Angelica Sotiriou Creates Spiritual Wonder in Deeply Layered Art

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Deeply wondrous, luminous with light, and shimmering with meaning, Angelica Sotiriou’s art touches the eye, heart, and soul of the viewer. Her work embodies a sense of spiritual presence, generating a collective awe in those witnessing her paintings, drawings, and mixed media pieces.
According to Sotiriou, “My work has always come from the deepest place of my prayer life. Be it finding beauty in the world or the darkness that invades our good intentions, my works take the sacred and secular and use them to create my abstract narratives.”
Her sense of purpose and meaning has not changed over the years, even as her techniques or mediums shift. “My works have not deviated from my internal focus of one’s life journey. I started out painting, using other-worldly, intensely brilliant color transparencies on canvas. I continued with creating bigger than life handmade paper bas-reliefs, dealing with the  plight of young womanhood and the spiritual journey of transfiguration,” she says. And in the meantime, she notes that she’s “always loved [the] energetic movement of soft graphite on large sheets of rag paper. Early in my career, they were autobiographical abstracts. These works eventually evolved into spiritual landscapes with the focus on the visceral search for Light.”
Today,  the artist has combined these techniques and mediums, shaping thematically imagined landscapes. She relates that she is “still searching for Light…still energetic…still [creating] larger than life narratives.  Thematically, I have attempted to meld the secular and the sacred in each new work using mixed media.”
Asked which mediums she prefers, Sotiriou says that she loves “the energetic line work of soft graphite, acrylic brushwork, interference pigments, transparencies and I have incorporated the line work into my subtle mixed media painterly abstract narratives.” She wants viewers to “look long enough to see the multiple layers of dark to light pigment, water soluble graphite, and interference pigments” that make up individual works.
Sotiriou’s newest works “deal with the notion of longing for home and the familiar, our earth as home, stewardship, the sacred, the secular and the ache that comes from wanting to go home to a place that may not have ever existed.”
As profound as it is beautiful and involving, Sotiriou’s stunning art will be on view at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach,  August 1st. In September, she will be sharing another large body of her work at Kipos Gallery/Trinity San Pedro, as well as several works at the Pacific Unitarian Gallery in Palos Verdes. In November, she’ll be showing some work at “Art At Dark”,  St. Katherine GOC, Redondo Beach.
The artist has been creating her powerful work for 56 years, and for each of those years, she says that her images have asked “my viewer to sit with them for more than a few moments and to explore the layers of marks and pigments, to tap into the energy of the compositions and to explore where their own sensibilities reside in each work.” She adds that “There is a narrative in each work; if you listen close enough you will find your answer.”
For all those seeking answers, or simply the beauty of life itself, visit the artist’s exhibition of both large scale and small works at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery, 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach. Opening reception is 4-7, August 1st; regular gallery hours are 12-4, Thursday-Sunday.
– Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Michael Stearns Creates Contemporary Color Dazzle

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Michael Stearns is a contemporary artist whose practice explores fundamental questions of existence, origin, and the forces that animate being.  His rich work operates at the intersection of metaphysical exploration and aesthetic investigation, seeking not only to articulate these universal, eternally relevant questions but also to implicate the viewer in their contemplation.

Stearns says that he employes a painterly language that consists of both organic forms and vibrant, saturated color. The artist constructs visual fields that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, amplifying the phenomenological impact of these thematic concerns.

Whether creating entirely abstract, lush and brilliantly colored canvases or more precise maps, roads, grids…or a mix of recognizable, impressionist and abstract landscape, Stearns work is a riveting fairytale, a narrative ripe for the eye to take in and the heart to feel.

In his sculptural works, he often employs the most prosaic of found materials, from cereal boxes to bits of colored cardboard and wire. What he makes from these humble textures does not just elevate the material but transforms it, making it something almost ethereal, an accordian of light and color. His natural and industrial materials are synthesized, generating a dialectic between the primal and the constructed, transforming dissonance into a harmonious duality.

Color shimmers, shape mutates, image mesmerizes. Galvanizing is one way to describe the layered luster of Michael Stearns’ art. Filled with a glowing joy, his work explores questions of profound meaning with dazzling aesthetic forces that fill the viewer with a profond sense of wonder amid its heightened chromatic intensity.

