We are constantly erasing the Dogs never ending abstract creations from this front window. I haven’t had the heart to erase their newest creation, an impressionistic masterpiece. Ale looks quite proud of it don’t you think?

Roger Alderman

“My work is about expressing the spirit and energy I sense in the landscape. Painting on location provides a spontaneous and emotional response to the land and the presence we make as inhabitants. In the studio, I abstract this responce even further into power shapes, colors, and symbols. In both cases, I leave out the details and allow you the viewer to fill those in with your own experience and imagination. If I have done my job as an artist utilizing color, light, form and composition, and you sense the spirit of things unseen, than I have succeeded. A Native American friend once said to me, “that to Native Peoples, everything has a spirit, the air we breathe, trees, animals-even rocks”, when she commented on seeing the shape of a bear in the rocks I had painted. If you can see the bear in the rocks, or in some way your spirit is moved to soar, then we are speaking the same language”.

Visit Rogers Website at: www.rogeralderman.com

Palette knife painting has always been my passion although it took me a few decades to realize it. I had been painting with brushes for years when, during a demonstration, I applied some paint with a knife and felt a freedom and excitement about the technique I had never before realized. Although I am starting to use brushes again in my work, I have painted mostly with knives ever since that eureka moment. The knives provide a three dimensional quality to a painting which, combined with color and light, helps to create a lively result. My favorite subject matter is the natural environment: trees, fields, mountains, animals, lakes, and oceans.

The under-painting is applied in a thin sheen with the details of a piece applied with heavier texture. I generally use ten to fifteen different knives on a canvas, each knife providing a unique texture and effect. A painting must be finished the day it is started because the palette knife must be able to slide on the canvas rather than getting hung-up on partially dried paint. This technique requires using greater quantities of paint but the end result is fresh, and exciting.

Watch Alison create a painting on Blip TV

Go to Alison’s Website

Susan’s love and study of art began early. She won a haiku contest about bunnies in fourth grade and years later managed to have three art classes her senior year of high school. After graduating from Chico State in 1987, she spent the next thirteen years teaching middle school English. Being a teacher was the most difficult, joyous and significant accomplishment of her life.

She left teaching in 2002 and has been immersed in mosaics ever since, often pondering how middle schoolers and tesserae (the little bits of material that make up mosaics) have a lot in common:

• There are a lot of them scrunched into a very small space.

• They’re lovely, each in his/her/its own way.

• Tesserae don’t love you like kids do.

• On the other hand, tesserae don’t follow you around the classroom, pulling at the hem of your shirt, begging repeatedly, “Ms. Cro, Ms. Cro! Will you read your bunny haiku again, Ms. Cro? The bunnies! Hey! Ms. Cro, will you read your haiku? It’s so funny! Huh? I can’t believe that thing won a prize, Ms. Cro. Please? Come on!”

Now she lives and creates in a (very quiet) cabin in the woods of the California Sierra Foothiils. As a kayaker, hiker and reader, her work is most influenced by nature, as well as poetry, literature, and others’ mosaics.

Susan has studied under several esteemed mosaic artists including Laurel True, Ellen Blakeley, and Sonia King. She has studied the mosaics of many countries, including Turkey, Spain, and Mexico. She is a member of the Society of American Mosaic Artists.

visit Susan Crocenzi website

Email: susan@scmosaics.com
Telephone: 530 798 3895