Abstract portraits

Artist Statement

My artwork addresses the mute expression and range of heart-felt emotions experienced by the human race. Art is something people should be able to relate to. Art is a visceral experience that can be accessed by all regardless of race, socioeconomic status, gender, religion, or identity.




HANNA MARIE DEAN WRIGHT is a self-taught folk artist residing in Keavy, Kentucky. She uses her experiences from growing up in rural South-Eastern Kentucky, teaching special education classes, and living with obsessive compulsive disorder to inspire her unique works of art. Hanna Wright uses bold lines and bright colors to create abstract figures with relatable and at times deeply emotional expressions. Hanna was born in Barbourville, Kenucky on April 15th, 1993. Hanna graduated from the University of the Cumberlands in 2015 with degrees in Special Education Behavioral Disabilities and Elementary Education.  

Hanna Wright’s mamaw, Geraldine Scalf, has had a great impact on Hanna’s art career and works as a fellow folk artist residing in Barbourville, Kentucky. Hanna was adopted at the age of 4 and moved from Barbourville to Keavy, Kentucky. She now teaches special education in the Laurel County School District and spends most of her free time creating unique works of art on paper, canvas, wood, and reclaimed scrap materials. Hanna most enjoys drawing her expressive “Starmen” and painting abstract figures and faces on reclaimed wooden panels. 

Hanna Wright’s collection of art contains over 2000 works of art on paper and   over 400 paintings of all sizes. Hanna’s artwork has been gaining popularity on the internet since 2015 and her artwork has been sought after by art galleries on a global scale. Hanna has had opportunities to display her artwork in galleries from Australia to New Mexico. 

Facing It Together

by Jack Bordnick


JACK BORDNICK’s sculptural and photographic imagery is a reflection of his past and present forces and the imagination of his life’s stories. They represent an evolutionary process of these ideas and how all of life’s forces are interconnected, embraced and expressed through creative art forms. These works represent what has accomplished with this art form. They reflect this quantum and metaphoric moment, the changing from one form to another. They express and implement these thoughts and feelings, and take risks, without any guarantee of their success. To be reflected through these present works, is his goal. The predominant imagery deals mostly with faces of both living and non-living beings and things. They are expressed in many forms and images, speaking to us in their own languages.

Bordnick has been a part of this creative world since he can remember, beginning as a product designer and establishing his own design business in New York, SantaFe and Europe. These present sculptural images incorporate surrealistic, mythological and magical imagery, fabricated in textural metallic mixed media assemblages. They are assembled, disassembled and reassembled. They are heavily textured surfaces that become abstractions unto themselves, and he seeks them to revert back to their origins. Enjoy their stories.

Equinoxes

by ALLISON ANNE

allison anne is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (unceded Očhéthi Šakówiŋ land), working in collage, zinemaking, mail art and mixed media. The core of their practice is handcut paper collage— a constantly evolving exploration of experience and emotion through the reconstitution and rearranging of various printed media and ephemera. By recontexualizing images and materials, allison creates complex textural, intuitive abstractions and configurations which prioritize that which is found, discarded and left behind, exploring the intersections and interactions between context, materiality and creativity.

allison is a founding member of Twin Cities Collage Collective, a member of the International Union of Mail-Artists and the collaborative projects Morphic Rooms, NONMACHINABLE and Scissor Prism Orchestra. Their work has been shown and published around the world and is in the collections of the Scandinavian Collage Museum and the Minnesota Museum of American Art as part of the MPLSART 2020 Sketchbook Project.


  • Delphinium, Hand-cut paper collage, 2020-22
  • Structural Color, Hand-cut paper collage, 2020-22
  • Holocene, Hand-cut paper collage, 2020-22
  • Diffraction, Hand-cut paper collage, 2020-22

Fey

by Alex Joseph

ALEX JOSEPH is a painter as well as a writer and researcher of cultural studies. As an artist, he has taken a long time to shape his voice and makes sure that each work reflects the emotion of striving for a goal and the detours that happen along the way. He works primarily in Watercolor and Acrylic and focuses on portraiture as his language of depiction.


Fey, Watercolor on paper, 2021

I Look Towards East

by Karkhana-e-amoeba

From an iconoclastic understanding of self-portraiture to a more distant research based miniature style, I have built my studio which produces self-sustained works. My Images are still within the spaces of self-stories (fan fiction), addressing the environment itself that they surround. I find that self is in itself a mythical character. A formation of multitudes, different collection of consciousness and sensations that are put together into an idea of unified self, which in itself is a lie. This particular work, based on poem I wrote, represents love, loss, and politics across borders.

(Excerpt)

III

I can only see East now,

Hooked to a fishtail

An unreachable sail

When west is a leash

IV

I see East now

On another page

A line draw across my eye

An absurd faith

V

East & East & East

At the shore of nowhere

Locked in a painted wall

I looked towards East


‘I Look Towards East,’ Multimedia on Paper, 21cm x 29cm, 2022

Ocean Macrame

Artist Statement: I try to capture moments of transition, knowing that such moments often occur in stillness.


Digital Photography, North Island (California), December 2015


JIM ROSS jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in seven years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, and hybrid in over 175 journals and anthologies on five continents. Photo publications include Bombay Gin, Burningword, Camas, Columbia Journal, Feral, Friends Journal, Manchester Review, Stonecoast, and Typehouse. Recently-published photo essays include Barren, DASH, Kestrel, Ilanot Review, Litro, New World Writing, Sweet, So It Goes, and Wordpeace, with Typehouse forthcoming. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five little ones—split their time between city and mountains.

Coexist

Artist Statement: The ability of humankind and nature to co-exist is a critical question for our time. This piece speaks to that issue and ecological concern but demonstrating that “man and nature” are interwoven, and that they can and should coexist.


Digital Art, 2021

LAUREN BARTEL is an award-winning writer, artist, and historian. Her literary work, essays, artwork, and photography have won numerous national and regional awards and have appeared in several literary magazines, academic journals, and podcasts. Her independent work in history won the national academic and research prize presented by the Nobel family, and her groundbreaking biology research regarding rare orchid propagation is pending publication in a scientific journal. Lauren’s life passions include the natural sciences, creative arts, and natural history. A change-maker, servant leader, and citizen naturalist, she studies and conducts lab and field research in genetics, zoology, and botany and volunteers her time to environmental and conservation causes as well as child literacy and education. For her volunteer work, Lauren has twice been the recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award and has won the Congressional Award Silver Medal (the highest honor Congress can bestow on a youth civilian). A Miami native of Latinx and Italian heritage, Lauren will be an incoming freshman at Harvard College in the fall of 2022.