Mike Holsomback "Faces and Things" Opens Friday 4/2

opening night reception friday, april 2 5pm - 8pm

 a b o u t    t h i s   e x h i b i t

“Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story...and we all need help in our passage from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.” Bill Moyers here speaks of our birth to death search for personal identity and the help we all need to find that identity. We are born into; raised within; guided toward; pushed toward personal and cultural identities which may remain with us for our entire lives. They become part of the story of our lives, and then the myths which we each create for ourselves, complicates the narrative further. The subjective modern myth and the search for personal identity within 21st century are the themes I will explore further in this new series of paintings. The works in this series were made possible in part by a grant from Create|Here.

a b o u t    t h e    a r t i s t

Holsomback is a well-known artist and art department faculty member at Chattanooga State Community College in Chattanooga, Tennessee. While being the primary painting instructor at Chattanooga State, Mr. Holsomback is also a productive painter himself, having a considerable regional and national exhibition record.  His work has been selected for exhibitions in such venues as: the San Diego Art Institute, the University of Mobile, the Stage Gallery in Merrick, NY, the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, AL, and Nassau College in Nassau, NY. Mr. Holsomback’s paintings and collages are found in the holdings of numerous private, corporate and government collections, including most notably, the corporate law offices of King and Spalding of Atlanta, GA, and the Park Avenue offices of Dr. Jacqueline Dryfoos of New York, NY. He continues to live in north Georgia with his wife and a houseful of rescued cats and dogs, teaching, painting and observing the changing world around him.

Born in rural north Georgia in 1961, Michael Holsomback is the self described son of a son of a white sharecropper, as his father’s parents lived in a string of depression era sharecropper shacks. The fields may have been segregated but the poverty was colorblind. It is through his own veil of poverty, and the illnesses which arise within it, that Holsomback has sharpened his vision as a painter. He has seen and participated in the long and often painful journey of southern cultural evolution.  Holsomback’s passion for art developed early, fostered by the sacrifice and support of his parents, he earned a MFA degree in painting in 1989, and began his teaching career shortly thereafter. 

Closing Reception for 'Eye of The Beholder' is Sat27th

This is the final weekend of Paul Fontana's wonderful collection of eyes and stories. A peculiar assortment of characters from Paul's personal photography of world travels, art markets and public places in-between. Images were transferred on to wood and canvas, some pigment-enhanced before or after printing/transferring., creating a collection as unique as the eyes in each piece.

"Eye of The Beholder" has been a wonderful success for Paul and the gallery. Come celebrate with us on Saturday evening from 6pm-8pm.

Paul Fontana's Eye Of The Beholder thru March 28th

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I see opportunities for photographs constantly.  The minutia of daily life are filled light and shadow, textures and color or the lack of it.

I've often wished for a bionic eye, which would photograph what i'm seeing with a single blink.  My interest in taking pictures of eyes began with photographing my own.  I took part in a photo project called 365 days, in which I had to take a self portrait every day for a year.  Often, the reflection of my own eye was the subject of the daily shot.  The project increased my interest in many aspects of the human face, but none as much as the eye.

I began experimenting with photographic image transfers onto wood after reading online about the transfer properties of acrylic gel media.  Getting a consistently professional outcome proved to be a challenge, but after many trials and errors, I can usually count on being successful with most attempts.  What intrigued me about the process, was that after the paper backing of the photograph was removed, the remaining image layer was so thin as to allow the grain of the wood to show through and become part of the original image.  Though much of the in-between work is repetitious and tedious, the preparing of the photograph and the finished product are most rewarding.

ARTIST BIO

Paul Fontana was born in New York City and lived there until his teen years. He made his way to 23 acres of wooded heaven in Cohutta, Georgia by way south Florida.

He honed his photographic skills as a U.S.N. Photographer’s Mate aboard 2 different aircraft carriers, photographing mostly mundane images of shipboard life with the occasional significantly important events: the Gemini-V recovery being the most notable.

Many decades passed before Paul’s love of photography would give way to painting. After retiring from teaching he has the luxury of balancing his time between the two.

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

Eye of the Beholder consists of image transfers on wood or canvas.  A combination of digital art and straightforward photography is arranged to focus, so to speak, on that most miraculous organ, the eye.  The show is composed of small, single pieces or multiple arrangements on wood and canvas pulled over stretcher bars or blocks of wood and, at times, burnished with acrylic pigment, which adds additional texture.