By painting over photographic inkjet prints, James Hyde redefines his own experiences and subsequently how we perceive painting, photography, and nature’s aesthetic. An avid traveler, Hyde photographs scenes of California which he prints and mounts over canvas. He then paints over the inkjet print with acrylic, allowing abstract shapes and bands of color to interact with printed shrubs or lake shores. This combination of acrylic and inkjet disrupts the normal viewing process, forcing viewers to examine the fundamental tropes and techniques of painting and photography. Hyde was born in Philadelphia in 1958 and currently lives in New York, teaching at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and The Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art. He is the recipient of several prestigious grants, including the Pollock-Krasner Grant (2011-12), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2008), Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2000-01), among others.
For over thirty years, Ray Kass has found his muse in nature, the landscape, and his garden. Layering washes of water media, oil emulsion, dry pigment, and smoke, Kass forms bold yet abstracted floral and arboreal imagery. The rag paper surface, covered with shaved beeswax, lends to a soft aesthetic that reflects the natural elements found within the paintings’ composition. The ground of his paintings is created in one of two manners: smoking or staining. Kass developed the technique for smoking paper in the late 1980’s while working with the highly influential composer and artist John Cage. In this method, Kass lays wet paper over a fire, allowing smoke to overtake the surface as uncontrolled marks and traces remain. Though abstract, these forms capture the spiritual quality within nature, and often mimic organic shapes of foliage. Kass received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Kass’s work is in the collections of the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; Boston Public Library, Boston, MA; Phizer Corporation, all, New York, NY; and Medical College of Virginia, SunTrust, and Ethyl Corporation all, Richmond, Virginia.
Playful yet methodical, Ron Johnson’s process-driven work is defined by chance. Pouring pigmented polyurethane over wood panels, he investigates the effects of layering transparent color. In a recent Art Pulse interview, he states “The medium allows me to control (for the most part) this idea of translucency which in turn allows the viewer to access my work in layers. So viewers are literally able to see the archeology, or experience my thoughts in an archeology of seeing.” What they see is vibrant, abstracted landscapes simultaneously constrained and released in flowing pools of acrylic. Johnson received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio State University (1999) and Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (2003), where he currently works as an assistant professor in the Painting and Printmaking department. His work has been exhibited at Washington & Lee University, VCUarts Anderson Gallery, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Cite des Arts Gallery in Paris. His work is in numerous public and private collections including Altria Group, Capital One, the Federal Reserve Bank, and Markel Corporation.
