ANN CONNELLY FINE ART HEALTH & WELLNESS
About the Gallery Ann Connelly Fine Art has been the leading fine art gallery in the Baton Rouge area since 1998. Ann Connelly has curated a space that encompasses painting, sculpture, mixed media, and three dinensional work. The gallery strives to procure artists from the Southern region while also maintaining a group of nationally recognized artistic professionals from around the United States. Today, Ann Connelly Fine Art operates as a fine art consultancy firm specializing in private, residential and public artwork programs.
Phelps Dunbar A focus on minimalism within the space to reinforce the positivism of interpersonal communication and professional relationships in finance
Below: Amy Dixon, Oil on canvas Right: David Carlysle Humphreys, Photographic collage on unstretched canvas
Corporate Iberia Bank Wanted to portray the mission of progression and innovation in finance.
Healthcare and Wellness Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center East Tower Renovation and Expansion Project
James Vella hand-blown glass installation in Atrium right: James Vella hand-formed glass tile installation in Mediation Area
Based on the guiding mission of the hospital’s patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi. The facility wanted to focus on work that was light-filled, naturalistic and soothing. St. Franis is the patron saint of nature and animals, and this reflected in the use of local nature photograhers, Gerald Burns and David Humphreys.
Healthcare and Wellness Pennington Biomedical Center Louisiana Percent for Art Program James Vella hand-formed glass installation
Steve Wilson, Stained Glass
Kate Blacklock, Inkjet print with archival pigments
Healthcare and Wellness Marybird Perkins Our Lady of the Lake Cancer Center
A mission of comfort and tranquility with an emphasis on local landscapes that embody the nature of healing and rejuvenation in medicine. Marybird Perkins and Our Lady of the Lady have a team that is leading in the personalization of healthcare and wellness through the use of genetic therapy customized for each patient.
INSPIRATION BOARD
PAUL HOUSBERG CONCEPT
BRAD BOURGOYNE CONCEPT
Hospitality Pinnacle Entertainment
Doug Kennedy, Boutique archival print
Dede Lusk, Original Photography
Doug Kennedy, Boutique archival print
Dede Lusk, Original Photography
Hospitality The Renaissance Hotel by Marriott Recently awarded in 2012 for the “Best New Hotel” by the Marriott Corporation.
Inspiration for thematic concept based on Louisiana based industry, agriculture, and culture. Partnering with the architects at Gensler in Houston, TX, we collectively told an artful story of the hotel and it’s community.
Jill Hackney, Acrylic on Panel James Vella hand-formed glass
Indigenous species of water lilly in Louisiana served as the inspiration for the elevator lobby
New Orleans based artist, James Vella developed a hand blown glass installation with the colors and shapes of the waterlilly. The cascade of fauna flanked the elevator lobby creating a sculptural moment that felt naturalistic and innovative.
Hospitality The Renaissance Hotel by Marriott “The art should be thought provoking, elegant, indigenous, and tell a story in a variety of mediums� A vision to celebrate the best of Louisiana culture and commerce throughout the Renaissnace with an art program reflecting the rich diversity of Louisiana and its artists.
The cultural identity for the area is rooted in the jazz music tradition. This imagery was carried forward through collaborative artwork and graphic light boxes for the bar area
(Above) The Tallulah Bistro and Bar rendering at the Renaissance Hotel with inspirational designs depicting music, muscians and the thriving musical cultural of the area. (Right) A detailed image of the calligraphic mark making for the theme of the bar.
Hospitality The Renaissance Hotel by Marriott
Curated Exhibitions The Gallery at Manship Theatre, Shaw Center for the Arts
Museum Partnerships LSU Museum of Art, Uniquely Louisiana Exhibition
Artwork The Gallery procures artwork from across the world. Our primary focus is cultivating the talent within our local region of Baton Rouge and state-wide. Our artists are highly qualified and all hold a diverse collections of merits to their work.
