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

Quantum Beauty in Quantum Matter at Matter Studio Gallery

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Quantum Matter, which closed at Matter Studio Gallery April 19, was a lush, exciting intermingly of five contemporary artists’ immersive work.  The exhibition included multiple works in mixed media, oil and acrylic painting, collage, and sculpture by artists Susan Ossman, Angelica Sotiriou, Monica Marks, Karena Massengill, and Sandra Vista.

The exhibition explored each artist’s own unique vision of all things connected, great and small. As a scientific definition, quantum matter can be topological and refer to emergent order and exotic properties. These artists each expressed and experienced such, from the vastness of the lines, conjoined brush strokes, and brilliant hues of international artist Susan Ossman to the lush and intensely lovely abstract spiritual landscapes of Angelica Sotiriou to the landscapes of desert, raw earth, and sky of Monica Marks, these artists exhibit vast and fascinating vistas that speak to a rich accumulation of the proportional or quantum energy of the world. For sculptural artists Karena Massengill and Sandra Vista, matter is an infinite use of materials as diverse as beading and gourds for Vista and fine metal works in amazingly detailed shapes from Massengill.

Among the many standouts in the exhibition is Susan Ossman’s oil on canvas “Chergui,” left above, a rush of red wind and pastel light soaring in across the desert of a region, or perhaps a heart.

Also from Ossman is the glorious “One and Many,” a swirling conjoining of blue and orange that evokes the heart of a flower, the intertwined cosmic and natural world, and the conflicts and comparisions within each living being.

Monica Marks’ use of found materials both defines and enhances her work, which here features the language, losses, and love she finds and has for the desert. Her mixed media ” House with Green Trim” uses fragments of wood and metal found near the desert Wonder Valley, Calif. homestead which she has painted. She is fascinated by the abandoned dreams of desert homesteads, and treats these sites, and the remanents of objects such as Del Monte branded cans, with revererance. Small and lovely salvaged objects receive new life in color and form, such as the rainbow paints illuminating “Salvaged Traces Series 10” and the colors of the sunset that form the backdrop to the circles of crushed cans in “Sunset Circles.”

Like Marks, Karena Massengil often works with salvaged material, creating undulating and exciting metal sculptures such as “Billabong,” which depicts environmentally impacted birds, and is shaped from repurposed stainless steel, enamel, wood, mirror fragments and feathers.  Leaves danced in a updraft in her “Joyful Dance,” a colorful stainless steel canvas utilizing oils. Always tantalizingly inventive, Massengil uses her work as a way to express both ecological concerns and political ones.

 

Vista also repurpsoes her wall sculptures, using zipper tabs to create wildly deep sculptural forms that have a deep and shimmering texture. The four long panels of “Museum Horizon” are skyscraper-like in shape, shimmery in gold and grounded in dark grey tabs. Her beaded gourds pay homeage to the death of a loved one; named for the southwest region they represent in style, these meticulously beaded works reflect upon characters such as “Pistachio Mary.”

Painter Angelica Sotiriou revels in light, the spiritual, and a passionate joy for and concern about the natural world. Her large scale, multi-layered canvases such as her acrylic work “Through a Glass Darkly #5” are filled with a luminosity that goes beyond the canvas and radiates. Like many of her works, the effect of her layers creates a kind of pearled opalesence. Smaller scale acrylic and mixed media works such as “Hiraeth #6” shine with rivulets of gold leaf in the presentation of a sanctified breath.

Jenny Hager’s colors are often bold and bright: lime green, canary  yellow, electrifying orange. Working in lines, shapes, patterns, and “monsters and monuments” as she explains, the artist adds further depth and precision to her acyrlic work by taping the canvas. Hager’s appropriately named “Gang of Glee” is a burst of gold and pale purple that brings an explosion of pleasure to the viewer’s gaze. “Cascade” is a meadow of chatreuse through which dreams wade deep.

