Art & Beyond Special Issue. Planet of Joy 2020

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Planet of Joy. 2020

GABO

RED APPLE. Acrylic on Canvas.

a&b Planet of Joy special

Gabo

MEDALLION. Acrylic on Canvas.

A vein of fantasy runs through the Armenian spirit, and thus through its art. In contemporary Armenian painting, that vein can come to the surface as sober, even foreboding. More often, however, it manifests light-heartedly, even whimsically. It makes the exotic out of the everyday and makes readily available the impossibilities of the imagination. Gabo mines this vein, and the ore he strikes happens to be rather more colorful than most. He also is less hesitant than most to refine that ore extravagantly, so that his images appear not simply fanciful, but lush and expansive, brimming with humor and passion and vibrant lust. A Gabo painting, at once jewel-like in its detail and sea-like in its vastness, at once induces and

satisfies cravings for sensual pleasure – and it all happens in the eye. All five senses, and the sexual drive for good measure, are addressed on some level; you would think that the pictorial level could represent the others only metaphorically, but the gratification seems more immediate, and more thorough. Gabo is less poet than chef, less chef than host, less host than master of ceremonies.

By Peter Frank

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Elena Panimasova

ANGELS LIVE NEARBY. Oil on Canvas.

ELENA PANIMASOVA is Russian artist born and raised in Minsk, Belorussia. She was self-taught under the guidance of the experienced master Olga Bazanova, a wonderful St. Petersburg artist. “I have many different hobbies. Painting as a way to break away from reality. Writing as a way to explain and change reality. Audio recordings as an opportunity to realize my acting skills. And I still go to work every day,

five days a week. Through this combination of rational and irrational I gain integrity. Ånd art as a means of harmonization is present in all my manifestations.” - Elena Panimasova.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

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Felice Willat

FELICE WILLAT is an award-winning travel photographer and publisher, whose images from Burma, Morocco, China, Vietnam and Argentina, capture the beauty of the human landscape across cultures. Willat's photographs have been juried into the Los Angeles Center for Photography, Photo LA, Photo Independent, TAG Gallery, Bergamot Station, the Brand Library, Glendale, CA, and numerous other venues across the United States and in London, UK and Italy. In 2010, Felice won First Prize, for her Travel images in the Southern California Council of Camera Clubs‚ annual juried exhibition.

In 2009 Felice published The Quiet Between, Song of Burma, a book of photography and poems.

Felice sees her camera as providing a sense of time expansion and stillness. She says, I could capture a moment, something sacred or commonplace, an unconscious gesture, a tattered clothesline, a red plastic pitcher, or a worn prayer book. I like to leave the familiar, travel to far-away places, and find the gift of really being present.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Jacob Ebriani

QUEST FOR BEAUTY. Oil on Canvas.

For JACOB EBRIANI, making art is a spiritual act, an intimate conversation between a man and his God. Jacob's paintings are meditations that explore elemental themes underlying the material world. Sur-naturalism, his signature technique, transcends surrealism with dreamlike insights into fundamental workings of nature and the human spirit.

Jacob grew up in Tehran surrounded by the sounds of Sufi poetry and músíqí-e sonnatí — Persian classical music. Selected as an artistʼs assistant when he was just ten years

old, Jacob began to transpose that aural tradition into a visual context. While his instrument is a brush, his canvases have the narrative quality of songs, or poems. But it was Sufi mysticism, the intoxicating dance with the divine that guided poets like Rumi and Hafez, that fundamentally shaped his work. “The mystical side of the mind is very close to music,” says Jacob, “to a beautiful painting.”

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Jenik Cook

WATERFALL OF CIRCLES. Acrylic on Canvas.

No question but 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.

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 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

Gabi Domenig

DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?. Acrylic on Canvas.

GABI DOMENIG was born in the medieval town of Lienz in the East Tyrol. She graduated from the Commercial Academy, and worked as an au pair in London and Rome.

Gabi's dream of studying art at the Mozarteum in Salzburg did not come true when she failed the entrance examination. Then she studied history and German for two years at the University of Salzburg. After working at a bank in Salzburg, Gabi returned to Lienz in 1994. As an employee of the Austrian Tourism Board and later on in the family business, Gabi participated in many individual exhibitions, projects and

national and international group exhibitions in galleries and art fairs in Austria, Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Belgium, Switzerland, United Kingdom, USA and Brazil. You can find her artwork in renowned national and international art books, art magazines as well as at online galleries all over the globe and in private collections in Austria and abroad. She has won many international awards and was a 2017 finalist at the Global Art Award with her picture, "Paradise Madonna."

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com

Lark Pilinsky

RED BLOSSOM. Acrylic on Board.

LARK PILINSKY, the Russian-born, Los Angeles-based artist and writer, began her visual art activities as a collagist. She began her professional involvement with art as a journalist advocating for other artists, specifically the Armenian- Russian Bunker group; but as her connection deepened to the adventurous and open-spirited Bunker artists, she found herself moved to make art herself, with their encouragement. In her most recent paintings Lark becomes most completely a painter at the same time as she employs paint in an almost collage-like way. She attaches strokes of pigment to one another and the canvas rather than modelling and blending them into conventional representations. The active quality of her surfaces emerges from this visceral approach; the paint retains its physical presence, its objecthood, perhaps at the expense of the subject but ultimately to the benefit of the mood.

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Cindy Rinne

PEACOCK PARTY. Fiber Art.

CINDY RINNE is a San Bernardino artist and poet who has created fine art for over 40 years. She started creating fiber art over 30 years ago. She had tapestries in “Woven Stories” at MOAH (Lancaster Museum of Art and History) and at RAFFMA at Cal State San Bernardino for “Voices of Ancient Palmyra Resounded.” She participated in “50/50, FIFTY/ FIFTY, The Creative Magic of Collaboration” at the Progress Gallery, Pomona, CA. Also, “I Pity the Poe” at The Hive Gallery in Los Angeles. Cindy was featured at “100 Vibrant Artists at the Neutra” in Los Angeles. Cindy curated and exhibited at Chaffey Community Museum of Art and the Inland Empire

Museum of Art. She exhibited with “Old Broads” curated by Karen Karlsson in several southern California galleries. Her art was at the Ontario Airport through 2019. Cindy was selected for “Hobson’s Choice” at the Torrance Art Museum. She has exhibited at the Beatnik Lounge and La Matadora Gallery in Joshua Tree and is represented by Desert Peach Gallery in Yucca Valley, CA.

Presented by LarkGallery larkgallery.com