Happy New Year!

2008 was a good year, full of big changes, lots of great work & delightful new artists. It was a very happy holiday - great fun with the family and so wonderful to have the kids home from college. So here's wishing everyone a prosperous and fulfilling new year, the best is yet to come!

Well we had a very happy holiday I hope you did also...I continue to collect and document the permanent collection for Stafford. It has been quite an adventure. This is a charming little painting by Ed King.

Happy Holidays!

yesterday I took the day off and drove to Radford to pick gabe and tori up from school. I drove through the most amazing fog in the mountains outside of Charlottesville. Here is the view from above it. I've been splitting my time between NIH and Stafford - purchasing some amazing artwork from the local artists. On the 16th I visited the LibertyTown Arts Workshop and found some great work, including the lovely artist Kathleen Walsh who we exhibited at NIH last year.

happy graduation KT!

Anne Beck

Anne Beck
Anne Beck is an artist working in painting, drawing, printmaking, and book arts. Her paintings and works on paper have been exhibited nationally, most recently at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI, and are included in The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program. Ms. Beck is co-publisher of Acid to Zinc, a serial artists’ book disseminated through the USPS, and is a core member of The Printmakers Left–an international collaborative working in print and book arts. TPL’s most recent project, Exquisite History Volume 1: The Land of Wandering, was published in 2005 through the University of Virginia Press. They are currently at work on Volume 2: The New World. Ms. Beck has received fellowship awards from the Virginia Center of Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain, and Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, and recently was Barstow Artist-in-Residence at Central Michigan University. Ms. Beck holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and a BA in Printmaking and Art History from the University of Virginia. She recently moved from Brooklyn, NY and now lives and works in California.

state

state: multi-dimensional, precarious, shifting; state of mind, state of being, state of the nation, state of the world; a public body, nation state, civic state; a declaration; statement.
state began with whimsical pictures & apocalyptic visions of a high-tech synthetic mechanized culture. It became loose social history & critique. The original manuscript is a handmade artist’s book made of casein, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, ink, graphite, collaged bits of etching & drypoint on watercolor paper, and bound in found printed suede. Anne Beck sees her work as a visual journal inspired by latent structures, indiscernible figures, forms that wax and wane, and images and thoughts that coalesce and dissipate. Underlying her work is a belief that the personal and universal are not quite mutually exclusive, a reality that is vital to our ability to communicate and connect. She’s apt to borrow archetypes from contemporary culture (from science, philosophy, literature, nature, et al) in an effort to document whatever new tributaries arise from the adjoining of personal and collective histories. Though a constant introduction of new elements working together in layers and flux, Anne Beck creates works that reassert the potential of evolving systems while still placing a premium on the delights of personal excavation.

Click HERE To purchase Anne Beck's book

Flux Studios

You are invited to Flux Studios for our first annual open studio
Saturday, December 13, 12 - 5 pm
Many neighboring studios such as Red Dirt Studio and Washington Glass School will also be open.
Please join us- there will be music, good food and lots of great art to see!

Artists at Flux Studios are:
Novie Trump
Laurel Lukaszewski
Mila Kagan
Kyan Bishop
Andrea Roberson
Noah Armstrong

Flux Studios
3708 Wells Avenue
Mt. Rainier, MD 20712
www.fluxstudiosdc.com

For information, contact Novie Trump at novietrump@mindspring.com.
Hope to see you there!

Vee Osvalds

If you've been reading the blog you already know I'm a real fan of Vee Osvalds, an amazing glass artist from Charlottesville. Recently we installed this charming glass detail in a break room at NIH. In the late afternoon with the sun streaming through it is amazing. Vee's web site here