Art & Beyond May Specula 2019

art&beyond Vol. 60 • May • 2019

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Homage to the Russian Avant-Garde an Art Show juried by Peter Frank

Featuring Art by The BUNKER Group

Kiki. UNTITLED. Mixed Media on Paper.

Martin Petrosyan

UNTITLED. Mixed Media on Paper.

Vol. 60 • May • 2019

art&beyond Homage

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CONTENTS

Russian Avant-Garde

Cover

Back Cover

Inside Front Cover

Kiki

Julienne Johnson

Martin Petrosyan

Inside Back Cover

Bunker Group

Kiki 6 Martin Petrosyan 7 Ashot Ashot 8 Armen Rotch 9 Sev 10 Grigori Offenbach 11 Lark 12 Narine Isajanyan 13

Poetry

Tatyana Apraksina

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James Manteith

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Russian Avant-Garde Julienne Johnson

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Laurie Yehia

17

Barbara Nathanson

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Lisa Bahouth

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Olesya Volk

20

Gerardo Castelan

21

Gala 22

Donna Angers

23

Jenik Cook

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Tatiana Yartseva

25

Laurie Yehia

Next Stop is the Art Santa Fe 2019 Apply Now to be Published in the Summer Print Edition Magazine Deadline May 27, 2019 https://www.artandbeyondpublications.com/magazine-entry/ Publisher Art Director Editor

Mila Ryk Mila Ryk Alina Lampert

Art & Beyond published 8 times a year.

Six (6) Online issues and Two (2) printed issues.

Distributed to the galleries, museumes and other

Entry Form to apply to be published in the Art & Beyond Online magazine is available at http://www.artandbeyondpublications.com/ab-online-entry/ Membership Program application is available at http://www.artandbeyondpublications.com/membership/ For any additional information please contact Mila Ryk at mryk@art-beyond.com

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Homage to the Russian Avant-Garde Dear participants in the competition "Homage to the Russian Avant-Garde," we want to thank everybody who submitted art and congratulate those artists chosen by our juror, Peter Frank.

Congratulations to our winners!

First Place

Honorable Mention

Julienne Johnson Laurie Yehia

Gerardo Castelan Diane Holland Narine Isajanyan

Second Place

Lina Kogan

Barbara Nathanson

Jane Serebrenikov

Third Place Lisa Bahouth Olesya Volk

Julienne Johnson

Laurie Yehia

Barbara Nathanson

Lisa Bahouth

Olesya Volk

Gerardo Castelan

Diane Holland

Narine Isajanyan

Lina Kogan

Jane Serebrenikov

The Homage to the Russian Avant-Garde list of participants Tatyana Apraksina Lisa Bahouth Jean Brantley Michele Castagnetti Gerardo Castelan Irina Chelyapov Jenik Cook

Gala Vered Galor Diane Holland svetlAna ivAnov Julienne Johnson Lina Kogan Barbara Nathanson

David Phillips Tatiana Savchenko Jane Serebrenikov Olesya Volk Tatiana Yartseva Laurie Yehia

HONNORARY GUESTS FROM THE BUNKER GROUP Kiki Armen Rotch

Ashot Ahot Grigori Offenbach

Martin Petrosyan Sev

Narine Isajanyan Lark

The BUNKER Group

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Like other non-conformist art groups of the period, Bunker served as an entryway for Western experimental styles into the gradually opening discourse of Soviet art. In Bunker's case, the practices engaged included Minimal Art and Art Informel. This in itself was unusual: an association of artists reinterpreting not what the latest trends were coming from Western Europe and America (e.g. conceptualism, neo-expressionism), but tendencies that went back twenty, even thirty years. In fact, there had been no full reckoning in the USSR of either American Minimalism from the 1960s or of Art Informel – European post-existentialist gestural abstraction – of the 1950s. In the hands of the Bunker artists these seemingly anomalous (not to mention anachronistic) styles fused into a dynamic hybrid that encouraged the exploration of materials, textures, patterns, repeated motifs, and other non-objective tropes in new, distinctive and even unanticipated ways.

UNTITLED. 1990. Acrylic on canvas, by Martin Petrosyan.

UNTITLED. 1990. Plastic on Wooden Board, by Sev.

The Bunker Group remains an active global network, identified with Armenia in its source but resolutely international in its outlook.

Its aesthetics remain avant-garde even as it roots itself in traditional modernist formats. Looking, then, to the recent past and the near future, Bunker maintains a powerful studio dialogue, its ongoing argument between simplicity and complexity, construction and destruction, image and substance. This is art with an identity, and even purpose.