Artists: Bradley Sabin
Ryan Cobourn
Kelly Mueller
Robert Rector
Andree Carter
George Marks
Donna West
Kate Blacklock
Billie Bourgeois
Michael Buscemi
Marsha Boston
Kate Trepagnier
Joe Walters
Nancy Simonds
Elise Toups
Amanda Talley
Tim Hahn
Caroline Coe
Megan Singleton
Chase Langford
Chuck Voelter
Elise Morris
Amber Bookman
Robert Rea
Meredith Pardue
Thomas Swanston
Karoline Schleh
Cynthia Knapp
Jason Urban
Ed Pramuk
Doug Kennedy
Libby Johnson
James Vella
Mia Kaplan
Marilla Palmer
Kevin Gillentine
David Carlysle Humphreys
Paul Yanko
Susan Robert
Joyce Howell
Enid Williams
Demond Matsuo
Jill Hackney
Kelsey Brookes
Cynthia Giachetti & Benjamin Diller Kim Uchiyama Lisa Di Stefano
Trine Bumiller
Bradley Sabin Bradley Sabin uses ceramic to create installations that capture the mysterious beauty of nature. His installations range from single pieces to compositions of thousands of small flowers. He believes his installations reflect a dream state where the plant world and the human world merge.
Robert Rector Robert Rector is drawn to line and color theory as it relates to the geometry found in his medium. He believes that his work has an intuitive quality that channels dreams, previous experiences, and visual references to the natural world. His goal is to assimilate rational planning and intuitive or automatic expression into a unified thing. Rector is influenced by the balance of spontenaity and artist control.
Donna West Donna West uses her paintings to capture the serenity, stillness, and beauty that can be seen in a landscape. By eliminating the details, her technique of using light and dark abstraction and a light color palette emphasizes the calm mood of the painting. She believes that art should trigger emotion and wants the viewer to experience a quiet moment in the serene location she has created.
Michael Buscemi Michael Buscemi is influenced by the spontaneous forms that emerge from movement. In his white collage pieces, he cuts extra thick paper in a swift and fluid motion that he repeats thousands of times to create each individual piece. He then arranges these pieces in an undulating, yet organic way, using shadows to determine where each piece is placed. His pieces change drastically with different environments and light sources.
Joe Walters Joe Walters’ sculpture and works on paper are inspired by the flora and fauna of the low country marshes and black water rivers of the region. Walters creates site-specific installations of visual complexity and beauty which metaphorically address issues involving human relationships with nature. The forms are made of Styrofoam, plaster, cellulose and wire mesh, covered in glue and then rolled in sand. Then, he paints the surface to resemble the hard, rocky, outer layer of the earth. Each animal or plant is a pure moment of stopped action or interrupted growth.
Amanda Talley Amanda Talley is inspired by translating the activity and movement of the outside word into a vocabulary of paint and line. She observes the way light, color, and energy are reflected in the ouside world, and she uses this action to dictate form.
Megan Singleton Megan Singleton received her MFA from Louisiana State University. She uses her artwork to investigate the relationship between nature and society. She collects, tests, and discovers invasive plant fibers from Louisiana Marshes, and she uses them in her papermaking and sculpture. She explores the different ways that the natural world and the physical actions of a growing living environment can inspire communities and individuals.
Elise Morris Elise Morris believes painting is an intuitive process of creating space, a layering of experiences that evokes both unexpected complexity and the bareness of the moment. She looks for the light that shines through trees and clouds and translates it into her paintings. Morris believes that where there is light, there is clarity and warmth, and the hope of what is ahead. She believes her works are complete when the surface of the painting truly becomes the edge of the space.
David Humphreys David Humphreys has been a photographer for thirty years. As a David photographer and artist, Humphreys has he has always worked in grids been a professional artist/ and segments. He believes these photographer for thirty gridsyears. help him the subtle Hisdissect photographic nuances of an image and create collages reflect the grids an understanding of what makes and segments he has frethe subject so special. Each image encountered startsquently as a photograph. Then, throughout career.into the initial image ishis dissected PROCESS varying parts, based on the subject matter. He applies each image as a collage onto varying media. By stripping these images down to the stark black and white quality, he hopes that the viewer can see the intrinsic beauty of each image.
Cynthia Knapp
Cynthia Knapp uses earthy and organic forms to explore abstraction. Her work is both figural and natural. She uses shading and variations as well as paint and glaze layering to achieve her final piece. Cynthia believes that each of her pieces features a different dimentionality that distinguishes it, much like a topographcal map.
