I have a hard time saying anything about them. Probably something about my childhood on a farm in Iowa… Soil. Control. Nature. Trying to package up feelings that are either evasive or hard to manage. The Yin. The Yang. Time slipping through my fingers." www.wernerbargsten.com

Beat Kuert

Beat Kuert is the photo artist closest to the manner of painting. Voiding the “linguistic minimalism” and moving towards a sort of “pictorial baroque-like” expression made of strong ignition of colors. With a procedure that all figurate art has in common, Kuert affirms in that way a more meaningful “intelligence of the reality. Kuert’s photographic work is clearly a sort of “digital alchemy”. He has been experimenting with the language of video and photography for many years, using a editing technique similar to computer imaging software that distorts and de-familiarizes real images to create a unique visual vocabulary www.beatkuert.com

Debbie Miracolo

Debbie Miracolo is a New York-based artist working in color photography. A former graphic designer with a fine art education from Rochester Institute of Technology, she creates images with intuitive attention to detail and composition juxtaposed with layers of psychological undertones. With themes of transition and passage of time, her style has been described as evocative, revelatory, and poetic. Miracolo attributes her imaginative outlook to memories of an introverted only childhood infused with make-believe worlds and storybooks. By transforming rather than documenting truth, her interpretations of train travel, humanity, and nature serve as seductive invitations to linger, question, and weave a story of one’s own. www.debbiemiracolo.com

Edward Eichel

Eichel is a painterly painter. His voice is lyrically clear and his vision singularly uncluttered. Of course, the basic background of anyone who wants to paint is drawing. Though the line in Eichel’s drawing seems nervous, it is the nervous tension sometimes seen in work deeply felt by the artist. The mainstream of art with its clarity, taste and technical excellence is the source of Eichel’s gift. 'Camel', from the 'Israel Sketchbook' in the Collection of Metropolitan The Museum of Art, New York, pen and ink on paper, 1962 ‘En Route to Israel- Istanbul’, from the 'Israel Sketchbook' in the Collection of Metropolitan The Museum of Art, New York, pen and ink on paper, 1962 www.westbeth.org

Melih Ozuysal

I was born in Aydın, Turkey in 1956. I started painting after a long period of acquaintance (1974, 75 and 76) and without a break, I have been painting ever since. I’ve been living my studio in İstanbul since 1986. I have not had university or academy training. I have had 13 personal exhibitions, the first in 1985, one aboard… I know that the less I say about my paintings, the more they will say about themselves. The best feature of my paintings is that they were all brought into being by the some hand, yet they have all taken on different temperaments and personalities from each other (if this suggests a lack of character on the artist’s part, it also shows just how much personality each of the pictures has). What is important is not an image that tells a story or creates an issue, but the blanks, stains, hoxys, lines, color texture and such –like images that can in themselves be pictures. For this reason when I start a painting, I am not being, it is better… I paint not with my thoughts, ideas, discoveries, but with my moods, the states of my spirit. That is why instead of communicating through thoughts or ideas or making people think, I like my paintings to communicate with people’s spirits. As someone who puts shadows (with color) in the light of life, my dream is to make my painting seem like they were not painted but that they just came to be of their own accord or they already existed but I enabled them to be seen. Sometimes a color that has not been used in a painting can make itself be felt to such a degree that it will become present in that some picture through its absence. This is the magic of painting and the secret of a good artist is hidden in this magic

Barbara Palka Winek

Barbara Palka Winek is a multifaceted artist who creates paintings that defy categorization, yet continue a legacy of the quasi-abstracted figuration in the vein of DeKooning, Velasco, and Auerbach. The Cracow-based painter is a virtuoso artist who has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as Rome and Warsaw, New York and Frankfurt. Winek’s art is simultaneously lyrical and mysterious, jubilant yet pensive. By employing these paradoxes, she skillfully applies a multihued palette of soft and passionate color which creates a sense of memory and longing for faraway people and places. www.palkawinek.art.pl

Eric Swart

Eric Swart is an autodidactic/ self-taught artist born in Amsterdam. He portrays one of the greatest art forms our world knows; architecture. He started digitizing facades of buildings throughout the world in 1992 which began as an experiment, and became a passion. Visiting new towns where he meets the buildings he portrays, such as the Great Church at the center of Amsterdam while exhibiting there, is an emotional process for the artist. www.ericswart.com

Biljana Cincarevic

Purity and Serenity is a part of the concept of Holy femininity and is about the reflections of the enlightened women from the past transposed in the present time. It is an attempt in the demystification of their holiness and the transposition of their sanctity into a new form. How would enlightened women of the past look today and could the modern women experience the enlightenment and holiness of the past? Today, sacred women are replaced with the icons of style, film, business... This particular series of oils on canvas engages the observer to reflect on contemporary feminine spirituality. www.biljanacincarevic.com

