Fine Art

STATEMENT
This work is a study of how nature and power rhyme. These are snapshots of what is under the surface: seductive gardens, playgrounds, sensual and scary things…. some frightening. Are they microscopic or large enough to climb inside?  You are invited in to explore and play.
Process Remarks:
This work is digital.... I use CAD [computer-aided-design] software, fractal software, painting software and digital photography to show you what we don't pay attention to. Some of the work is printed on aluminum via photographic process, some printed on metallic film and bonded to the reverse side of clear Plexiglas. Some pieces are printed at high resolution on smooth paper and teased with acrylic. Craftsmanship counts. 

BIOGRAPHY
Education:
BFA Painting, University of Illinois, Highest Honors 1973
Listed:
Who's Who in American Art (Cattell Press) 1976-
Instructor/Lecturer:
Rock Valley College, Rockford Il 1975-1978
Rockford College, Rockford Il 1976
University of Miami (Visiting Lecturer) Miami Fl 1977
Awards:
1989 Air Brush Digest Annual
1984 Art Institute Juried Biennial Spires, Chicago 
1982,1975 Illinois Professional Exhibition, Springfield, Illinois 
1981 Illinois Arts Council Purchase Award, Chicago
1980 Rock Island Juried, Rock Island, Illinois 
1980 Beloit Juried, Beloit, Wisconsin
1976 1st Prize, Union League Juried, Chicago
1975 39th Butler National, Ohio
1975 Mainstreams 75, Marietta, Ohio
Selected Corporate and Public Collections:
Container Corporation of America
Borg Warner, Chicago, Illinois
Bank of Wisconsin, Janesville, Wisconsin
Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Illinois
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, Massachusetts
Hope College, Holland, Michigan

STATEMENT
This work is a study of how nature and power rhyme. These are snapshots of what is under the surface: seductive gardens, playgrounds, sensual and scary things…. some frightening. Are they microscopic or large enough to climb inside?  You are invited in to explore and play.
Process Remarks:
This work is digital.... I use CAD [computer-aided-design] software, fractal software, painting software and digital photography to show you what we don't pay attention to. Some of the work is printed on aluminum via photographic process, some printed on metallic film and bonded to the reverse side of clear Plexiglas. Some pieces are printed at high resolution on smooth paper and teased with acrylic. Craftsmanship counts. 

BIOGRAPHY
Education:
BFA Painting, University of Illinois, Highest Honors 1973
Listed:
Who's Who in American Art (Cattell Press) 1976-
Instructor/Lecturer:
Rock Valley College, Rockford Il 1975-1978
Rockford College, Rockford Il 1976
University of Miami (Visiting Lecturer) Miami Fl 1977
Awards:
1989 Air Brush Digest Annual
1984 Art Institute Juried Biennial Spires, Chicago 
1982,1975 Illinois Professional Exhibition, Springfield, Illinois 
1981 Illinois Arts Council Purchase Award, Chicago
1980 Rock Island Juried, Rock Island, Illinois 
1980 Beloit Juried, Beloit, Wisconsin
1976 1st Prize, Union League Juried, Chicago
1975 39th Butler National, Ohio
1975 Mainstreams 75, Marietta, Ohio
Selected Corporate and Public Collections:
Container Corporation of America
Borg Warner, Chicago, Illinois
Bank of Wisconsin, Janesville, Wisconsin
Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Illinois
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, Massachusetts
Hope College, Holland, Michigan

STATEMENT
This work is a study of how nature and power rhyme. These are snapshots of what is under the surface: seductive gardens, playgrounds, sensual and scary things…. some frightening. Are they microscopic or large enough to climb inside?  You are invited in to explore and play.
Process Remarks:
This work is digital.... I use CAD [computer-aided-design] software, fractal software, painting software and digital photography to show you what we don't pay attention to. Some of the work is printed on aluminum via photographic process, some printed on metallic film and bonded to the reverse side of clear Plexiglas. Some pieces are printed at high resolution on smooth paper and teased with acrylic. Craftsmanship counts. 

BIOGRAPHY
Education:
BFA Painting, University of Illinois, Highest Honors 1973
Listed:
Who's Who in American Art (Cattell Press) 1976-
Instructor/Lecturer:
Rock Valley College, Rockford Il 1975-1978
Rockford College, Rockford Il 1976
University of Miami (Visiting Lecturer) Miami Fl 1977
Awards:
1989 Air Brush Digest Annual
1984 Art Institute Juried Biennial Spires, Chicago 
1982,1975 Illinois Professional Exhibition, Springfield, Illinois 
1981 Illinois Arts Council Purchase Award, Chicago
1980 Rock Island Juried, Rock Island, Illinois 
1980 Beloit Juried, Beloit, Wisconsin
1976 1st Prize, Union League Juried, Chicago
1975 39th Butler National, Ohio
1975 Mainstreams 75, Marietta, Ohio
Selected Corporate and Public Collections:
Container Corporation of America
Borg Warner, Chicago, Illinois
Bank of Wisconsin, Janesville, Wisconsin
Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Illinois
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, Massachusetts
Hope College, Holland, Michigan

