Nature is Front and Center at Upcoming ArtPlace Show

May 10, 2011 - PRLog -- Fairfield, CT - Award-winning Darien artist Karen Vogel and renowned Greenwich artist Liana Moonie are proud to announce their upcoming solo art exhibits to be held at ArtPlace Gallery, 11 Unquowa Rd Fairfield, CT from June 7- July 9, 2011.  Both exhibits draw on different printmaking techniques to express the artists’ mutual love and appreciation of nature, offering visitors a complementary juxtaposition of views.

“This exhibit is a continuation of my experience with landscape design and explores the relationship between the geometric structure and organic flow of nature,” says Vogel, a long-time painter, whose main focus for the last 13 years has been printmaking.

The natural environment has always inspired Vogel and this exhibit, “Landscapes of the Mind,” is founded on drawings she completed for landscape design classes at The New York Botanical Garden. The work moves beyond the garden gate (the title of her last exhibit was: “Through the Garden Gate”), into an aerial view of a garden and its layout, and features a new body of monoprints comprised of collagraphs (a process in which a textured surface is achieved by creating a collage board to form a relief with different surface levels and textures. The plate is then inked and the image transferred to paper).

“Each print is made up of multiple collagraph plates in which I break down the natural elements I observe, into a simpler form,” she says.  

Critics have called Liana Moonie’s work; “timeless, done with an exquisite sense of design, balance, and color harmony," and "holding a sense of movement and excitement.”  Her ArtPlace exhibit, "Single Out" features her monoprints, one of several media utilized over her more than 40 years as an artist.  Known as the most “painterly” of the printmaking techniques, a monoprint is essentially a printed painting.  

“My artistic creations spring from a love and appreciation of nature, filtered through a meld of ever changing life experiences,” she says. “Over the years my work has evolved into more abstract form which has more freedom of expression and imagery.”  

Born in Italy Moonie studied art with Robert Brackman, Edgar Whitney, and other prominent artists. She has received numerous prestigious awards and exhibited in twenty solo shows and numerous juried and invitational shows, including The National Academy of Design in New York, various annual exhibitions of the National Association of Women Artists, Allied Artists of America, at Silvermine Gallery in New Canaan, CT, at the Bush Holley Historical House in Cos Cob, CT, and the Hurlbutt Gallery in Greenwich, CT.  Moonie is listed in Who's Who in American Art and Who's Who of American Women, and is represented in the Library of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.  She has a private art studio in Stamford.

Vogel studied painting and drawing at New York’s Art Students League and Washington D.C.’s Corcoran College of Art & Design, printmaking at The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk CT.   Her prints and paintings have been featured in museums and galleries across the country, as well as in her personal studio in Norwalk where she teaches printmaking.  Numerous private and corporate patrons have also collected her work. She is currently an active member of the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Women’s Caucus’s Art and ArtPlace Gallery in Fairfield.  

Reception will be held June 11, 2011 from 4-6 pm at 11 Unquowa Rd, Fairfield, CT.  Gallery hours are Tues - Sat from 11 – 5:30 pm. For more information visit www.artplace.org or call 203.292.8328

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