Charmagne Coe is an American visual artist of paintings,
assemblage and drawings. She creates expression and narrative in mixed media
such as acrylic, watercolor, ink, pastel, feathers, cloth, plants … whatever
intuitively pushes into and out of the canvas and her imagination. The
foundation of my creative process is an inherent respect for automatism, which
is creating intuitively without a template. Her latest body of work evolved
from 2-dimensional painting into a genre she calls, Soft Brut. The new works are bare,
rudimentary expressions combining watercolor brush, ink and pastel techniques
with 3-dimensional assemblage, collage, and fiber arts. Coe says “I moved
farther away from composure, and am constantly experimenting, questioning and incorporating.”
Her work has been included and awarded in publications such as Phoenix Magazine, Utne Reader, Luxe Interiors + Design and Creative Quarterly.
Tom Ortega views every day in the studio as an opportunity to
learn. Those discoveries lead to new techniques and approaches. As a result,
each sculpture he creates reflects the passage of time. Each piece informs the
next. He sands wood surfaces. Pulls them apart, and puts them back together
again. Each piece lives a life before it is complete. Ortega’s art is part of
many private, public and corporate collections. Most recently he was added to
the Polsinelli collection and was featured in the Microdwell exhibition at the
historic Shemer Art Center in Phoenix. Tom’s work was also selected for inclusion
in The Family Fang, the Nicole Kidman movie filmed in New York.
Lorena Suarez is from Nogales, Arizona. After exploring various
genres and techniques. Suarez discovered abstract expressionism. Her paintings
offer a kaleidoscope of colors with the goal of opening the minds of viewers
and bringing emotions to the surface. She says, “I invite you to let yourself
feel that emotion without judgment … let us not forget that we do not see
things the same way others do.” The same painting contains all sorts of different
shapes, objects and emotions for each unique viewer.