New Artist Spotlight: Christopher Lyman, Malia Pettit, Jared Sussman, Piotr Antonow and Renea Menzies
Every Thursday at 1PM, we welcome a batch of new artists and artwork to our Ugallery family. This series of blog posts highlights each week's new artists, sharing a bit about their work and highlighting one of our favorite pieces of theirs.
Our new artists this week are Christopher Lyman, Malia Pettit, Jared Sussman, Piotr Antonow and Renea Menzies. To learn more about each of them, read on below. And, if you'd be so kind, please leave them a nice comment on their profile pages to welcome them to the Ugallery community!
Christopher Lyman. Orleans, Massachusetts
Christopher's photographs are explorations of what he calls "the built environment" around us. He works to capture a sense of aloneness, calmness and order in urban spaces that are typically crowded or chaotic. This solitude allows for a more personal connection with the physical city itself and provides a counterpoint to the frenetic restlessness. For Christopher, photography helps him better appreciate and love the urban condition.
Malia Pettit. West Hollywood, California
Malia is driven by the idea of idealized beauty. For most of her paintings, she begisn with source materials from glossy images of women in fashion and glamour magazines. In addition to painting these women, she also paints birds. Malia says "I feel the two are related in some way – perhaps in their fragility and fleeting presence." Her subjects convey a specific kidn of vulnerability - the intimidated awareness of a person in an unfamiliar space.
Malia uses loose brushwork to "liberate" the paint and allow for the unexpected to occur. About her aesthetic style, she says "I want my paintings to be about paint, so that they can only exist as paintings and not in any other medium."
Jared Sussman. San Francisco, California
Jared leaves his work completely open to interpretation, explaining "my feelings in regard to my artwork are always changing. I expect everyone to see something different." What can be said about his mixed media pieces is that they are ambivalent - critical while at the same time humorous, playful while terrifying. To create this scenes, he pairs a variety of media (iPhones, dollar bills, matches) with a bright, cartoonish San Francisco street aesthetic.
Piotr Antonow. Morton Grove, Illinois
Piotr Antonow uses bright colors and bold line work to create his impressions of people. He blends realistic nudes with warm colors and moments of abstraction, taking the traditional studio nude and infusing it with new life.
Renea Menzies. Houston, Texas
Renea Menzies creates her modern abstract pieces with a technique called “sculpted oil”. Using a palette knife, she swirls colors onto the canvas, teasing the paint into botanical patterns. Her molded flowers have a thick buttery appearance like ribbon candy and can be as much as a couple of inches high.