STATEMENT
Art in it's truest form shows the person making it their beauty and relation to the moment. Art lets us be aware in the creation. When we share art with others it becomes electric. Art promotes our basic instinctual element to be playful and become one with our surroundings.
I approach my art with a vigorous free flow. I work on several at a time. I am interested in how physical objects, poetic abstract forms and emotion spaces communicate making visual corridors. My inspiration comes from the process. In all my art: painting, sculpture, drawing and assemblage, I hope to convey a sincere and instinctive sight.
I like to make colorful oil painting abstractions. Images of people and landscapes present themselves, become characters and starting reference points to complex narratives and visual questions. I am interested in creating a visual language, answering the notion of what is and what is not. The themes of my paintings range from beauty, music, catharsis, social injustice, community, dreams, nature and time. I hope you enjoy.

BIOGRAPHY
Daithi was born in the United States (1972). He was awarded at a young age for his artistic talent. He has studied at The University of Wisconsin, The Art Students League of New York City and, through The Pratt Institute of Art, in Lucca, Italy. While in Lucca, his studio was located in the Cathedral Santa Maria Bianca.
He has exhibited in museums, galleries, universities and city centers across North America, Ireland, Italy and Argentina. Daithi has taught art in many surrounding; such as The McColl Center for the Visual Arts in Charlotte, NC. Save the World Project in Kathmandu, Nepal. Nimbus Arts in Napa Valley, California and most recently as Artist in Residence at The Goodman Community Center in Madison, Wisconsin. His art can be found in many private, public and corporate collections.

STATEMENT
The longer the viewer takes to concentrate and “study” any form of fine art the greater the possibility they have to enjoy it, or decide why they don’t. The average viewing time is fifteen seconds. I am challenging that notion to allow submission to the emotional experience.

My work is an accomplished effort of juggling composition and improvisation. The construction of these two elements take shape in a semi-trance. After this absorption, three-quarters of the way through this process, the critical phase occurs when I must make the whole piece come together. Of course it’s not a “process” in the corporate sense of the word – it is everything that has stayed with me from being a student with Elaine de Kooning to thirty years of working and exhibiting in NYC.

I must use whatever facility comes to play during this circumspect analyses in an attempt to finish with a positive ending. This final personal satisfaction is achieved with a certain amount of luck along with my  years of experience towards completion.

My approach to the current work relies on critical analysis and a reservoir of acquired techniques and subject matter. The new element to my work shown here is collage. A palette of appropriated images from vintage periodicals and posters. I use the cut line of the X-acto blade much like a pencil or paintbrush. Choosing the collage pieces, placing them, shaping; gluing and burnishing. This process is very intuitive while simultaneously reflecting on the compositional direction allowing for changes. I paint over the cut pieces with a variety of techniques.  The stipple dry brush application of paint is based on a technique I have used previously in my work to suggest the painterly approach.

The titles are conceptually cryptic leaving the final response and analysis up to the viewer. “Competition for the largest” and  “Butterfly” are examples of my earlier stylistic approach. They are graphic, with high contrast. “Christian Harley Riders in favor of Gay and Lesbian Marriage” might be transitional – busy but  composed.

What I am striving for in “Surf City is the Place to be”  is a combination of seamless blending of the figurative and abstract.  “Rolanda and the Kitchen Sink in Hawaii” is dedicated to a good friend who  immigrated to Hawaii. It  expresses a more painterly tone with a sense of color, bright light and the  thrill of being in a new place. “Butterfly” is an expression of life  on  over load with a geometric abstraction, and   kinetic movement. Delicate creatures that can travel  hundreds of miles every year to be where  they need to be, and return every year to another place called home.

BIOGRAPHY
Rande Barke remembers the sweet acrid smell of beer “factories” when riding in his father's truck toward downtown Milwaukee in the 1960’s. A prosaic industry set in a humble and sturdy landscape next to lake Michigan. 

Barke, who spent the last 20 years in New York City, exhibiting his art, is now back in Milwaukee. The culture and urbanity of “The City” provided a context that fostered five single person shows and several reviews in  Art Forum and Art in America, as well as awards including The National Endowment for the Arts Scholarship and the New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowship in drawing.
Before working full time as an artist in New York, Rande taught art for 6 years.  First at the University of Southern Mississippi, then as an assistant professor in the Art department of Syracuse University.  His formal education was at the University of Georgia with an MFA in drawing and painting.  There, he worked for two years with Elaine de Kooning who enabled him to meet such masters of 1950’s American abstraction as Willem de Kooning and Philip  Guston.  Willem de Kooning reminded Rande of his German speaking grandfather, Sam Barke, who left Europe to start a cedar post business in Gillett, Wisconsin in the 1930’s.
Rande left New York City in 2002, changed forever, after watching the Trade Center towers burn from his  Greenpoint Brooklyn studio. He and wife moved to Westchester County setting up a studio in downtown Yonkers, 2 blocks from the Hudson River and the Palisades.  The river and surrounding imagery was reflected in his abstract paintings and semi representational drawings.The great recession would take Rande and his wife  to the midwest. Rande now lives and works in Milwaukee - the city he left at age 16.