Chromatic Wonder and Pitch Perfect Composition: Photographic Artist Jeffrey Sklan

Posted on by Diversions LA
From faces to flowers,  Jeffrey Sklan is a photographic artist who makes his visions bloom. The artist says that implausible or not, “almost everything inspires me at this point. I have set it up that way. First, the obvious: unique light and beauty surrounds us in Los Angeles. I watch almost every sunrise and every sunset. There is an endless cascade of interesting faces and talented people to observe and create portraiture with.”
Sklan notes that past perceptions are coming to the forefront for him as an artist today. “Increasingly, ideas that had their roots in a moment or season years ago have been providing inspiration. It is not nostalgia, it is perspective. And that can only come with time and distance. Revisiting the work of  artists who contributed to my aesthetic is a bottomless well. Likewise, the young artists with whom I collaborate or envy– so many talented people are doing beautiful and thoughtful work.”
On the same subject, it is no accident that his work seems to provide an almost musical catharsis for the viewer. It’s a visual soundtrack to joy and existence. “Music is my wellspring for emotional content,” Sklan attests.
The artist’s work has gone through many changes over the years. “For the past ten years or so, I deliberately have tried new things, new techniques, and reworked the classical portraiture styles that are my foundation. My preference is still simple, unaffected portraiture or botanicals. But, I consciously take different roads to get there and to avoid getting stale,” he explains. “Stasis is death for creativity.”
According to Sklan, he works in medium format cameras. “Mostly they are digital but film is still important for certain instances. I don’t care about the gear or the technology – the priority is actualizing my intuition.”
He is deeply involved in many upcoming projects. “I’m very excited about the next few books that are in varying stages of layout – and sharing them with a (hopefully) wide audience. Restarting my artists’ portrait project is a priority, also. Later in autumn, I will be returning to a botanical project and building out a dedicated space for it. I need to find a representative that can keep up with me,” he stresses.
Sklan describes his work as “originating in my heart, which is is my north star. Hopefully, it both resonates with others and finds new homes. Art is like a favorite meal: best when shared, not when hoarded.”
Come feast and share the artist’s stunning botanicals at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery August 1st through 30th. Opening reception is the 1st from 4-7; regular gallery hours are 12-4 Sunday-Thursday, and the closing reception will be held August 30th from 1-3. Stay tuned for information about a book sale and signng for the artist as well.
– Genie Davis; images provided by the artist

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.

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