Doug Kennedy Doug Kennedy uses traditional methods of painting, oil, acrylic, pencils, and sometimes collage to capture the moments of action that lead his work to a visual harmony. He starts his painting process with his canvas on the ground, so he can walk around it. Then, he stretches his canvas in his studio where he begins the long process of work and examination. Each piece is complete when it reaches its own harmony.
Mia Kaplan Mia Kaplan is inspired by the environment of southeastern Louisiana. Her portfolio ranges from plein-air paintings, abstraction, small and large scale sculpture, and botanical illustrations of native plants. She uses sensitivity to movement and color to reflect her natural surroundings. Her work is included in private collections all over the world.
Meredith Pardue Meredith Pardue combines random actions of painting with controlled, diliberate mark-making to descibe each form in her work. The canvases are composed of organic forms that derive from those found in nature. She positions these forms against a pale ground that is actually a builtup surface of layers of paint. She experiments with the use of positive and negative space through the dynamic of the composition.
Kate Blacklock Kate Blacklock works in series of photography, painting, objects and combinations of all of these. Her compositions are described by the artist as existing in an ambiguous space, not subject to the laws of gravity. Her spirited still life compositions are framed by bold solid colors and present vibrant, yet obscurely aged floral arrangements. Each one a symbolic narrative of lyrical illusion linked by an awareness of the transience of life.
Westin Hotel, New York City
Federal Bank, Baton Rouge
Jill Hackney
Jill Hackney uses unfinished boards to create her still life oil paintings. The natural texture of the wood lends its own organic layer to the composition. She uses simple brushes, which she trims herself, to create vertical and linear strokes which create layers and depth. Synaesthesia plays a main role in her pieces, uniting the senses of the viewer. Her work aims to awaken the feelings of joy, serenity and peace in the viewer.
CynthiaGiachetti&BenjaminDiller Cynthia Giachetti believes her work deals with a sense of metamorphosis. It is reminiscent of geology and archeology’s concerns with the layering of time, place, absence, presence, and process. She incorporates history and natural phenomena in a way that it can be interpreted in the present. The artifacts and materials in her work represent recurring cycles that take place in our daily lives. She uncovers, restores, and builds in a manner that produces work that has a spiritual overtones. Ben Diller’s installations span two and three dimensions through the making and unmaking of form. He juxtaposes graphic iconography with weathered, organic imagery. His work celebrates the joy of labor and engineering. Many of his elements are recycled and repurposed and given new meaning. His hope is that his images resonate with the viewer, inspiring reflection and understanding.
Lisa Di Stefano Lisa Di Stefano’s work employs subtle details, respectful suggestions, and rousing palettes. Having learned and painted in the land of representation, Di Stefano now communicates from a more personal perspective. She often chooses landscapes as the subject of her paintings; enlivening trees, water, and marsh grasses with a diversity of hues and thin, multi-layered brushstrokes.
Ryan Cobourn Ryan Cobourn’s work focuses on depictions of the world around him. Usually based on drawings from observations, the paintings through their creation, change and veer off into abstraction. The paintings’ content emerges through a protracted process of deconstructing and rebuilding of the image, based on memory and intuition.
Andree Carter Andree Carter begins her process by laying an allover grid. Then, she makes hundreds, sometimes thousands, of little marks on each canvas until the surface is covered. Layers of gesso, acrylic, and oil are applied over collaged elements until the layers are indistinguishable from each other. She believes that her process is similar to a musician combining elements in an improvised performance.
Joyce Howell Joyce Howell believes the art of painting is an internal navigation based on instinct. She is a keen observer of her surroundings, and her palette, marks, and textures are directly related to what she hears, sees, and feels. She believes each painting is an attempt to tap into the beauty that appears spontaneously at her feet and in her memories.
George Marks George Marks uses a rich and complex combination of materials to create textures, colors, and surfaces that recall specific tactile associations and memories. His work is simultaneously ordered and spontaneous. Carelessness and rigid geometry mingle on the canvas. Passage of drawing in the work range from sensitively rendered figuration to loose impetuous scrawls. His palette is generally warm and harmonious, but searing thin strips of color may awaken the calm. All of his pieces are deliberately orchestrated to fit together into a continuous installation, and yet each is also an improvisation.
Billie Bourgeois Billie Bourgeios believes there must be a relationship between form and content. She is always concerned with the composition and formal aspects of the work, balanced with subjects derived from nature and intuition. She is more at home with suggestions of gesture and strong personal mark making.