Stearns’ work is reverant in its respect for nature, form, the miracle of life, and the fecundity of nature. Moon shapes, seascapes, rose colored trees, orange mountains, purple coastlines and blue roads dissect, diverse, and blossom. His work is both intelligently precise and voluptuously open, images of land, sea, sky, and the universe itself, all fragrant with color, steeped in memory, imagination, and an inveterate belief in the miraculous.

Whether painting mystical shapes, congruent maps, highly textured landscape, or sculpting with cardboard and newspaper to bring both nature and urban society together, Stearns is a force to be reckoned with.

To view his work is to be immersed in it; the pulse of life and the power of his art run through each image like a current. Stearns’ radiance and accessible yet deeply resonant work is a slice of both California life and magical light. Of course, maybe that is one and the same.

Stearns’ work is currently on exhibit at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach through July 26th., as well as at his own studio and gallery in the Los Angeles Harbor Arts building in San Pedro. DFA Gallery is open 12-4 Thursdays-Sundays, with special open house programming from 12-4 July 25th and an artist’s talk and closing reception on July 26th from 1-3.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and as provided by Michael Stearns Studio.

The Zen of Neon: Linda Sue Price

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Abstract neon artist Linda Sue Prices sees herself as”an investigator of cultural phenomena; one who endeavors, with the aid of
observations, history/science/philosophical readings, to arrive at a point of reference that connects the human experience with all of the other parts of the environment.”

The beautiful zen of her investigations is infused in so much of her work. She notes that in the past she created a series of work  about “Connections and Enlightened Systems” that featured a quote from Black Elk, “All Things are our Relatives.” More recently, she reports that she read a book by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink.

“It was an exploration of intuition. I didn’t think I was intuitive, but have since come to recognize that I am and have relied on that
and trust to make my choices. I had always thought of myself as fearful and pragmatic. It has been an interesting process discovering my core,” she explains.

The artist’s current series of neon works is titled It’s Always Something. “So far, I have completed three pieces. I am using a new process of just letting the work reveal itself,” she says.

Her bending process is always developing. “Even benders with years more experience than I, share that they are still learning, too. My bending style is free-form, not to pattern. Most people who bend, do it to a pattern on a work bench. I typically heat the glass and then bend in the air. It has been described as having a conversation with the glass or as dancing with the glass.”

Describing this process, she says “There are three things you have to do: heat the right amount of glass, get it hot enough, and heat it evenly. Sounds simple. I struggled with even heating until recently. It turned out I was too low in the fire.” Price adds that “At times, it feels like therapy because you can’t bring any attitude with you as you enter the fire with the tube. No expectations, no willfulness, you just have to learn how to ‘be’.  Once I finally got to that space, I finally started to really seeing the glass and recognizing what the glass was saying to me. I finally got the message.”

In the past several years, Price has made other changes to her work as well. “I started adding a digital frame with an animated video to some of my work. I realized that when doing video animation, after the structure is defined then I moved into a ‘play’ or ‘flow’ space where I experimented and discovered moments that appealed to me. That caused me to recognize that I don’t do that when I’m bending.”

According to the artist, “Bending, for me, was structure and process. I decided to try bringing flow to my bending once the process was taken care of. I’ve spent the last year moving in the that direction. That triggered a change in how I approach making a piece. Mostly everything is flow now except specific things that have to be structure and process.”

She likes texture and uses a variety fo elements to create the right texture for neon light to “play with.” She says that material can range from “paint to washers, to acrylic rods and spheres, mirrors and chains, fake gemstones, beads, scrub cloth, electrical tape… you name it… nothing is safe.”

Thematically her current series It’s Always Something, serves as a commentary “about the increasing challenges we all face just doing typical activities like paying bills, almost getting hacked, unexpected aches, illnesses, traffic, the cost of everything, the list goes on and on.”

Currently, Price is exhibiting at Diversions Fine Arts in the Manhattan Beach gallery’s exhibition Midsummer, but she has plenty of other opportunities to show ahead, from an art fair in Oregon to a solo show at a downtown Los Angeles.  Regardless of wehre she is showing, the artist’s work is always as fresh, vibrant, and alive as she is herself.