This year celebration of Bunker is built around works from the collection of Sergei Djavadian, a Glendale-based collector who has been supportive of Bunker artists around the world. Here Djavadian has lent paintings, assemblage, and work on paper by original Bunker members including Kiki, Martin Petrosian, Sev, Asho Ashot and Armen Hadjian Rotch. Works from other collections and the artists themselves augment Djavadian’s loans, as does the work of several LA-based artists who joined Bunker later, including Lark Pilinsky and Narine Isajanyan.

Peter Frank, Los Angeles

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One of the last anti-official art groups to emerge from the Soviet Union was the Bunker Group. Bunker emerged from a larger dissident circle, the 3rd Floor Art Group, in Yerevan, capital of the Armenian SSR, in the early-mid 1980s. 3rd Floor was stylistically inclusive, open to dissident artists of all stripes. Non-objective artists in the Group felt intellectually alienated from their more figurative and surrealist compatriots, however, and broke away to form Bunker (which, like 3rd Floor itself, took its name from its first exhibition venue). As perestroika lashed the Soviet Union, finally crumbling it, the Bunker orbit reached further, to Moscow, Paris and ultimately Los Angeles.

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he Soviet era began with the liberation of artists, but quickly devolved into their repression. Once Stalin died, artists in the Soviet Republics hoped again to practice the kinds of art their hearts and brains -- not just their commissars – told them to make.

But a state addicted to control would not let them. Until Gorbachev's glasnost, there were official artists and unofficial ones: the official artists' work hung in state-sponsored exhibit halls, while those of the unofficials hung in their residences and occasionally in what were essentially guerrilla exhibitions, often ones raided and even destroyed by the state. This, famously, was the pattern in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But it went on in the USSR wherever artists congregated.

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UNTITLED. Ink Acrylic, Tempers on Papet,

by Grigori Offenbach.

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Kiki

BOBO WITH BLUE, WHITE AND RED. Mixed Media on Canvas.

Leader of the International Bunker Art Group, Kiki is constantly mastering his abstract expressionist techniques.

His art works are on display in state museums in Germany, Armenia, Estonia, and Kazakhstan and constitute an important part of the Nancy and Norton Dodge collection of the Zimmerly Art Museum in New Jersey.

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Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Martin Petrosyan

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to the MARTIN PETROSYAN was born in Armenia in 1855. He studied drawing and painting at the Kh. Abovian Pedagogical Institute. In 1982 he started working at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Martin participated in art exhibitions even as a student. From 1987 his work have been exhibited in Union of Soviet Republics shows on a regular basis. His works are on the permanent display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Yerevan, as well as in private collections in Armenia, the former Soviet Union, France, Canada, United States, Germany and Syria. Since 1999, Petrosyan has resided in Los Angeles. For more information please contact LarkGallery.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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UNTITLED. Mixed Media on Paper.

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Ashot Ashot

AFACTUM 2, Acrylic on Canvas,1995.

ASHOT ASHOT was born in Armenia in 1961. Ashot left Armenia shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1993 and moved to France. With HIS discovery of the Vedic philosophy Achot Ashot began his mature period where all the works are titled AFACTUM - A word created by the artist from factum for event, and his own private prefix. For more information please contact LarkGallery.

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Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Armen Rotch

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ARMÉN ROTCH first began to exhibit his work in Armenia in 1978 under the name of Armén Hadjian, with the “Carré noir” Group, and continued to exhibit into the 1980s with the avant-gardists of the “3ème étage”, of which he was one of the founders, taking part in the “First Gathering of USSR Avant-gardists” in 1987. At this point, he began to show his work beyond Armenia: in Narva, Estonia in 1988; in Paris in 1989; in Copenhagen in 1990; and in Moscow, Vienna, and New York in 1991. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1993. For more information please contact LarkGallery.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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UNTITLED. Pencil on Paper, 2017

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Sev

UNTITLED. Plastic on Wooden Board .

Born in Armenia 1954, Sev started his career as a writer until he met a group of underground artists and joined their ranks. As a member of the 3rd Floor art group and later as a member of the international art group BUNKER, Sev took part in MORE THAN 100 exhibitions and creative actions in Armenia, Russia, Lithuania, Estonia, France, and Germany from 1987 to 1999. His works are part of the permanent collections of the Narva City Museum in Estonia;

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Panevezhiss City Museum in Lithuania, and Museum of Contemporary Art of Madeline, Colombia and private collections in Armenia, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, USA, Canada, Australia, Netherlands and Sweden. Sev now lives and works in Los Angeles.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Grigori Offenbach

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GRIGORI OFFENBACH is a Member of the Bunker Group. For more information please contact LarkGallery.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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UNTITLED. Ink, Acrylic, Tempera on Paper. 1990.

