2003 Painting
Susan Dory - 2003 Fellowship Recipient
Informed by the language and structure of minimalism, painter Susan Dory achieves what she refers to as maximalism, minimalism's amplified cousin -- in her case a luscious excess of repetition and stacking. Working for many years in encaustic and now in fine spray-painted layers, Dory has a down-to-earth yet poetic way of describing her work. She likens her mesmerizing patterns in pigment to "handmade knitting mistakes," an apt description for work that falls somewhere between the controlled realm of computer generated geometry and the haphazard chaotic world of organic nature.
Dory studied at Iowa State University and at Universitat Wein, Austria. She is represented by the Margaret Thatcher Gallery, NYC, Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and Howard House, Seattle. Her work has been exhibited all over the United States, including shows in New York, Austin and Oakland. She received the Best of Show Award at the San Diego Art Institute's 46th International Exhibit and has been the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Randy Hayes
The complex psychological collage that is human memory, perception and emotional interpretation -- a jumble of fleeting images in our heads -- is aptly represented in Randy Hayes' fusion of photography and painting. Hayes uses a grid of his own travel snapshots as his canvas, leaving an overall impression -- that of the larger painting -- and an underlying, almost subliminal message -- that of the series of photographs still visible under a veil of paint. Whether pointedly narrative or more ambiguously metaphorical, the photographs provide a backdrop for Hayes' serious architectural studies, highly charged portraits and introspective figurative groupings.
Hayes studied at the Memphis College of Arts and Memphis' Rhodes College. He has had solo exhibitions at the Boise Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacome Art Museum, and has been exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Robert C. Jones
A self-proclaimed modernist, Robert C. Jones is a proud steward of painting as a vital, ever-evolving art form. Referring to his expressive paintings and drawings as "improvisations," Jones acknowledges that he has not so much abstracted the subject as extracted the narrative from his work. Indeed, his bold abstraction, in which chaos and accident are delicately balanced against the structure of more formal conventions -- repeating form, controlled composition, cool light-evoking color, and lucid calligraphic line -- often hint at a foundation in the physical world: a woman's figure, a still life or a landscape.
Jones studied in New York with abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann in the early 1950s and received an M.S. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1959. Represented by the Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle, he has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum and the Whatcom Museum of History and Art in Bellingham.
Barbara Earl Thomas
Plumbing her own life story for images, Barbara Earl Thomas imbues intimate autobiographical scenes with mythic resonance. Often bordering on social realism, Thomas' work weaves a complex iconography of nostalgia, fears, and tragedies from her past and from current events, making archtypal dreamscapes that are both tender and apocalyptic, narrative and mysterious. Thomas paintes in egg tempera on paper, capturing in sweeping rhythmic scenes the brooding elements of the Northwest climate.
Thomas studied under Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lundin and Michael Spafford at the University of Washington, where she received her M.F.A. She is represented by the Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle and has had solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum and the Whatcom Museum of History and Art in Bellingham. In 1998, a book of Thomas' art and writing was published by the University of Washington Press, the first in the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Endowment Series on American Artist.