Amy Thornberry Takes on a World of Color and Pattern

Posted on by Diversions LA

Currently exhibiting a solo collection in Transformations, now at Diversions Fine Arts, artist Amy Thornberry works with a sense of devotion and delight in her creative work, viewing the manipulations of her materials as a playful way to pray and meditate, while transforming basic elements of paper and pigment and other mediums into beautiful creativity. Saying that she views her works as “portals into places where we may pause, wonder, and reflect,” she also relates that her knowledge of the Buddhist practice of tonglen – sending and taking –  remnds her of the ways in which, through art “we can move from the dark into the light.”

Her work dances with that light, with color, and with pattern and texture that is both exultant and lush. Asked what inspires her the most as an artist, Thornberry replies that “the nature of being, art history, current events, history, nature, and beauty” are all inspirations for her, as are both art materials and found objects. In short, both material and meaning are the core and purpose of her artwork.

Her practice has evolved over the years, resulting in many dynamic changes to the work, which is currently awash in layers, and dreamily vivid. “I used to lash out like say Franz Kline. Very fast and I had no patience to mix colors,” she relates. “Now I tinker and massage a surface endlessly.  I went to the opposite extreme of perhaps too much patience,” she laughs.

“There was a time when I had a complete aversion to making paintings and I only wanted to make installation pieces. I liked hanging and using the entire space which I think came from my background as a theater, set maker, and movie set maker. And  with my background as a competitive swimmer, I had so much physicality. I felt very confined with just a rectangle, and I think this latest body of work the framed shadowbox grew out of a way of processing that.”

Her insightful and meditative work is at least in part a result of the fact that she “thinks a lot in between studio sessions about pieces and my next steps usually come to me early in the morning, upon waking or when I am practicing yoga.”

She says that having “renounced panic” she has also “developed a love of mixed neurtrals and pastel colors,” a palette that her “younger self did not prefer.”

Thornberry works in a variety of mediums. “I use water-based paints as well as oil paints but no solvents, just linseed oil and marble dust. I also love, love, love cutting into work as well, and collaging with other papers and fabrics. I have a huge collection of fabrics and papers. ” She adds that “lately I have been craving drawing as well with colored pencil, conte or ink…I have a love a little bling and metallic shine.”

Thematically, she explains that she’s “a very protective mama bear/big sister and cannot NOT think [and] be influenced by things I find unjust or hurtful to humanity. Making art and getting lost, creating reverie, is a way I think to make sense of things, to process them, and to transform them.”

According to the artist, “I guess its a therapeutic way to use my love of formalism and materiality.” She jokes that she is “very practical,” after all.

That said, she attests that “My aim is for this reverie and creation of a refuge if you will, [one that exists] not only during the making of the work but for as long as it can be looked upon. Staring at art is so much easier than dealing with all the remote controls and trying to decide what to watch on all the streaming services. I am a joking a little,” she says, adding that these are her honest feelings about art, and observation.

In short, Thornberry recognizes the poetry and purpose of art as having a deeper import and more peaceful and involving outcome in viewing it than endlessly watching streaming “content.” Art is far deeper than content: it is creation, and a profound one for her.

With that in mind, she is currently “reorganizing my life in order to move to a bigger studio and work on some larger
canvases,”  a plan and move that she is very excited about pursuing.

She hopes viewers of her work can see that “even [having] one art piece hanging in their home is like a mini-opera or a taking trip. Support your artist friends, buy their work, and sit back and enjoy the show and trip.” In other words, vacation and immerse yourself every day if you wish, simply by owning a beautiful work of art, and taking a lifetime filled with imaginative and fascinating visceral travel through the mind, eye, and soul.

Viewers can certainly start their travels with Thornberry April 11th through May 3rd at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery, 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach, or reach out to her directly for a studio visit to explore her dazzlingly delightful and layered work.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by the artist

Transformations Are Headed Your Way

Posted on by Diversions LA

Transformations features the work of three stellar artists offering abstract works as unique as each artist.  Opening this weekend at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery,  Amy Thornberry, Connie Saddlemire, and Sharon Weiner each present stunningly original visions of vibrant art that speak to the promise of change, delight, and insightful gaze.