Each artist’s work is galvanizing on its own, but when combined, of course, the work becomes “quantum.”  The quantum world may defy conventional logic, but creates its own, intense, magnetic language, as do the artists in this beautiful, seminal exhibition. The exploration of the visionary and the unseen, the massive in terms of emotion, brush stroke, sculpted forms, small elements made large when conjoined all comprises the mystical, magical work in this exhibition. The unexpected and the uncanny, the infinite and the minute are all encompassed in a collection of lustrous work.

While the exhibition is no longer viewable live, the works can be studied and purchased online.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

Landscapes of the Mind – Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa

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   Landscapes of the Mind – Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa

                                                                   Nancy Kay Turner 

Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything.
Albert Einstein

The earth has music for those that listen.
William Shakespeare

Thresholds, thoughtfully curated by Genie Davis, brings together five artists, Eileen Oda Leaf, Hung Viet Nguyen, Angelica Sotiriou, Linda Sue Price, and Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, whose artworks reference the elements of air, water and earth. Working across different mediums such as oil and acrylic painting, mixed-media drawing, neon and 3-D printed sculpture, these artists create landscapes that take us from the depths of underwater reefs to gently rolling hills, jagged mountains, and aerial views of land both icy and green, moving engagingly from the micro to the macro. These five artists present landscape as a state of mind rather than an actual place by creating romantic dreamscapes that are idealized versions of nature.

Both Hung Viet Nguyen and Eileen Oda Leaf invent inviting scenarios, jam-packed with flowers, trees and plants with highly textured surfaces. While Nguyen literally sculpts and incises thickly applied oil paint, creating ridges and crevasses that illuminate his forms in his Sacred Landscape series, Oda Leaf adds actual painted materials to her pieces, as in “Desert Plateau,” laying them out in a regular simplified pattern that recall embroidered Folk Art hangings. Both painters present bucolic unspoiled scenes where the sun always shines, the grass is green, the water is pure and there are rarely people visible. While Nguyen’s paintings focus on the majestic and mysterious, bringing the viewer on a spiritual journey, Oda Leaf’s work focuses on recognizable spots such as piers, desert and forests which she transforms with her lavish color palette. Nguyen and Oda leaf are masterful colorists whose palette and paint handling echo both the Impressionists and the Symbolists.

The sculptors Linda Sue Price and Snezana Saraswati Petrovic use industrial and technological materials such as neon, 3-D printing and augmented reality to create compelling works that challenge our perceptions of the environment. Price’s jaunty neon works evoke both the down to earth world of plants in “Snake Beans” and “Kapeeno,” and aerial views of cities and freeways in “The Other Side of the Story. ” The festive colors and the surprising movement of the neon itself suggests cars moving on a freeway or even the gurgling equipment of a mad scientist, making these works especially lively.

Petrovic’s tiny, jewel-like 3-D printed “Pas De Deux” and “Coral Song” are poetic recreations of coral reefs that the artist not only imagines or re-imagines but ones that she has seen on her many dives. Each delicate translucent piece looks lit from within glowing, lace-like, and seeming to sway. Petrovic, whose works are conceptual, continues her use of 3-D printer technology along with augmented reality in her Sprawling LA series. These two pieces paradoxically look both macro (aerial view) and macro (view of the ocean floor). If one downloads the ARTIVIVE app on one’s smartphone, one can view the AR image that appears over the physical 3-D digital print. A frenetic Los Angeles freeway appears over one landscape and a serene ocean view with a seagull flying in the sky appears over the other. Petrovic alludes here to man’s destruction of the ecosystem and what is being destroyed.

 

Angelica Sotiriou’s works on paper and canvas are highly abstracted and poetic. Her large- scale mixed media painting “Scala, Divine Ascent,” highlights striations between earth and the heavens that are delineated, moving from earth tones to blue sky and to a glowing beyond. A simplified gold leaf tree reaches upwards towards the stars, perhaps a symbol of growth and transcendence.