Kate Trepagnier Kate Trepagnier believes painting is a powerful and intimate experience that gives the painter the freedom to play with color and paint in an eternal moment. She uses transparent and opaque brush strokes and vibrant colors that reflect her relationship to joy and tragedy and express her union with the mystery of landscape.
Enid Williams Enid Williams’ work is an inquiry into the physical and intellectual process of perception. She relies on a complex ordering of form and color to create elaborate visual scenarios that appear to be in continual flux. As an artist, she is interested in slowing the viewer’s gaze by creating an image that requires more careful engagement. Her vocabulary of small circular shapes is meant to evoke a sense of playfulness, while also reflecting a certain temporality of appearances.
Paul Yanko Paul Yanko creates densely layered compositions that are reflective of a desire to reconcile formal painterly concerns with an interest in creating process-derived imagery. He develops his paintings systematically through an additive process of layering acrylic paint mixed with acrylic mediums onto masked areas. As he paints, he allows shapes to shift in registration in order to reveal varying amounts of underlying color.
Robert Rea Robert Rea brings an energetic quality to his paintings fueled by his love of music and nature. Through honest and lively brushwork, he captures a mood that reflects his musical sensibility. He creates a lyrical palette and a sense of depth and spatial relationships in each painting by subtly layering carefully chosen colors.
Karoline Schleh Karoline Schleh combines images with paint, pencil, varnish, and smoke to create surreal representations. In her most recent work, she utilizes the technique of Fumage, which is used to describe smoke drawings. Today, very few artists use candle smoke to create their images. She combines this method, pencil and charcoal layering , painting, and backward script writing to create a sense of depth and space in her compositions.
Ed Pramuk
Ed Pramuk uses imagined spaces, architectural motifs, and references to traditional painting to call up metaphors for his spatial concerns. He wants to create a dream about the real, and at the same time to satisfy his interest in manipulating space. The fulfillment of this idea occurs when the weight of emotion generated by each pictorial situation is in harmony with an interior image.
Chuck Voelter Chuck Voelter’s process centers on nature and the process of decay and rebirth. He specifically eschews the balanced aspects of nature to focus more closely on the odd, asymmetrical shapes and spaces that are dimensionally created by light and mass. Forms recalling pods, eggs, or seeds tap into a life-affirming essence. Shiny pours of color-saturated polyurethane intertwine with matte brushwork creating a relationship process and response.
Caroline Coe Caroline Coe collects vintage papers and maps which she cuts by hand to create arrangements of butterflies.
Elise Toups Elise Toups uses bold color palettes and swift brushstrokes to create paintings that explore themes of nature and masquerade. Toups received her bachelors degree in psychology, and she believes that it is necessary to connect with nature in order to maintain an internal balance.
James Vella James Vella has been blowing glass for twelve years. He connects strongly with the ideas of decadences and overindulgence that is reflected from a Baroque attitude of glass design into classical rendering of the vessel. He has developed his own techniques and individual style while paying close attention to the traditions and importance of design that Italian glass has demonstrated since the 1600s. His work is an example of an extension into a modern day technical vocabulary that has moved towards a more sculptural way of working with glass.
Kevin Gillentine Kevin Gillentine began painting and drawing at age fourteen. He believes the focus of his art is simplicity. He paints to capture a moment in the way that he personally sees it in his head; he wants his paintings to look like memories rather than photographs.
Susan Robert Susan Robert has kept a journal for thirty years which serves as the foundation of her creative process. She believes that inan effort to create the new and different in the context of personal experience, the artist works on the outer edge of the possible. Art History plays an important role in Robert’s process. She often deconstructs and alters studies of previous artists focusing upon the painter’s range of hues, shades, and tones.
Demond Matsuo Demond Matsuo searches through seas of papers and inspirations trying to arrive at a conclusion. He believes that his collages serve as a treasure map to pull the viewer through to an understanding my overall meaning. He uses salt, iodine, and collage with paint to create archetypal heroes in situations that deconstruct ancient myths to rework them into more hopeful or melancholy settings, creating a Surrealist-influenced state.