“Each tube I bend can be considered custom because it is. I can’t duplicate most of the tubes I create. My moods change so my conversation with the tubes change. As my skills develop, I do new moves and can’t go back to what I was.” She notes that “Neon light is a peaceful calming energy. It is different from a painting; activating it involves plugging it into an electrical outlet just like you would do with a floor lamp.”

And yet so much more beautiful, experiential, and lustrous. To see Price’s literally and figuratively brilliant new series, is not to be “blinded by the light” but to be enLIGHTened by it.

Midsummer, with Price’s lustrous neon, is on display through July 26th. Open house at Diversions Fine Arts, 12-4 Saturday July 25th; artists talk/closing reception July 26th, 1-3. DFA is located at 1069 N. Aviation in Manhattan Beach.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Linda Sue Price and Genie Davis

Artist Susan Ossman Joins Concept with Emotion

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With conceptualization as strong as her brilliant colors and swirling shapes, painter Susan Ossman says that literally “everything and anything” inspires her.  “Inspiration may seem like a one-off event or emotion—but the artistic process deepens through many micro-sparks. The process involves focusing ideas and energies, intelligent design and choice of media, scale or collaborators, these have to produced micro-sparks and involve self critique and dis-inspiration or even desperation to make the work,” she relates.

Ossman describes her work as having developed into several decades of distinct bodies., noting that despite the changes to her art, “certain features prevail across subjects and styles- an attentiveness to the centrality of movement, and thus to rhythm, including in how color contributes to the ‘beat’ of a painting or installation.”

She recalls vividly reading the words of art historian Pierre Francastel, who claimed that “‘all images are in movement’ many years ago.” This artist views this statement as “a key to understanding what I am trying to develop artistically and intellectually.”

Asked what if anything has changed for her in her art career over the years, Ossman finds this a question to ponder. “It is difficult to answer this question since I have been painting as far back as I can recall: the oldest examples I have of my work are watercolor portraits from 1971, when I was 11 or 12. So many things have changed in me and in the world: I would have to write a book to answer this question. Indeed, I did write a book Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork, a memoir of Anthropology and Art,” she explains. The book was published by Routledge in 2021.

While her preferred medium is oil, she also works with “acrylic and watercolor or paper, seeds and thread, depending on the project. For installations I combine materials, often working with organza, paper, photographs and dyes,” she says, adding that “Besides visual art, writing is my primary practice.I also work with bodily movement, voice and words in performance.”

According to Ossman, thematically she is focusing on “a series called Gather Wood, Gather Words that explores the human conundrums of our relationship to other living beings, particularly in the context of climate change.”

She has created a transnational network working on this theme which includes projects in India, Brazil, the UAE and USA, as well as in Morocco, where she presented an exhibition and developed a performance with local art troupe Moumkin (possibility) at the Museum of the Tangiers American Legation in 2024.

“The project continues with the production of a play this summer by the New Views theatre called “Planet First” by William R. Duell which was developed through our joint research in Virginia’s Shanendoah Valley,” she adds.

Currently, Ossman has an exhibition at Diversions Fine Arts that includes a spectacular, massive orange-hued diptych among other works. Once that exhibition concludes at the end of July, she will be “developing my Lifeworks project, which uses bio-ethnographic techniques to produce artworks about the life experiences of other people. This relates to the presentation I plan to give at Diversions Fine Arts in the near future along with artist Julianne Allison,” she says.

Ossman is never one to rest on her laurels. “I am planning an exhibition in 2027 in Virginia related to the Gather Wood, Gather Words project; I am writing an e-book called Projects of Art Ethnography with fellow artist/anthropologist Lydia Nakashima Deggarod.”

If that isn’t enough, next year she will be organizing a meeting in Florence, Italy of her collective of serial migrant artist/scholars,  The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop. She has directed the workshop since 2013. “We develop programs on migration involving integrated research, exhibitions and performances. We are working on a partnership with the NYU global network to develop our work in Italy, and beyond, in a wide range of sites around the world.” More informations about this fascinating project can be found here. 

Summing up her work, with its sweeping lines, magical sense of movement, and illuminating, brilliantly rich palette, Osmman says simply, “It is a lyrical joining of concept and emotion.” And a beautiful one to behold.

View Ossman’s work in Midsummer, now at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach. Artist talk and closing reception will be held on July 26th. DFA Gallery is located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd.

  • Genie Davis, images by Genie Davis and Susan Ossman