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Cat Bennett is artist and author. In her Saturday Morning Drawing Club, she teaches drawing as a way to meet the true creative self. Her book, The Confident Creative: Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind, published by Findhorn Press in 2010, was a gold medal winner in the 2011 Nautilus Book Awards. Her book Making Art a Practice: How To Be the Artist You Are, and her newest book, The Drawing Club of Improbable Dreams: How to Create a Club for Art, are also published by Findhorn Press.
Cat worked as an illustrator/designer for about thirty years. Her illustrations have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun and Time Magazine, Houghton Mifflin, Scholastic, Harcourt Brace and many other publications. She has also made short animations for CBC-Sesame Street, Nickelodeon TV, WHDH-TV, WGBH-TV and various non-profits. She has exhibited her art in group shows in Boston, New York, and Tokyo.
Her essays have appeared in The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, LA Yoga Magazine, Yoga Magazine UK, Integral Yoga Magazine, Red, The American, Lightworker, High Spirit Magazine and others. www.catbennett.net
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Diane Culhane is a professional artist and art educator who lives in West Seattle in a 1910 home, and works out of her studio in Ballard Building C. She received her BFA from the University of Utah and Master’s Degree from Seattle University.
Diane has taught for The Bellevue School District, Seattle Pacific University, Kirkland Arts Center, Bellevue Arts Museum and currently directs and owns Kelsey Creek Fine Art School for children in the summer.
Visit her website at: www.dianeculhaneart.com
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Fred Lisaius is a painter, sculptor, and a popular art teacher at Bellevue College, WA (“Fred is perfect!”). Fred is represented by the Patricia Rovzar Gallery in Seattle, and his work is in many private and corporate collections.
Fred currently has a show at the Bainbridge Island Art Museum. From his statement:
“The deeper I go into the forest the closer I feel to the truth. Off of the trail, there is a quiet calm where ideas can be contemplated and refined. In my paintings and my sculptures, I utilize the forum of nature to explore our relationship to the natural world and to each other.”
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Stephanie Hargrave writes: “I’ve been both painting and working in clay since college, where I studied color theory, ceramics, sculpture, drawing and painting. I started a line of functional ceramics as a small business in 1997 after studying with Carol Gouthro, and have worked with metal, oil paint, and acrylics over the years, but my medium of choice is bee’s wax.”
“I learned a great deal studying with Jef Gunn and Larry Caulkins at Pratt Fine Arts Center, and have been focusing for the past 9 years exclusively on encaustics. It is the one medium that affords all the other materials I’ve worked in to overlap and inform one another.”
“I find bee’s wax to be inherently lovely, and work with it always mindful of how its natural beauty and transparency can coexist with my ideas and imagery.”
See more wonderful art at Stephanie’s website: www.stephaniehargrave.com
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Megan Hovany is a multimedia artist, puppet designer, and cardboard art-wizard living in Chicago. She is a scenic painter and adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University. She has painted scenes and created puppets for numerous theatrical productions, was commissioned for a 40′ sculptural mural for Chicago Children’s Museum, and has received Joseph Hefferson Award nominations for two of her puppet designs for Quest.
The Chicago Reader writes: “[T]he stagecraft is breathtaking at times–especially when it comes to those puppets by Megan Hovany.” – Tony Adler review of “Drum Circle Pandora.”
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The artwork of Alison O’Donoghue can be described as contemporary folk art.
Her work is partly naïve, sometimes illustrative, at times cartoony, with some of her pieces being heavily patterned. Her paintings are mostly playful with creatures and people that are quite often glowing with life… awash in dimensional color and shade in a mostly two-dimensional world.
In many of her paintings, she combines everyday objects such as; cups of coffee, fruit, plants, humans, birds and odd, made up animals, into a fluid motion of interaction of intertwined shapes. The playful next to the sinister give the paintings a sense of humor and the complexity of an unfolding story.
