MEMBER GALLERY Pokrasso - SHAMMA

"My artistic development spirals around a need to express, making new discoveries, and continually returning to familiar themes. I have always relied upon things that are close to me, things that speak about the passions in my life and are often derived from day to day experiences .  .  .I  like to juxtapose seemingly unrelated or competing elements to create visual and technical contrast. I have a conversation with the piece as it unfolds."

Artist, Printmaker and Educator, Ron Pokrasso has been exhibiting for more than 40 years, featured in public, private, and corporate collections throughout the world and in numerous books. Ron teaches classes in Santa Fe, around the United States and internationally. In his Galisteo Street Studio he offers workshops and assisted sessions for artists in addition to creating and exhibiting his artworks. His artwork combines printmaking, collage, drawing, painting, photo and other techniques. 

Workshops with Ron take place throughout the year and around the globe with exciting opportunities to study in Europe, Mexico.OPEN 365.

WEBSITE: https://www.ronpokrasso.com

FAVORITE PLACES:  Paper Dosa

My style is collaborative, I partner with textiles, forests, scrap yards, segundos, antique fairs, and together we design and create, process being the guide.OPEN365.

WEBSITE:  www.vivienneriggio.com

FAVORITE PLACES:  Plants of the Southwest

My work is largely about memory: what we save to remember and the memories we fear we might lose. My mother, when she was suffering from cancer, pasted ephemera on her walls that connected events she might forget. Through the creation of her wallscapes, she was able to hold fast to memories externally that were quickly fading internally. 

I work in two series, the Book, and Nest Series. Both are about how we struggle with memory and loss. The idea that underlies this work is drawn from my lifelong love of books and the narratives they contain. In addition, this work starts from a place of found objects, - the spines, covers of books. I have always been a reader; in the Book Series I devour volumes in a literal and physical way, one that satisfies both the reader and artist. Kali, the master of death, time, and change, tearing things up to create anew.  What we find meaningful personally in one moment shifts and changes. My work is a comment about my grief over our material culture and the terrible price it has brought. There is, simply, too much stuff. And all of it, if it is saved, might be in service of something more valuable that we do not want to lose: a time, a place, a feeling. What we don’t want to lose. No matter the cost. 

WEBSITE: www.kateriversart.com

FAVORITE PLACES:  Java Joes

 For Santa Fe-based diverse media artist, Blair Robbins, creating art is and has been a constant in her life. She was raised in a suburb of New York City where her early impressions were colored both by the natural beauty surrounding her in a coastal Connecticut town and the intense collage of a big city full of art. Moving west, she traveled the western park lands extensively, observing the landscapes, flora, and fauna as she created films on nature and landscape stories which earned twenty-four awards in national and international film festivals. Independent filmmaking was a major influence on her art. To her, cinematography was poetry in motion and the inspiration that sparked the return to her roots in studio art. Today, she brings those sensibilities to the creation of contemporary diverse media sculptures and paintings. 

Her passion for horses coupled with her Osage heritage inspired her current series of wire horses. Her creative process is freeform and improvisational. Working with wire is complex as it involves shaping a medium that is essentially two-dimensions into a three-dimensional work enveloping space. Robbins’ wire art is in the private collection of noted art dealer Molly Barnes (Los Angeles/New York). 

She was awarded the red ribbon for contemporary diverse media sculpture in Santa Fe Indian Market (2017) for her wire SKY DOG (War) H1 which was recently purchased by the Osage Nation, along with rights for some of her paintings, for their new casino hotels in Pawhuska and Bartlesville, Oklahoma. OPEN365.

WEBSITE:  www.blairrobbins.com 

FAVORITE PLACES:  Pasquales

I work with the painter’s mind and eye as a digital mixed-media artist who looks at the inner complexity and behavior of humans and their actions, expressions, thoughts, and connections with nature and place. 

Our bodies are a moving, breathing specimen of the natural world that navigate through space with instinctual wanderings. 

Our bedazzlement with the world of scents, shapes, colors, light, and shadow is, I believe, an innate function of our being. 

Manipulating and layering images to place imagination, memory of the moment, and abstraction of delicate textures, patterns, values, and colors leads me to surprising revealing’s that tickle my mind and spirit. OPEN365.

WEBSITE:  www.dianerolnick.com

FAVORITE PLACES: Harry's Roadhouse

I am a mixed media Artist. A transplant from Colorado where I was an art educator and a studio artist. I love the exploration of materials, which keeps my work expanding. 

My work may consist of handmade paper, paint, graphite, cardboard, print, and transferred images.

My constant goal is to the visual experience, to bring the viewer in on a personal level where they create or relate their own story of my visual language. 

While my exploration of materials continues, my constant goal is to the visual experience. 

My intention is to bring the viewer in on a personal level by creating and relating their own story to my visual  language. 

WEBSITE:  www.roxannerossi.com

FAVORITE PLACES:  Madame Matisse

The Line in the Form - The Message in the Line 

My work initiates from mastery of Chinese written characters in their various historic styles. 

I then work through to abstraction. 

I work in ink on traditional unsized xuan paper, sometimes incorporating color with paints. 

There is no effort or intention to create a legible character, but I do work to respect Chinese artistic and calligraphic composition while incorporating some Western art principles. 

I blend ancient and new, demonstrating timeless themes. Interpretation should be personal to the viewer. 

WEBSITE: www.dragoncatstudio.com

FAVORITE PLACES:  Thai on Canyon

Born in Syria, I grew up in Kuwait in the fifties and early sixties when visual arts were not part of schools’ curricula, and art museums and galleries did not exist. Later, living in London (England) and in Manhattan opened my eyes to the possibility of studying and practicing art. At first, I concentrated on realistic rendering of figures and landscapes using oil as the primary medium. Currently, my work is predominantly abstract using acrylic and mixed media. My work is varied, prompted by my interest in exploring different techniques and motifs; the process is my main concern. I start with a color or a mark and proceed one step at a time responding to what is already there.

Although primarily abstract, my work can be minimalist, geometric, floral, calligraphic, or narrative/figurative when live models are available.

Overall, my work does not aim to make a statement, but to exult in the power of the creative impulse, which I believe is the highest example of our evolution as humans. 

Growing up, I was left-brained, excelling at math and languages. 'Finding' art gave the other side of me; the rebellious, contrary, lover of freedom; an outlet. I feel very lucky that art continues to be a joy and a quest for finding my inner self, as well as a respite from a fiercely divided and divisive world. 

WEBSITE:  www.artbybushra.com

FAVORITE PLACES:  Bishops Lodge Hotel