STUDIO-f

Chase initiated the STUDIO-f program with her visit to the University of Tampa in March of 1990. Born in Panama City, Panama Canal Zone, she received her bachelor's degree in fine arts from Syracuse University and her master's degree from Yale. Her work has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Chase's images, which build upon abstract expressionism, are referential, lushly painted and a bit whimsical. In a review by Michael Brenson in the New York Times, Chase's work is described as "insisting upon totality at a moment when American culture seems to be insisting upon limits."

While at STUDIO-f, Chase energetically produced a number of outstanding monotypes. Her prints display an interesting balance between logic and emotion. Strong gestural figures and shapes are superimposed over flat, hard-edged, anthropomorphic forms. The linear elements dance through the image, while the more geometric elements provide a stabilizing force.

Stephen Greene, a New York-born artist, known for his lyrical abstract works, began his career as a figurative painter, showing canvases inspired by Renaissance art in his solo debut at the Durlacher Gallery in 1947. In the late 1950s, he turned to abstraction and in 1960 arrived at his mature style of atmospheric color fields punctuated by fluid lines and biomorphic shapes.

He taught at Princeton University , Tyler School of Art in Philadephia and the Art Students League in New York. Greene has been granted numerous awards throughout his career, including the Andrew Carnegie Award and the Saltus Gold Medal from the National Academy of Design.

His work is intellectually symbolic and reflects his deep reservoir of thoughts and emotions. During his career, he displayed highly-refined skill in both line and color and evolved from a literal symbolist to one of the world’s most recognized classic symbolists. The monotypes produced in 1991 at STUDIO-f show Greene at his best – displaying strong symbolism with a skillful use of colors.

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid worked at STUDIO-f in November of 1990. The two artists have collaborated since meeting in a morgue while enrolled in an art school anatomy course in Moscow during the mid ’60s. They left the Soviet Union in 1978, and their work has since then been increasingly recognized and admired throughout the United States.

The work of Komar and Melamid has been characterized as “eclectic, blunt, satirical, eye catching and thought provoking.” Parodying pre-glasnost Russia , much of their work is considered irreverent and unpredictable.

While at STUDIO-f, the team created images that were perplexing and stretched emotional responses. Many of their works used the front page of a newspaper as a central theme. The stark pattern of the printed page strongly contrasted with superimposed images of angels and other symbolic forms. Other monotypes displayed angels above the University’s landmark minarets.

Sam Messer was born in New York City . His undergraduate work was completed at Cooper Union in New York and graduate study at Yale in New Haven , Conn. Sam Messer’s figurative expressionist paintings first appeared in the East Village during the early ’80s and although the stylistic climate has changed since then, Messer remains a practitioner of that now-underprivileged style, which he makes interesting and complex.

Although his images might be grisly or dark, they hit on psychological insights which are not despairing. “I think that part of the joy of living is the struggle. No one likes to struggle, but there’s joy and a power in the struggle of trying to do things,” said Messer.

The STUDIO-f monotypes created by Messer in February 1992 display a luridly grotesque figuration full of political and personal content. His work defines moods through the use of rich color contrast and dense texture.

Katherine Porter was born in Cedar Rapids , Iowa , in 1941. Porter, who now lives in Maine , has always seemed fascinated with how abstract imagery acquires meaning. Her interest in the way an image is framed leads her to a “within and without” field where remnants of geometric shapes create a tension on the plane. Whether in black and white or in rich color, her pieces speak the language of rhythm.

Porter’s monotype images use elements of portals – shapes and colors overlapping to imply dimension. Some of her 1991 STUDIO-f series monotypes were constructed with black, grey and white flat shapes, while others used monochrome and colors to create a rich surface. Geometric shapes are balanced with smaller colorful shapes to fill the space.

John Walker was born in Birmingham , England in 1939. He studied at the academie la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. After teaching for a number of years in England he was awarded the Harkness Fellowship to the United States.

Walker expresses his spontaneous and energetic character through painterly organic forms, and he creates dimension through shapes and rich textures indicative of his experiences in Australia , where he has frequently visited.

While creating STUDIO-f monotypes in 1994, Walker used personal icons from paintings. His works exhibit rich ochre; brown and black layering that create a luminescent surface with subtle organic forms, vessels with dots of white or black.

Willy Heeks grew up and was educated in Rhode Island , where he continues to have a studio. The elements of Heeks’ abstract images transform from dark to light, surface to atmosphere, sobriety to exuberance, and containment to expansion. Due to the ambiguity of repetition, Heeks’ works embody contradictions, both physical and psychological, in the experience of actual events.

The STUDIO-f monotypes completed by Heeks in 1998 have a subtle tension created by the use of stencil patterns alluding to iron-work balcony tracery, dragons, leaves, chains, disks, bubbles, holes or planets. Complex color harmonies, gold and intense hues contrast with muted tones. Dynamic negative shapes create an appearance of dream fragments on these rich surfaces.

Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo , Mississippi in 1933, and he now lives in Washington , D.C. Closely associated with color field painting in the ’60s and ’70s and the inventor of the draped stained canvas subgenre, Gilliam has a secure niche in the history of contemporary art.