ThomasSwanston Thomas Swanston’s trademarks are a paired down palette and simplified composition with the use of precious metal leaf. He draws much of his inspiration from his visual and spiritual surroundings. His work is the end result of an omnivorous search for meaning. It emerges from the love of many seemingly disparate elements, including the history, processes, and materials of art making. Technologies old and new, the spirituality of the natural world, and close observation of simple things come together to form the conceptual underpinnings of his work.
Jason Urban Jason Urban is an artist, writer, designer, curator, and teacher. His idealized scenes of the natural world are calming. He explores the serenity of nature against the reality of an outdoor experience. Some of his printed collages never hone in on a subject and reference underdeveloped elements of graphic design.
Libby Johnson For Libby Johnson, art is a way of quieting the soul and centering the mind. The concentrated act is applied daily to her artistic practice in order to give all of herself to the work. The artist centers on the canvas, revisiting the places she has traveled and recapturing those moments wholly as she paints. The meditative concentration is reflected in her interpretation of light. A combination of oil paint, technical skills, and varnish gives Johnson the ability to create a deep-set composition that provides the viewer with a window into an escape from reality.
Marilla Palmer Marilla Palmer blends naturally occurring and manmade materials in such a way that they become indistinguishable. In her typical works of sculpture and paper-based collage, Palmer combines branches and flowers with sequins and crystals. She believes that artifice and nature intertwine, and she uses her techniques to engage deeper themes of glamour, life, and renewal.
Kelsey Brookes Kelsey Brookes is an artist of contrasts. His well-documented background in microbiology and folk art combine in explosive prisms of raucous color, bold imagery, and timeless motifs. Raw and untethered, his vibrant, mixedmedia assemblages reveal a freeflowing aesthetic that is altogether energetic.
Kim Uchiyama Kim Uchiyama is a painter of abstract watercolors, for whom locations are central influences if not the literal subjects of her work. Her works’ characteristic bands of color reference landscapes or elements of sea and sky. The fields of color in her works vary between solid and gestural, sometimes offering glimpses of previous layers. Uchiyama works on both dry surfaces as well as wet-on-wet.
Trine Bumiller
Trine Bumiller references the natural world in which images are abstracted and recombined to convey the patterns, rhythms and underlying forces inherent to the immediate environment. They merge an idea of a place with a sense of memory and existence. In alteration of colors, forms, and perspectives, and through multiple transparent glazes, the paintings evoke an alternative experience, between time and place, and between imagined space and physical existence.
Kelly Mueller Kelly Mueller looks to capture a momentary world, frozen and fleeting with each quilt she creates. Using a projector, she traps text, imagery, instructional manuals, maps, found patterns and momentary realizations in layers of acrylic and charcoal.
AmberBrookman Amber Brookman believes that her body of work is a meditation. She begins with journal writing as a process to empty the mind of notes, philosophies, or scientific ideas of reality and consciousness. From there, she explores the structures and forms that relate to these philosophies from an intuitive level, leaving the mind to create a visual experience.
Tim Hahn Tim Hahn creates work that exists as an object as well as a painting. The colors and patterns work together to draw the viewer in. The viewer is caught up in the entirety of the piece as well as an understanding of the process. He believes his pieces are successful when they elicit a meditative reaction that leads to an emotional attachment. Ultimately, he believes that his work is about the physicality of each piece.
NancySimonds Nancy Simonds creates large-scale, abstract gouache paintings on paper that create an experience of exhilaration and renewal. In each of her series, different arrangements of shapes and colors create a feeling of transcendent order. These images are anti-chaos. All of her pieces strive for a connection to a moment for reflection, resolution, and calm. These images reflect velvety textures such as moss covered earth, as well as disparate edges, sizes and patterns coexisting in nature.
Marsha Boston For the last two decades, Marsha Boston has been creating works centered on myths and concepts that have defined society’s relationship to nature. Through the use of watercolor and ink, she uses her work to portray her passion for botany and concern for the environment. Boston believes that a sense of inner balance is essential for total healing, and she believes that her works parallel her desire for a human future that is in harmony with the natural world.
ChaseLangford
Chase Langford started studying and drawing maps at a young age. His fascination of maps led him to study cartography which allowed him to appreciate the visual rhythms of geography. His series represent a significant shift from the two-dimensional map view to an abstract composition that implies a three dimensional space.