Nature is clearly the star in Thresholds – bountiful, fecund, benevolent, a treasure to behold. Humans rarely appear and when they do, they are tiny specks in the immense universe – small and insignificant. They seem newly formed and not yet dangerous to the planet. There are no cars, planes, buses, cruise ships or tourism. This earth is still a paradise, unspoiled and pristine. Clearly a balm for a troubled soul.

And what is the threshold suggested by the title? Is it the precipice we find ourselves on? The tipping point or moving from the now to the point of no return? Is it the portal one steps through from the present into the future, from the known into the unknown? From what could be into what is? Uncertainty swirls about us daily but in this exhibition, Davis offers us beauty, serenity and abundance. Perhaps this is also a gentle call to action – a reminder of what might be lost if we don’t preserve what we have while we still have it.

– Nancy Kay Turner; photos: Nancy Kay Turner, Genie Davis, Dani Dodge 
Pasadena, CA.

Thresholds Are Opening

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Hung Viet Nguyen, Angelica Sotiriou, Eileen Oda, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic,  Linda Sue Price each create their own unique Thresholds – visionary points of entering or beginning in a new exhibition opening September 20th in Hermosa Beach.

From lush oil and acrylic landscapes and portals to potent abstract neon art and other worldly 3D printed sculptures of flora and fauna, each artist’s vision shapes a lush new world, one that speaks to the beauty of the earth, the sea, the spiritual, joy and loss.

While the artists themselves did not collaborate, the exhibition is very much collaborative, allowing visitors to view a range of special and secret worlds, from stunning clifftop waterfalls to lush green and gold oceans, astonishing skies and sunsets, the corals of a watery world, and hypnotic neon.

Each of the five exhibiting artists have combined their gifts to create transcendent gateways to places that shape visions to cherish and contemplate, expressing the beauty of nature and the wonder of the unknown, creating beautiful and visceral works of the earth, sea, and heavens, shaping mysterious and magical landscapes to enjoy, explore, and contemplate.

Nguyen’s compelling, labor intensive investigations of oil paint reveal a methodical mastery of textures., suggesting the influence traditional art forms such as woodblock prints, East Asian scroll paintings, ceramic art, mosaic, and stained glass, with his ultimate expression entirely and inventively contemporary. He offers a series of small works and three larger canvasses, some of which incorporate humans into his rich and intricate paintings.

Oda focuses here on breathtaking landscapes that express her lifelong love of nature, a spiritual and passionate love both sweepingly impressionistic and realistic. From entirely original desert vistas to dazzling sea cliffs and brilliantly colored forests, her works entirely befit her belief that art is an expession of the soul itself, exuding an exciting depth.

Sotiriou works with layered, contemplative abstact images that serve as portals of light and spirit. From small scale, mystical and dream-like images to a fast, dazzling work riven with gold light, she says that work express expresses the feeling that she is a witness to conversations between heart, hand, and mind. Resonant and deep, these works are astonishingly contemplative.

Price works in neon, creating entirely unique abstract shapes that she bends without a pattern, free form.  Brilliant with color and light, she expresses thew ays in which people make sense of the world around them, with change as the only constant and our response to that change shaping our personal thresholds and lives both external and internal – always driven by light.

Petrovic’s work is both stunning and intimate, flora and fauna of the sea are shaped from incredible 3D, recycled plastic and bioplastic. Here she offers radiant corals, augmented reality images, and even a full table display of her work, treasures of sea and earth shaped by her imagination, based on both her personal observations of nature and her research of symbolic meanings.

Inviting viewers into this immersive and lustrous world is my great pleasure as its curator. The exhibition’s festive opening reception is September 20th from 5-8 p.m. at the Gallery of Hermosa, located at 138 Pier Ave. in Hermosa Beach.

An artist’s talk will take place in person and online October 9th at 6 p.m. Regular gallery hours are 11-4 Thursday-Sunday; with a closing event TBA on October 17th.

Go ahead, come and cross these thresholds!

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the exhibiting artists