Thornberry manipulates her mixed media and painted materials into portals that cause pause, wonder, and reflection.

Drawn to the Buddhist practice of tonglen, which means both sending and taking, through her art she moves viewers from the dark into the light with often ethereal, layered, and vividly colorful works that dance with meaning and a magical sense of motion. Working with elements of collage, acrylic paint, and layers, each piece resonates a sense of both inner peace and mysterious renewal.

To experience Saddlemire’s complex, geometrically abstract work is like entering a mesmerizing and intricate puzzle or taking a step into a brilliantly ordered wonderland.

Experimentation and innovation lead her into a world that’s filled with compelling change and woven patterns that each explore a special story. Her photography is exceptional and precise, creating a painterly sense of pattern and perfection.

Sharon Weiner’s abstracts are alive with light and color, lush and shifting, embodying both sensation and thought. As an artist, she gives form to her own lived experiences and to a profound sense of awareness itself.

Describing her work as visualizing self-revelation, viewers will find her work calls to and reveals meaningful emotions within themselves. These are astonishing works, some large in scale, some small, each unfolding like the petals of a flower or the colors of the universe as seen from space.

Both individually and combined, these artists’ works embody every transformation that April promises, unfolding a sense of awe, waiting to embrace each viewer with joy, and as T.S. Eliot wrote “…mixing/Memory and desire, stirring.”

It’s a time to celebrate new growth, and a time to remember the past. A time for Transformations. In today’s fraught environment, isn’t it time to transform? Bringing the color, light, texture, and emotion of these splendid works close is a tonic for these times.

 

The exhibition is on view starting Saturday April 11th, with a reception from 4-7 p.m.; the artist’s talk and closing will be May 3rd from 1-3 p.m., with regular gallery hours 12-4 Thursday-Sunday or by appointment.  Diversions Fine Arts is located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and as provided by the artists

 

Antidote Through Art: The Work of Gregg Fleishman

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Antidote Through Art: The Work of Gregg Fleishman – Genie Davis

Los Angeles-based architect and designer Gregg Fleishman is exhibiting Antidote, a dazzling collection of functional art, collectible design, and large geometric installations just in time for LA Climate Week. The exhibition, curated by Jojo Abot, opens Thursday April 9th, presenting four decades of Fleishman’s work in geometric innovation in architecture, sculpture, and functional design.

The exhibition serves as an entry point to Fleishman’s structural research, work he began in 1972.

According to Fleishman, “I spent a long time studying how to build with geometry. We have a lot to show in that area,” he says of his work. “The last few years I’ve simplified some of my methods. I’ve been able to come with a whole range, a whole new series of avenues of exploration. We are showing different geometric worlds here in this exhibition.”

Asked to describe those worlds, he notes “One is based upon a truncated octahedron, another is a cube, and a third is a rhombic dodecahedron.” He asserts that while each is designed to fill a space, his true inspiration is “seeing how to do more with less, how to make sense of and to make the best output of geometry.”

Fleishman describes all geometric forms, and indeed, all geometry itself as “considered sacred geometry in a way, determined by how you use it and relating to it as something to be inspired by.” He relates that “There is very little work done in the 3D realm with geometry. There is a lot of 2D work, but in a building sense, sacred geometry has not been used, not in the sense that it is used to construct things in that area.”

All the same, Fleishman is using it. “We have the potential to build with these forms and I want to import these to people.  What I am working on, what I am showing, these are a framework for further building and exploration, furthering the ways of working in this world.”

As a designer and architect, he says that he’s “made great strides in the past few years. My purpose is to elevate our consciousness in this new framework. It seems like with [the current] state of the world we perhaps need to do as much as we can as soon as we can in that area.”

He specifically desires to bring the world of sacred geometry “into our present reality.” Fleishman wants the viewers of his exhibition to “come away with an appreciate of the ability to create these geometric objects. There are so many uses for them, major uses.” He points out that “so far they are used as temporary structures in the festival world, but these forms have potential for housing as well.  Their art and beauty in the festival world is basically designed as an adult playground, but that play can be transferred into a living environment.” He adds that “This kind of playfulness would improve the state of world. It would be an antidote to the poisons all around you in the world today.”

