ucsc

June First Friday - Maddie Amelia Lewis: Dreamscaping

Skulls and Bottles

Artist Reception: Friday, June 5 - 6-8 p.m.

Bio: Maddie Amelia Lewis is a 2D artist with a fondness for acrylic paint and ink. She is a recent graduate from UC Santa Cruz. She is fascinated by fantasy, the arts, and textures.

Paintings will be on sale from $20-$85, and lithographic prints will be selling from $5-$15. See artist website for preliminary prices: www.noxkitarts.com

Artist Statement:

I like making huge gestural brush strokes, circular voids reminiscent of black holes, drips, and fine lines. I paint abstracted landscapes and attempt to embody concepts like death, anxiety, love, daydreams, and imaginary places. I will go through great lengths to actualize an idea. I try to draw from the beauty and emotion in my life for my art so I can’t forget it. Each of my pieces is a space I create to reflect, and after I take my time with each one, I let it go.As an acrylic painter, I am a texture junkie. I love acrylic mediums—glass beads, resin sand, modeling paste, black lava—I’ve tried them all and I make full use of them. My paintings ensure dynamic and varied surfaces. I tend to work very quickly and use a lot of aggressive mark-making techniques. The larger the canvas, the more energetic I become while I paint it. For small works, I can be more delicate, but the restlessness remains.  They say that drawing from live models gives the drawing itself more life, so I try to instill the energy, emotion, and intensity into my paintings by embodying those feelings as I paint.In the end, it all comes down to an obsession. I paint because I can never get paintings out of my head. A painting will tell me what it needs to be real, and I oblige it the best I can. It’s a piece of the world inside of me—it has always been, and will never cease to be.

First Friday - April 2015

First Friday is finally back at SCRS and we've got an amazing artist lined up for April.

Janina A. Larenas: Graphic Works on Paper A collection of design projects ranging from posters to hand printed sticker images to original book illustrations.

Artist Bio: Janina A. Larenas studied printmaking and book arts at the University of California Santa Cruz. Besides design her skills include relief, intaglio and letterpress printing, as well as painting, embroidery, bookmaking and food preserving. Her designs are most recognizable as hand printed printed stickers and as t-shirts for The Devil Makes Three.

The show is available to view during normal studio hours. Check schedule here. If a band is booked, then the studio is open.

First Friday March

First Friday, March 7 Dream Scapes:Fleeting Lines From the Human Consciousness Paintings by Whitney Romberg Available to view for the month of March anytime the studio is open.

Artist Statement: From a young age, I have always been fascinated by the concept of dreams within the human brain. Within these paintings, I strive to explore the tangibility of dream scapes using color, texture, and symbolism to illustrate the vagueness that our conscience is capable of making, expressing our deepest thoughts that our rational mind isolates during waking.