His recent work emphasizes external and internal expression. Gilliam superimposes layers of color while allowing light to radiate from the original surfaces. A high energy is created by moving shapes of opaque and transparent color, which explode in a seemingly limitless dimension.

While at STUDIO-f in 1993, Gilliam created a series of monotypes he called the Tower Series. The prints featured intense blues with towers of light as luminous reflections within surfaces. He used explosions of color with raked surfaces to create rich textures.

Returning to STUDIO-f in 1996, Gilliam produced a second series of monotypes that displayed layers of surface designs enhanced with hand painting to create opulent simulated textures. The prints are exciting examples of Gilliam’s expertise with integrating shapes and color to create an illusion of form in space.

Tom Lieber was born in St. Louis . His fascination with maritime lore (he collects model ships) may partly account for the the general “wetlands” look of his works. Asked about his childhood memories of the Mississippi River and its relevance to his work, Lieber mentioned “shadowy greens and thickness of water, the sun flickering on it – how it enters through your eyes and goes into your spine, crystal moments from interior life.”

In January 1993, Lieber worked with great energy at STUDIO-f to produce many rich monotypes that displayed overlapping tangles of lines, looping and exploding in horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions over luminescent color. His monotypes demonstrated linear elements applied with skill and spontaneity creating a limitless space.

Although an independent figure who has never been associated with stylistic trend in American art, McGarrell has been cited in several books discussing developments in the nation’s contemporary art. His paintings have also been written about and reproduced in periodicals such as Arts, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Time and Newsweek.

McGarrell’s work usually contains many allusions and layers of dream-like images. As the mind and the eye wanders into the picture plane, the scenes change from active to passive events. “I like to think of myself as a maker, not as expresser. Expression should be one part of the thing made well and honestly. I construct my paintings out of the elements of my own experiences, but it’s neither reality nor fantasy. Remembered perception is broken down, thoroughly reordered and synthesized into a new made thing…fiction.”

During his 1992 STUDIO-f visit, McGarrell created monotypes with allusions in interior and exterior spaces. With transformations into frozen environments, the images make active objects become passive.

Larry Poons was born in Japan in 1937 and now resides in Florida . The influence of music can be seen through his expression of rhythm within the context of form. In the 1960s, he created an intriguing form of systemic painting with optical illusionistic implications.

In 1968, he adopted a painterly idiom and returned to gestures of abstract expressionism. Subsequently, he moved in the direction of matter painting, using heavily textured canvases and long vertical dragged brushstrokes densely arranged in rich color patterns.

His STUDIO-f monotypes created in December 1992 show exciting colors and shapes vibrating throughout the surfaces and expressing his high energy.

For most of her professional art career, Hollis Sigler has created paintings with a central theme - an imagined heroine - a female persona simply called The Lady. Although Sigler rarely depicts The Lady in anything other than silhouette form, the figure’s surroundings give her a sense of purpose and belonging. The paintings’ rich symbolism provides an intimate glimpse into a vivid interior life with a subtle sense of apprehension. Sigler frequently combines emotional content with high color, patterning and a casual draftsmanship that can be identified as a neo-naive style.

Beginning in 1985, she focused on the complex issues surrounding breast cancer – incident rates, causes and treatments, as well as the accompanying fear, rage and uncertainty. In 2001, Sigler lost her long battle with the disease that had also taken her mother and grandmother.

While at STUDIO-f in September 1990, Sigler produced monotypes with subject matter derived from her day-to-day encounters in Tampa . The monotypes evoke a sense of aloneness mixed with exuberance.

In 1975, Robert Zakanitch met Miriam Scharpiro while guest teaching at the University of California in San Diego. In the following year, the two painters jointly formed the Pattern and Decoration Artists organization in New York.

When Zakanitch took up decorative imagery, he had been working as a color field abstractionist faithful to the minimalist grid as the structural system of his painting. Once into decoration, he retained both his color sophistication and his respect for structure but translated the latter into a free, often organic floral motif rendered in painterly fashion.

The STUDIO-f monotypes created by Zakanitch in 1991 represent the opulent hues in his expressive manner of painting. Lush flowers, hands and birds are included in vase and plate motifs. Zakanitch returned to STUDIO-f in 2002 to create a series of salt and pepper shaker shapes with decorative images including sky, squirrel, flower and tree images.

For more than 20 years, Paschke has been a painting professor at Northwestern University . The Chicago Sun Times once called Paschke “perhaps the most acclaimed of all the Chicago Imagists whose irreverent paintings terrorized the ‘good taste’ of the city’s art establishment during the late 1960s and early 1970s.”

Paschke produced a body of work entitled “Tampa Series” at STUDIO-f in February 1999 and returned again in 2001. His work uses classical facial beauty integrated with primitive mask-making in a blaze of brilliant coloring. Paschke’s work defies time; classical notions, history and time are a compression of the past, present and future. He works the human face into masks, clouding features, and confusing the face’s gender by adding tattoos and vibrant coloring.