Along with these structures, Fleishman is also exhibiting furniture as an “early demonstration of what is possible using these forms.  I have been doing this kind of work forty years and longer, creating work” that ranges from functional furniture to inhabitable structures.

Antidote activates the gallery space as an immersive environment using geometric thinking.  The exhibition introduces Fleishman’s groundbreaking structural research to a new generation, highlighting the continued evolution of his practice.

He sees the exhibition as a “spark, a glimpse into what geometry makes possible,” Fleishman enthuses.

He describes the chairs on exhibit as “studies in invention that led to larger structural work…There’s something inherently mysterious about polyhedral geometry, whether through sacred proportion or simply the complexity of understanding space in three dimensions. For me, the goal has always been to create work that is both playful and functional—structures that grow out of a long evolution of methods and that have the potential to change how we experience space and how we live.”

The exhibition features three works from Fleishman’s Otic Series, a group of pioneering modular assemblies such as “Otic Oasis,” “Man Base Pistil,” and “Pomo-Paradise,” each of which explore space-filling construction systems. Central to the exhibition are structural installations that reveal Fleishman’s long-term investigation into modular building systems and spatial environments, such as his. “Return of the Caterpillar,” which is a modular structure composed of interlocking geometric segments, that demonstrates Fleishman’s belief that architecture itself can behave as a living system that’s capable of growth, transformation, and adaptation.

“Mayan Tower (Junior)” is a vertically stacked geometric structure, that examines human-scale construction through interlocking modular components that are efficient, transportable, and can be capably assembled without complex tools or specialized labor.

Fleishman’s “Octo II” is a faceted geometric environment constructed using repeating octagonal elements. The work demonstrates structural repetition that creates both spatial rhythm and architectural strength.

Combined, each of these works serves as an exploration of modular construction versus standard building systems.

His sculptural furniture work with chairs presented as a design challenge using the artist’s “panel puzzle” system of precision cut plywood components. They are assembled without nails, screws, or glue to produce lightweight but structurally resilient furniture. Works such as the “Skyrocker” and “Broadway” are crafted from Baltic and European birch plywood.

As part of Los Angeles Climate Week, Fleishman’s installation at Sky Portal X will be included in the city’s cultural programming. Antidote opens Thursday, April 9, 2026, from 6:00–9:00 pm at Sky Portal X in Downtown Los Angeles and will remain on view through Spring 2026, along with public programming and conversations exploring the intersections of design, architecture, and technology.

Sky Portal X is located at 201 S Broadway in DTLA.

  • Genie Davis, photos provided by the artist and Evolution Media

 

 

 

 

Debbie Korbel is Living the Dream

Posted on by Diversions LA

Debbie Korbel is Living the Dream by Genie Davis

Debbie Korbel‘s mystical, marvelous solo exhibition Living the Dream, now at Riverside College Quad Gallery in Riverside, is an exciting, enchanting sculptural show filled with wit, poetry, and a profound sense of grace.

Entering Korbel’s world is like taking a walk through both the artist’s dreams and your own. Horses made of wire and found metal parts are ready to gallop across a wild prairie; Frankenstein and Jesus are merged into one suffering and ecstatic image; flowers burst from an elegiac “Indian Summer,” and an electric blue deer conjures up a vision of beauty and delight.

The artist’s use of unusual materials is exciting and inventive, but it is her sense of motion, through both joy and pain, that is the most unique.

Living the Dream is an apt title for an exhibition that is both dream-like and packed with abundant life. Each work in its own way conveys a sense of yearning, a longing for the dream to continue or shift, for reality to bend. And if anyone could actually bend it, that would be Korbel, whose gift for creation is magically, marvelously slightly off kilter.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition weaves a complex spell of alternative reality, one both intimately recognizable and strangely alien. Individually, each piece has a powerful emotional resonance, a kind of ache to be set free, find happiness, achieve a transformation that might provide both, or neither.

“Night Dreaming” is a glorious image, a deer that is mutant indigo, with patterns of black and beige a part of his painted coat. With purple ears and tree branch antlers from which lustrous pink flowers spring, this lovely young deer is the bringer of spring and hope.

