Jane Johnson

https://www.janejohnsonstudio.com/

Nature inspires comfort and mystery. From it comes our most familiar historic images. In this time of Pandemic, Art and Nature are healing.

For painting this platter, I have turned to my past travel photographs of designs from Turkey, India, Morocco…especially ancient textiles and carpets…beautiful photos from the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and from The Victoria and Albert Museum.

My painting derives from natural forms…remembered in the studio. I am interested in color and what happens when colors meet.

I am glad I can do some small thing for people experiencing difficulty

Mae Mougin

https://www.maemougin.com/

Mae Mougin started her journey with ceramics in high school. After graduation from The San Francisco Art Institute, she started working with fashion photographers as a stylist and muse in Los Angeles and New York. Rediscovering clay and porcelain at Parsons School of Design gave her a new voice of creativity.

To focus on her personal work, Mae  renovated her automobile garage into an art studio and began crafting bowls, plates, platters and individual pieces. Spurred by resounding support from friends in the art and fashion community, Mae Mougin Porcelain was launched.

The custom designed collection reflects Mae’s lifelong fascination with fashion, travel and art. Inspiration comes from Mae’s unique view of the world—the overlooked objects of the everyday, odds and ends found while traveling and the natural world. The one-of-a-kind pieces are playful and functional.

Mae’s Southampton studio faces West and the light lends the workspace an ever-changing glow. Each piece begins as a brick of porcelain clay, which Mae hand-slaps then drapes over custom molds made in the studio. Finger tips and paddle marks along the edges have become a signature design element. And when not drawing from her own arsenal of imagery, Mae incorporates family monograms, so each made-to-order piece becomes an heirloom.

Today, Mae Mougin Porcelain can be found in the homes of celebrities, artists and trend-setters as well as select retail stores. Most Mae Mougin Porcelain pieces are by commission. Each piece is made with love and becomes a family collectable.

Nina Gillman

https://www.ninagillman.com/pages/painting.php

Melinda Hackett

https://www.melindahackett.com/

My paintings refer to organic space and unfixed time. To call them landscapes would be misleading since they are poetic inventions of my imagination, and reference the world of nature rather than depict it literally. One of my purposes in making paintings is to transport the viewer to a necessarily foreign place, where nature can be experienced without knowing it fully, and where reality is communicated through the senses. I am involved in the play of interior and exterior space. On one hand; interior, intimate, house, personal-and on the other; exterior, immense, universe, cosmos. My paintings represent both states, the near, the far, the view through a telescope, the view through a microscope, the sheltering sky, the intimate forest. My paintings create worlds full of images that float, hover, creep, spin, hang, roll or sleep in corners.

The images come from an internal source. They contain a vital impulse, and are alive as if subjected to breezes, weather and climatic conditions. My paintings represent states of nonlinear time. It is less that a singular event is taking place than that a group of different objects are moving through the picture plane at various rates of speed and in opposite directions, some gliding slowly and others whirring as if in a blender. Nature is not in a state of decay, nor is it symbolic or nostalgic for the past. The paintings are largely fragmentary in that they exist in one moment of time, so do they exist in one torn swatch of space. There is a sense that the activity continues outside the borders of the paintings as the forms flirt with the edges or get chopped off by them. Some forms are only just coming into being while others have already ‘come out’ and some just like to watch. By virtue of their inability to be fully identified, they remain in the realm of the poetic, a sum of images to form a whole. They are meant to be experienced fully through the eye of the viewer.

Michael Butler

Michael A. Butler is a native New Yorker and self-taught regional artist who focuses upon the hidden worlds of the historical and mythological. Many of his paintings will reflect the unspoken history of this locality with specific reference to the African-American and Native-American influences.

Drawing inspiration from the clean lines and geometric forms of the mid­twentieth century Butler will also utilize these influences in a separate and distinct body of work. At times the process of documentation can feel heavy and thus the colors and simpler forms of that time period provide a refreshing relief free of historical reference.

The deep jewel tones frequently represented in Butler’s works are reminiscent of those seen in the paintings of Henri Rousseau and the early works of Romare Bearden, two artists whom Butler admires. Another artistic influence is Aaron Douglass whose geometric paintings provide inspiration.

Butler has a Master’s degree in Public Administration and had his own art gallery at one time. He is former president of a local historical society. While also having exhibited in Massachusetts, Manhattan, Brooklyn, NY and Nassau County he exhibits mainly on the East End of Long Island. Butler has had one-man shows at Gallery Merz, Headley Studio, Paradise Restaurant and the Eastville Community Historical Society all located in Sag Harbor, NY.

Hans van de Bovenkamp

https://www.maemougin.com/

Renowned for his monumental sculpture created primarily for open-air public locales, Hans Van de Bovenkamp has been described as an artist-mystic whose work — with its signature power, lyricism, and grand proportions — heightens the viewer’s sense of imagination and discovery.

A Dutchman and a youthful immigrant to Ontario, Canada, and then the United States, he was a part of the avant-guard Tenth Street scene in the New York City of the 1960s, an adherent of Abstract Expressionism, and has maintained residences in New York City and Sagaponack in the Hamptons. Mr. Van de Bovenkamp has earned an international reputation in the past 55 years for designing, fabricating, and installing over 100 unique commissioned sculptures and fountains in collaboration with architects, cities, museums, and private individuals. His works can be seen in public, civic, corporate and private collections. Recent solo exhibitions include Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, the Danubiana Meulensteen Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia and Season of Sculpture, Sarasota Marine Park, Florida.

Michael Paraskevas

https://www.maemougin.com/

Michael Paraskevas has been an illustrator since graduating from The School of Visual Arts in 1984. He then went on to receive his MFA from SVA in 1986. He’s worked for most major magazines including Sports Illustrated, Time, Town & Country, New York Magazine and Rolling Stone, to name but a few.

Michael Paraskevas has also illustrated and written 24 children’s books over the years with his mother, Betty. The two went on to create and write the animated television series Maggie and the Ferocious Beast for Nickelodeon. Two of their other books were also made into animated series: Marvin the Tap Dancing Horse for PBS and Kids from Room 402 for Fox Family. Betty passed away in 2010 and Mickey continues to work on animated projects for a variety of companies.

His large-scale beach paintings have sold all over the world through his gallery in the Hamptons.

Michael Paraskevas works in acrylic, oil, watercolor or whatever the mood suits him at the moment. He also works digitally since the demands of the current illustration market requires quickness and the ability to change things at the last minute.

Michael is always working on something. He is currently writing and drawing a weekly comic, The Green Monkeys for Dan’s Papers. He is also writing and drawing Lili and Derek with his wife Maria.

Michael Paraskevas likes to draw and doodle on his iPad having fought getting one for ages. He keeps a wide variety of sketchbooks about all the events he likes to go to.

Michael and his wife live in Southampton, New York.