In her larger work, Alison seems to have no intention of leaving a space unfilled or unpopulated, as the figures become more of an overall pattern. It gives the viewer the feeling of looking at vines overtaking the world inside the painting in a kind of beautiful invasive force of nature.
Alison O’Donoghue’s contemporary folk art and patterned worlds invite us to explore visually the simple beauty, complexity, interactions and sometimes the humorously sinister aspects of everyday life.
Alison lives in Portland, Oregon. http://www.aliorange.com/alison.html
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Carla Sonheim is a painter, illustrator, and creativity workshop instructor known for her fun and innovative projects and techniques designed to help adult students recover a more spontaneous, playful approach to creating.
She is the author of Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun, a bestselling book, having sold over 75,000 copies!
Two more books were released in Fall 2012: Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals: A Mixed-Media Workshop (Quarry Books) and The Art of Silliness: A Creativity Book for Everyone (Perigee Books), and in 2012 she co-authored Creative Photography Lab with her husband, Steve Sonheim.
One of her students writes, “Carla just shines and is so gentle and generous that you will work hard all day and come out energized and inspired. Most importantly though, [her] class was a touchstone in my artistic journey, giving me the courage to stop resisting, and open myself to my creative voice.”
Carla lives in Seattle, Washington.
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Krista Peel Starer is an artist, art entrepreneur and longtime developer of creative projects. She received her degree from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, IL in painting and drawing.
Krista is an accomplished art maker and designer in a whole host of mediums. Currently she is Co-Owner of 3 Star Studio a design and fabrication studio with her husband and daughter. Together, they develop and produce jewelry, dollhouses, miniatures, puzzles and laser-cut beads. Krista has also started illustrating children’s books, including the already released “Illustrated Alphabet” and her upcoming title “The Amazing Book.”
She was previously Co-Director of the Philadelphia Art Hotel, an artist residency run out of her 3-story row home in Philadelphia. Krista is a seasoned jewelry designer, having participated in art and craft fairs around the country. She has worked at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was Art Director for various art theater projects with Collaboration in Chicago.
Now in her life as an off-grid homesteader in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania, she has discovered the art-making intrinsic in cooking, building projects and playing with her 4-yr-old.
Find her work here –
3 Star Studio – Etsy Shop
Krista Peel Jewelry – Etsy Shop
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Karine Swenson grew up just outside of a town called Rapid City, South Dakota in the Black Hills. The closest neighbor was a mile away. Reared in this environment, Swenson’s connection with the natural world was strong.
After receiving her BA in painting from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she moved to Colorado. She has spent most of her life in small towns that sit right next to the last remaining bits of wilderness.
From the mountains of Colorado, the ocean surrounding Maui, Hawaii and now the desert near Joshua Tree, California, she feels the most at home out in nature. In the studio, her second home, she can explore her relationship with the natural world. Her oil paintings are reflections of this relationship. Swenson has been a full time artist for the past ten years.
To watch a short video introducing Karine, click HERE.
See more wonderful art at Karine’s website: www.karineswenson.com.
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Lynn Whipple writes, “I am deeply grateful to live my life as an artist. Play and discovery are my dearest and most constant companions. There are a zillion tiny challenges in each art making experience, and so often I find, just as many small, sweet victories. Without a doubt, living creatively is the most enjoyable and satisfying game I know.”
Lynn shares a warehouse studio with her husband, John Whipple, in Winter Park, Florida. Lynn’s work includes found-object mixed-media assemblages; found images altered with a combination of drawing, painting, sewing and more; and her well-known Ninny Boxes; collages combined with found objects, and assembled within a box format. Her unique pieces have a playful, quirky, and often absurd charm.
Lynn explains: “I allow myself to play and let my pieces reveal themselves to me…I have been fascinated by old books, history, and odd bits of memorabilia. I find the things that interest me the most are slightly absurd…My hope is to create something real and somehow poetic but not commonplace. My goal is to keep communicating in my language.”
Lynn’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Visit Lynn’s website at www.lynnwhipple.com and her etsy shop at www.etsy.com/shop/lynnwhipple