Positioned beside him in the gallery are white-painted trees abloom in their own right with vibrant nesting bluebirds, in a delicate work simply titled “Birds in Trees.”

From this light, joyous focal point along the center wall of the gallery, weightier titles, topics, and materials spread out. Positioned in the middle of the gallery,  “The Call” is exuberant, wild, and brilliantly free. Wire tail flung outward like a flag, head raised, back arched, this is the call to run, to feel the wind, to carry it home.

Next to this beauty stands “Small Talk,” head bowed as if grazing, his perfect dangling tail created from found electrical conduits. Both these fine beasts are sinew and muscle made from a steampunk reality of metal and wire that, once conjoined, becomes more alive than flesh and bone. They stand on bases that are intrinsically created by Korbel to be of one piece with the sculptures themselves, not merely a base but the place on which these mythical creatures could stand. “Small Talk” is poised on what could be the wooden floor of a barn; “The Call” is balanced on what could be part of a road or rail ties.

There is a rich nuance to these horses, each intricate component, whether a factory discard, automotive part, mesh, or metal wire all come together in a kinetic rush to form a coherent, tough, yet delicate whole. “Small Talk” also embodies a poem written by the artist, “Quasimodo Love,” which reads in part “I don’t know how to be more.” And which of us do? And, which of us don’t make ourselves smaller in our own self-talk, sure that love will leave us if we cannot perfect our flaws.

Another equine, “Wired,” proudly poses on a pedestal wearing a crown shaped from a part of a fan, his muscular torso lined with bright yellow wire, a sunshine brightness so galvanizing his title can only speak to it. Encased in a mesh-fleshed body, this young stallion has pool balls as a part of his genitalia.

A different sort of ballsy humor is embodied by “Happiness is a Warm Gun” in which a bright blue man/rabbit throws back his head, quite pleased with himself and his scatologically placed firearm, his title is transcribed on his thigh. While recognizably human, his long rabbit ears and rabbit-hoof feet make his tough-guy posturing as comical as it is deadly.

A full rabbit is the subject of “Who’s Lucky Now, Motherf*@ker?!” Here, positioned on a square open box that could be a rabbit hutch, this is definitely “somebunny” as he dangles a human leg on a key ring, just as once upon a time we might have carried an actual small rabbit’s foot for “good luck.” His slightly psychedelic purple, green, and white patterning and cute wire tail belies an expressive face that’s seen some things. And acted on others.

Turning more seriously toward the human and inhuman condition, “Forsaken” gives us a Christ-like Frankenstein, his halo constructed of amber glass and a part of a fan, his face drawn back in a rictus of both suffering and ecstasy. With a chain dangling against one cheek, this man has suffered as all humans suffer, and perhaps for us as well.

There is a quiet transcendence in the suffering of “Metamorphosis,” as a human man, his face deep in thought, riven with both a cocky boldness and regret, merges into a ragged butterfly. One wing is imprinted with poetry written by Korbel, “I see your lips moving but I can’t hear a sound/I am lost in the cathedral of your eyes.” Is this the kind of terrible, ecstatic morphing of love, or  an ache that hopes to achieve it?

“Wild is My Heart” is the head of an elegant horse, partially turned, with amber glass sparkling near his eyes and a tangled aluminum wire mane. His nostrils flare, his elegant, fiery spirit awaits a freedom he cannot yet achieve.

Other works are just as lovely and inchoate with hope and loss: “The Kiss” gives us conjoined sisters, as restricted as they are, they express a deep tenderness; “Dreaming” gives us a beautiful man growing his ragged angel’s wings; “Flirt” is a teasing woman with an impossible headdress.

Above, “Michael,” is another tender, insightful work.

Regardless of title, whether human, deer, horse, rabbit, or a mythical mix, each of these wonderful, wondrous sculptures glows with a fierce lifeforce that the artist herself embodies. Never losing their sense of humor or their hope for a better world, the dream they live, along with that of their creator, is simply marvelous.

Living the Dream runs through April 6th; Riverside College Quad Gallery is located at 4800 Magnolia Ave. in Riverside.

  • Genie Davis; photographs by LA Art Documents