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LARK

HOMAGE TO BOBO. Mixed Media, Collage with Found Objects on Board.

Born in the remote mountains of central Asia, LARK (Larisa Pilinsky) grew up in Ukraine and studied art in Russia. She first became known for her work with the award-winning Bunker Art Group of Armenia —“fellow rebels in abstraction” against Soviet artistic repression.

Since emigrating to the United States in 1991, Lark has been recognized by respected critics and dealers. Her assemblages and, more recently, her paintings, have been featured in more than 30 solo and group shows including the Nickelodeon Animation Studios, the Avatar Art Gallery, the Swedish-American Museum of Art, and the Museums of Contemporary Art in Armenia and Russia. Lark’s work has been selected through juried competitions by the SoHo International Art Competition and the Foundation of Collage Artists of America.

Lark creates assemblages by recycling found objects and processing them through spiritual meditation, encouraging images to appear out of her subconscious, awakening both familiar and unfamiliar thoughts in viewers. Learning about her materials by exploring both their formal and their narrative qualities, she simultaneously reformulates them according to her deeply emotional, poetically romantic sense of beauty.

Their original functions discarded, their origins long forgotten, the objects she engages and interacts with are free to play imagined roles, resonating within one another and telling countless tales.

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Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

EVENT PARKING. Mixed Media, Collage with Found Objects on Board.

Narine Isajanyan

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NARINE ISAJANYAN was born in Armenian and began drawing and painting at the age of five. During her childhood she visited many museums and galleries in Armenian and St. Petersburg, as well as receiving training in music and dance.

In college she continued her training in art and received a Bachelors degree in 1987 from the College of Architecture in Yerevan.

She moved to Moscow to study at the Moscow Architectural Institute but found Soviet regulations on architecture too restrictive and sought more freedom to express her ideas through her art. She returned to Armenia and studied art

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IMAGINED CONSCIOUSNESS 2. Ink on Paper.

with Manuel Bagdasaryan and Samuel Bagdasaryan and later received a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the Yerevan University of Art and Theater. She first started exhibiting her art in 1990 in Armenia and has participated in numerous shows in Moscow, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Croatia and Belgium.

About her art, Narine says, "When I paint, I feel like I am flying and dancing; I hear music in my mind. Through my art I want to express the freedom I feel in my soul."

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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TATYANA APRAKSINA TO THE VIOLINIST'S HAND If I were known as a violin bow, I would not want or dare To have many hands given care of My will and hand's trust; Among many waves, I'd lie in rare palms, Curving carved cheek of maple upon Violin-laden shoulder, If a violin's state Were eternity mine made my errand.

All my songs, all my screams Would sound only inside holy fire Newly started whenever it's touched and regarded, Like striking on target, Like breaching the cosmos, Like whirlwind Ascent to a star early fated to be An unwavering breaker of laws in its scorching And soaring adherence To a madness whose faith bends Down, adores violinist and hand Searing symbolon cross over anima post, Arch-enclosed, Where the soul takes the body's communion.

— Tatyana Apraksina (translated from Russian by James Manteith)

SERGEI. FLEETING FLAGEOLET. Oil on canvas, 24" x 30".

A flageolet is a high-pitched harmonic produced by a lightly touched string. In the portrait, Sergei both plays and personifies the hovering tone. Part of the artist’s goal is to show the scene and pose as perfectly justified, no cause for surprise — “Don’t mind Sergei, he’s just levitating again.” She also aims to neutralize an element of caricature in the history of violinists’ depictions in art. Every detail here is true; nothing is made up.

— James Manteith For TATYANA APRAKSINA, traces of music and musical states of being become emblems of the work of spirit. A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, she has focused on the theme of classical music performance, working with soloists and ensembles including the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Borodin Quartet and the Moscow Virtuosi. She has exhibited at venues for music and art in Europe and North America. In the United States, her work has been shown under the auspices of the Soros Foundation. She has created an extensive body of art and writing while based in California. Since 1995 she has served as editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Apraksin Blues.

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At a St. Petersburg Philharmonic concert in San Francisco, the artist saw Sergei again. She recognized him by his splayed posture. One of the orchestra’s first to take an interest in authentic Baroque performance, he was a rather detached, religious person, whom his colleagues called a “monk in the world.”

