Artist Highlights

Lorraine Fossi

Lorraine Fossi is an artist painter with a mastery of space and color. Born in Paris, 1964, she has been surrounded by architects and artists since a very young age. She found it natural to express herself with a pen and developed a very personal style through drawings and sketches. She went on to study and practice architecture with passion and dedication.

Fossi has recently made a series of large paintings, in which she creates powerful abstractions of the sea, by sculpting the oil paint with a knife. She also makes surrealist compositions and symbolist figures giving the same dedication to any other subject (family matters, loneliness, fear and exposure).

When painting the sea, she is in a trance-like state where anything can happen. Her prime vision tells her what is to be kept and what needs to be transformed. She then finds the crest of a new wave until the painting reaches a point where nothing in it would request her action anymore. The painting is there with its strength and its new autonomy and Fossi can say: “I feel proud and honored to salute the waves with the reverence of a stroke”.

Fossi is very receptive to the surrounding world. “A spongy mind like mine will never really rest.” She has the generosity to give all in her art work, and the courage to make it happen, for our delight.

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Mariam Khalili

I see the world differently than most.  I see light, texture, and colors where someone else would see nothing at all, nothing worth looking at.  A simple glance and their gaze would be gone from it.  When you are sitting at the railroad tracks waiting for the cars to finish going by, do you see anything beautiful?  I do.  I take ugly, rusted pieces of metal such as a train car and turn it into something beautiful by simply focusing on the colors and texture.  I use the late evening sun as a reflector to add that little bit of sparkle.

The world to me is full of questions, ideas, and stories to tell.  Through photography I tell MY story, MY ideas, and hopefully I answer MY questions along the way.   One of my greatest fascinations is one similar to the theory that when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?  I often question what a place is like or looks like when no one is around.   By capturing images of train cars that have traveled far and weathered greatly, I am able to tell the story that surrounds what I am not able to witness myself.

Photography by itself is not enough for me.  I must use my hands.  Each piece I create must encompasses  a custom art panel mounted to the back of the image.  My art panels are faux finished to emulate and compliment the image.  My favorite application of joint compound and tissue involves a multitude of metallic paints put on in layers to give a luminous depth and shine.

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Laura Harris

I record and interpret life in its raw and unrefined state: the post-coital encounter in the bedroom, the heady euphoria of the party. My work may be seen as voyeuristic, I see myself as a hidden camera at times. Sketches of real-life situations are later translated into something more expressionistic when committed to canvas and marked in oil paint.

If I were to reveal influences, Tracey Emin’s honest self examinations, especially in her drawings, would be key, along with Edward Hopper who is interested in the way figures are positioned within a space and how light affects the atmosphere in a painting.

I am essentially an artist who thrives on the dissonances of urban life. I am interested as much in the situation itself as I am in the choreography of that situation; how the characters inter-react and how the shapes create their own dynamic on the canvas are both important elements to my work.

And then there is colour. The power of strong colour to evoke moods and provoke a reaction from my audience is the final key component to my work.

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