Pedro Morales

By taking the practices of architecture and meditation as a point of departure I utilize the mediums
of painting and photography in an attempt to record the process of the movement towards the inner. In one practice, one uses conceptual thought to build things from materials and in the other, through awareness, one travels from the outside in to the source of everything and every thing... Travelling the opposite way from the finished building as a product, beyond conception into the bright, luminous, knowing, blissful space of the mind. www.artnuvi.com

Billy Bob Beamer

Billy Bob Beamer (b. 1947) works in small formats to create compositions through the use of meditational and labor-intensive techniques. He has exhibited in over 60 solo, juried/curated, and invitational art shows throughout the USA and at the Ancient High House Museum, Staffordshire, UK. His art works can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia's Governor's Mansion, the Virginia Fine Arts Center for the New River Valley, and the estate of noted art/cultural historian, Roger Shattuck. Currently, in addition to his own drawing, Beamer teaches classes in "drawing as quiet active meditation" to relieve pain and stress. In January and February of 2011, beamer exhibited with internationally known artists at Roanoke College, in Salem, Virginia. The exhibit featured work done by those who use meditation as a primary vehicle for creating. beamer says, "My best way to express incalculable enormity is to create its contrasting opposite. At this time, I am concentrating on drawing--- that most basic mode of communication --and on arte povera-like constructions, both in a small format. To paraphrase Blake: 'the universe lies in a grain of sand' ... and in drawings or objects that are small and that may appear not too carefully crafted (however labor intensive the actual technique), I am in some sense paying homage to the marginalized...to the people (and animals) tragically seen as 'throw-aways' or 'what is to be ignored' by culture/society at large." beamer, a sociology graduate of the College of William and Mary, is also a retiree from the Commonwealth of Virginia's Department of Social Services, and an award-winning trumpeter, with a 40 year week-end career playing jazz, R & B, blues, and other types of music. He also explores experimental, experiential writing as a meditational tool, and has had five books of his POMES published by Chalk Editions and White Sky Books. billy bob (who has a married daughter, a psychologist) lives with his wife, Kathy, and their cats in Bedford County, Virginia. http://www.outsiderart.info/beamer.htm

Helga Kreuzritter

Are we going to keep walking and evolve super- slowly yet surely, or are we going to go against the stride, take discomfort and uneasiness without rest upon ourselves to bend our circle, make rules new in each moment and take the risk of being lost in the forest for the sake of involution?... The Abbreviated Articulation of Helga Kreuzritter –Tchera Niyego www.helga-kreuzritter.de

Halis Karakurt

When one peers into Halis Karakurt internal and private worlds what becomes immediately apparent is that two different visions coalesce as one in these visual works: an internal vision that one sees in visions and a type of representation that refers to the mimetic, that is, that refers to objects or their qualities that reside in the world of lived experience and reality. The near-impossibility of wrenching one system of sight from the other is at the core of this work's mystery and beauty. With this realization in mind it becomes quite clear this very fine artist intends to engage his viewers with the suggestive potency of symbolic material which refers to the antithesis of spirit-matter and matter-form: contrarieties always seeking synthesis but never achieving it. Naturalistic surfaces and textures alluded to are organic ones. The radiant gossamer quality of the bold marks, overall fields which resemble wave patterns, or microcosmic energy fields seem to ebb and flow on the residual larger forms which rests within them. They are fascinating to behold, a prism of the phantasmagoric characters involving dervishes and priests. These iconographic patterns allow the inner eye infinite access to a limitless and transcendent pictorial plane. The field is boundless and universal. The larger contrasted forms shimmer like apparitions within their overall spectral force fields. Three dimensions are insinuated but not stressed as size and scale becomes sublimely indeterminate. The dream quality pervades these efforts in which one can discern figural shapes that hover tremulously over the surfaces. These forms resist interpretation as they filter as spectral beings in and out of view. One could infer the impressions in time passed molded over cultures and civilizations. It is the mere suggestion of the past realized in a momentary flush, and then retreating, like a dream, in the night that keeps our attention and wonder fully aflame. www.haliskarakurt.net

William Rodwell

No matter what the subject matter, Rodwell’s work, when knit together as a whole, demonstrates truth by expressing beauty, pain, strength and volatility. wmrodwell@gmail.com

Susan Carnahan

I am an artist, a mother and a wife based in NYC.
In my work, I have often explored the nature of relationships and the perpetual shifting dynamics between people and their various roles. I am fascinated by how these roles inform each other, and how they are never static in nature, but rather constantly subject to change as they evolve. As an artist, I have examined roles and ideas from the perspective of a child. Now, as a parent, I am able to see myself in the role of my own mother, gaining a better understanding of how these cycles come together, full circle. www.susancarnahanart.com

Francisco Bustamante Gubbins

Chilean artist, Francisco Bustamante Gubbins usually creates large-scale diffuse abstract compositions that employ innovative media amalgamations such as oil, pigment, resin, and gold leaf. Bringing to mind nature, landscapes, and celestial states, here presented in a vivid reverse reflex, depicting a plane of single-pointed form executed through exquisite line work and mark making. www.bustamantegubbins.com