Translator, writer and musician James Manteith is a longtime collaborator with Tatyana Apraksina. His translations for singing include Okudzhava and other Russian songwriters. www.apraksinblues.com • apraksinblues@gmail.com

https://www.amazon.com/California-Psalms-Tatyana-Apraksina/dp/1887853375/ref=sr _1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374354756&sr=1-2]

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Also by Tatyana Apraksina: CALIFORNIA PSALMS

JAMES MANTEITH

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More often focused classically, the artist here displays other lines of musical reflections. A guitarist leans through the canvas as if through a window, maneuvering its dimensions.

His proportions, determined by meaning, probe beyond.

He has a freewheeling gypsy face and tousled hair. His mighty arm, a masterful musician’s, arches out of a craggy sleeve tugged back for playing. His attentively curved pose and festive orange garb enfold the tawny instrument. His gaze, from soul to soul, relays some innermost thought. A haloing backlight glints on aquamarine. Shadows imply a turn toward a darker space. Knowing many sides of life and sound, he comes as an agent of harmony.

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— James Manteith

Tatyana Apraksina. EMMANUEL. Oil on canvas, 18” x 24”.

Russia, for Manteith, is not an abstraction: it is specific people, streets, studios, poetry, paintings, with specific content and meanings to impart over time if treated with care. Russian culture has its vital hidden threads, with some of which his own life intertwines. Moreover, Russian origins and relevance may span many geographies. This is shown in his translated poems of metaphysics in Big Sur, in songs of night trolleybus riding, of the fates of a ballerina and a fortuneteller, and of faith equally expressed by prayer to a green-eyed God or by a smoke before a space flight. Valuing the revolutionary intuitions of songwriters like Boris Grebenschikov and Mike Naumenko, whose creative paths intersected with his mentor’s, he also draws on many of their influences: Okudzhava, Vertinsky, Dylan. As Mike said of his muse, “All my songs are dedicated to her.” The arts are a means to grasping a muse’s ideals.

In addition to Apraksina’s full “California Psalms” sequence (Radiolarian Press) Manteith’s book credits as a translator include “Physics in a Mad World,” “Under the Spell of Landau: When Theoretical Physics was Shaping Destinies” (both World Scientific) and Sirovksy’s “Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for Our Happy Childhood” (Barbaris). He has published poetry, translations and essays in American and Russian journals including Cardinal Points, International Poetry Review, St. Petersburg Review, Clade Song, caesura, Reality and Subject and convolvulus, as well as in Russian scholarly anthologies.

Tatyana Apraksina is known as an artist and writer informed by the world of music, as well as for producing the cultural magazine Apraksin Blues.

www.apraksinblues.com • apraksinblues@gmail.com

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JAMES MANTEITH is a translator, writer and musician with a Russian muse. Fluent in his muse’s language, he belongs to a community associated with Apraksin Blues, a multidisciplinary magazine nurtured by St. Petersburg’s cultural ferment. He is dedicated to conveying what he encounters through Russian minds and voices, ways of hearing and seeing. His translations for singing explore the Russian and Soviet songwriting canon. His repertoire, with his guitar accompaniment, also includes original songs and bilingual settings of Russian poetry. Classically trained, he also works with librettos. His articles on culture cover film, literature, visual art, music and other subjects. His writings on and renderings of works by Tatyana Apraksina stem from a key mentorship with the artist, author and Apraksin Blues editor in chief.

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Julienne Johnson

BANGKOK BOOGIE. Oil with Mixed Media Pigment Transfers Collage on Particle Board

JULIENNE JOHNSON is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture, and assemblage. She has been engaged professionally in a variety of other creative disciplines, most notably songwriting, with both Grammy and Dove Award nominations to her credit. Her latest music was released in Oslo, Norway, April 2019 for award winning producer, Knut Asphol. Her poetry has been published in the United States, and the UK. Despite her success in these areas, Johnson's most profound connection is with the visual arts – her strongest, most direct form of communication.

She trained classically as a fine arts major at Taylor University, Indiana and continued painting representationally for the next ten years doing commissions, while exhibiting minimally. Much later, after re-settling in Los Angeles, Johnson returned to studying art briefly at Otis College of Art & Design in 2005, transferring to Art Center College of Design in 2006 where she custom coordinated a Master’s-

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level type program and was mentored by the late Franklyn Liegel.

