Here is a snap shot of my work up at Lane Palmisano’s and Michele Hoben’s studio in the Torpedo Factory Art Center. Recent and some past work will be up for viewing throughout the month of May. The Torpedo Factory (TFAC) is an amazing art center in Northern Virginia. (Alexandria).

“Calore” – Lane Palmisano

Lane has been making increasingly significant oil paintings for as long as I can remember. Recent pieces involve her traditional impressionistic expertise breaking down into abstract and contemporary landscapes. Spatial relationships emerge and disintegrate both in the final image and throughout the painting process where Lane applies and scrapes paint with a variety of tools. Color is constantly put to the test in the paintings. The pieces currently hanging in her space showcase a variety of palettes; from transparent earth tones, to impasto pinks and yellow-greens. The paintings all explore a sense of distance between her often explosive brush strokes and imagined horizons. The recent work I like the best has a real breakdown of what that horizon line is defined as: A range of marks that are at once built with hard edges and areas that subtly play into a disappearing act.

“By The Paddocks” – Michele Hoben

The studio is also shared by Michele Hoben. She is exhibiting and producing paintings that incorporate mixed media and collage. The pieces seem to center on abstract environments that incorporate conceptual fences and response to landscape and feelings of containment. The fence is often at first concealed by what the viewer might believe to be a series of well placed marks and lines. Viewing evolves where the lines enter the foreground and your eye seeks to look through them. The lines at once hold your attention and frame the painting into sections of color and light. It is this subtle play between positive and negative spaces that begins to create movement in the works. The pieces also have a range of painting applications dealing with transparency, saturation and opacity.

At the TFAC studio space Lane and Michele’s works exist in a dialogue about boldness and subtleness of color, descriptions of space, and a unique combination of calculated and free mark making.