Since 2010, Johnson has been honored with 5 solo exhibitions across the United States, including a solo museum show at the Southern Nevada Museum of Fine Art; her sculpture and paintings have been included in numerous museum shows around the world, including: Armenia, Japan, China, Qatar, Italy and Thailand. Her work can be found in 7 Museum Permanent Collections internationally and can be viewed on permanent exhibition at the Arab American National Museum in Michigan, and several museums in Italy and Thailand. Residencies include: China, Italy, Japan, Thailand and Mexico.

Her work can be found in private and corporate collections across the globe. She resides in Southern California.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Laurie Yehia

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to the YEHIA’s mixed media work, drawing, painting, installations and printmaking have been exhibited in solo and group shows, selected for awards on ARTslant.com and featured in online and print publications. She studied drawing, painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, focused on printmaking with Nathan Oliveira at Stanford University, and received her B.A. with Honors in Art from Wesleyan University. She continues to study with Tom Wudl at his LA Arts District studio. Yehia also co-curates studioeleven exhibitions and serves on Santa Monica’s Arts Commission and Public Arts Committee.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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OUT OF THE BLUE. Mixed Media, Switch Plates, Screws, Foil on Wood Panels.

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Barbara Nathanson

UNTITLED BLACK AND GREY. Acrylic on canvas.

BARBARA NATHANSON uses art as a means to express her reactions to her environment.

In this way what you see is akin to the emanations from a sound box where the acoustics of sounds, life circumstance, and landscape have combined at one moment in time. The subject matter is not the subject. The process is often as important as the result. She has recently included with her abstract, tactile paintings, more objective work, but the impetus is the same. Just as each person responds differently to music, Barbara expects each viewer will respond differently to what they see.

Barbara studied with Marvin Hardin at California State University, Northridge where she obtained her MA degree in art. She has exhibited widely across the United States and in 14 countries, on 5 continents.

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Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Lisa Bahouth

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to the LISA BAHOUTH studied art at Rhode Island School of Design and received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. She exhibited her work in New York City before moving to Los Angeles. She has also exhibited internationally. Her art encompasses ideas about architecture, structures, habitat and space.

Her more recent work harkens back to the natural world and results in abstractions from studying nature.

As she put it in her own words: "Painting is my primary laboratory where I explore concrete and vague ideas simultaneously, in a formal structure that hopefully holds some play and whimsy. Although my work has the appearance of abstraction, it is not non-objective; conveying references to rooms, interiors and conceptual spaces. Paintings, drawings and installations often refer to each other as I build upon groups of work."

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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MARSH ON PAPER. Oil on Paper.

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Olesya Volk

THE SYCAMORE. Oil on Canvas.

OLESYA VOLK was born in Baku, Azerbajan, left for Moscow at age 16 and moved to Los Angeles in 1992. She holds a M.F.A. in Film &TV (major in Animation) from UCLA; she is involved in painting, writing, illustrating, cartooning, mixed media, paper theatre and small size dioramas.

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Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Gerardo Castelan

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For additional information on artwork available for sale please contact LarkGallery.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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ENTRE EL DIAY LA NOCHE LA POESIA. Acrylic on Canvas.

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Gala

IN CHANGE. Acrylic on Canvas.

I’m Trailblazer, who is a wonder traveler through the universe, who is observing "always and everywhere the eternal glory of water" and admiring the magic of the ocean.

For Women, water means even more than for men, because women's energy, including sexual energy, is the energy of water.

The symbol of women's perfection, beauty and sexual energy, Aphrodite, is raised to the light out of the sea foam....

The best way to boost sexual energy is to recharge it from water...and the elements of sea and ocean are an endless source of energy!

"Take the opportunity to join the new places in the universe and change your life, learn that women's energy can change the world!!!" - Galina Kovshilovsky

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Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Donna Angers

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My work is politically based and emerges from a place of inspiration and social concerns. I must be inspired by the subject I am compelled to recreate upon canvas. It may be the stance of the person; the color of their skin; the shape of their body or what they are wearing. The best portraits are when the soul of that person emerges from behind their eyes. Even when I paint a tree or a rock, I become one with the object. Whatever it is, when I paint, I become excited, sometimes frustrated and finally satisfied as I see what I have created with the help of my ancestors, long deceased.

I believe being an artist involves a social responsibility to incite change and transform consciousness. It also to bring peace to a troubled soul. I believe if I had started oil painting at 13 instead of 63, I would have been a fashion designer. I

love the lines that form the shape of the human body, and the texture of cloth and its movement upon that body like a human tree fascinates me. When I was young, there were not many images of young, defiant, black women like the ones described in the poetry of Maya Angelou such as "I'll Rise"-she writes, "Does my haughtiness offend you? You may shoot me with your word, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my Sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise that I danced like I've got diamonds at the meeting of my things?"

I love my work to be powerful!

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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GOURD HAT. Mixed Media.

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Jenik Cook

PLAY IN SPACE. Acrylic on Canvas.

No question but that the painting of Jenik Cook - and hardly less the work she realizes in other media (most notably ceramics) -is abstract-expressionist. But it is not necessarily Abstract Expressionist. That is, however much it may evince the DNA of mid-century American "action painting," or even European counterparts such as tachism, l'art informel, or CoBrA, Cook's art only incidentally revives the method, much less the look, of these bumptious, scrappy art movements.

Rather, to power her vision, she goes back to the roots of gestural modernism, finding dancing line, elastic contour, and fervid color in surrealism, in fauvism, in expressionism itself. The painting of Pollock and Kline, and of Fautrier and Jorn, gives Cook permission to work unfettered like this, and gives us the context to comprehend fully - even to empathize kinesthetically with - what she does. But she is not emulating, much less imitating, Afro or James Brooks in her graceful, muscular paintings on paper or rehashing Sam Francis or André Lanskoy with the rhythmic clots and scatterings of pigment that collect on her canvases (well, on a wide variety of more-or-less canvas-like support material). Look instead to Miro, Masson, Marc, or Münter, Pechstein or Picasso, Marcks or Matisse, for Cook's sources.

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Indeed, look into Cook's own cultural heritage. The line that whips and loops throughout Cook's oeuvre, whether hurling forms across canvas expanses or tracing them on the sides of pots, whether describing slashing trails of pure pigment or the sinuous contours of human bodies, is no more a painted line than it is a written one. It is made less with the whole body - although one can sense a change of stance, a hip motion, in so many of these dancing whiplashes - than with

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the whole arm. These gestures issue from the wrist and the shoulder. They are in fact as much inscribed as painted. Their energy is not just telegraphic; it is calligraphic. If the vivacity of the image bespeaks Cook's Armenian blood, the rhapsodic curvaceousness of her line betrays her Iranian childhood. As comfortable speaking and writing Farsi as she is Armenian, Cook marries her disparate cultural sources -which of course now include the western European and American influences of her adult life - into an aesthetically cohesive mix with a surprisingly broad formal reach.

Perhaps the breadth of that reach, given the variety of sources, isn't actually so surprising. But it is always a bit startling to witness - that is, to be allowed to witness - an artist master such a conceptual and expressive range. Most artists have this range in them, but so many suppress it. For her part, however, Cook refuses to suppress her stylistic multivalency. Not only does she not limit her vision, but she uses that vision very consciously to drive her artmaking in as many ways as it needs to go. She may edit, but she does not self-censure. Her style, ultimately as coherent and personal as a signature, emerges from and among her plethora of approaches, approaches which themselves spring from her persistence, her prolific output, her knowledge of art, and her irrepressible verve. Jenik Cook's art springs forth -in several directions at once.

- Peter Frank Los Angeles January 2010 Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Tatiana Yartseva

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To make art and see it being born from my own hands fulfills one of my greatest dreams. I like the moment when a new creation is not yet mine, not yet in my imagination - but already is tickling my subconscious. Working with paints, knowing their elasticity, and exploring new textures and color shades allows me to move them on the canvas spontaneously. But it only seems so. In reality it happens under the guidance of my soul. It is my soul that expresses itself on canvas, showing its flights and falls, joys and sadness, and then gives birth to an image. My hands only choose and move colors around, before the appearance of a new image gives rise to new fantasies.

When a fantasy desires to continue over a series of my art,

R ussian A vant -G arde

SOUNDS OF NATURE. Acrylic on Board.

the process gives birth to imaginary realities which emerge from the depth of my soul and cry out to find release on the canvas. Only then can my hands themselves put down the paints and hang alongside my body. Fatigue and relief cover me with a light veil. Nothing more needs to be corrected and completed. My soul enjoys the liberation of previously collected feelings and impressions of life whose meaning was unclear to me but which I can now express. Also what my paintings let me express on canvas is a joyful light shining from the soul. It is the wonderful space of creation.

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Laurie Yehia

SWITCH SPACES. Mixed Media, Switch Plates, Screws, Washers on Wood Panels.

Julienne Johnson

FIREBIRD. Oil with Mixed Media Pigment Transfers, Collage on Canvas.