New paintings.

Apte Visual Arts, Inc. (a father-daughter team) takes pride in bringing sights from Washington, DC metropolitan area and world far away! Please contact us at aptevisualarts@gmail.com if you would like to purchase Anisha’s paintings or Vijay’s photos. We would also appreciate any feedback and comments by email or in our guest book located at the booth. Thank you for your interest and visit to our booth!

This checkpoint installation was done as part of the Peace Now! exhibition at the Warehouse Gallery commemorating the 5th anniversary of the Iraq conflict.

The wall is meant to divide common space as an arbitrary impediment to normal human flow. I have been pondering "walls" for a long time now -- and there didn't seem to be any other way for me to express my feelings that we make peace now by throwing up walls without building a barricade and experiencing the disruption.

I've invited some graffiti buddies to do their thing on the walls -- and we'll be smashing it down and selling off pieces at the end of Artomatic. Special thanks to Kelly Towles, Tim Conlon, Jazirock, Rei21, Rezist, Amen, RDawg, Queen B. Email me if you want to reserve a piece of the wall.

While painting I play with building, redefining, destroying, covering, and rebuilding structures and boundaries. My work is about the tension between opposing forces like control and surrender, development and nature, resistance and acceptance. I explore my own emotional terrain as I create images that reflect impermanance, struggle, and growth.

I will be previewing work from my new urban series of whimsy, gardens, and street life called "One Mile North, One Mile South." These large oil paintings of Baltimore are set on St. Paul Street, and are "worked up" from preparatory sketches, photos, plein air paintings, and often from multiple "looks" and investigations. The full series will debut in Nov. 2008 at Antreasian Gallery in Baltimore.

My work has been displayed in solo and group shows at the Orchard Gallery (Bethesda, Md.), Diddywopps & Keefer (Monkton, Md.), Maryland Hall (Annapolis, Md.), and the Space Science Telescope Institute (Baltimore, Md.). I am a member of the International Guild of Realism, Oil Painters of America, and the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association. I am a full-time artist specializing in plein air, classical portraiture, landscapes, and still life.

Lara Beaudry Byer is a painter and tile maker. She creates oil paintings, murals and painted tiles using a variety of ceramic finishing techniques. She creates hand cut tiles and molds as well as using sgraffito, mason stains, cloissonne and majolica on bisque and pre-glazed tiles. She enjoys combining mosaic elements in some of her ceramic pieces. Subject matter often includes whimsical people and animals in relationship with their environment. She has recently exhibited her artwork at Strathmore Hall, The Gilchrist Museum of Arts, Friendship Heights Village Center Gallery in Maryland, The Warehouse Gallery in DC, The Arts Upstairs in Phoenicia New York and The Central Library of Arlington, Virginia.

Growing up with both parents being active artists, my unconventional art training began at home. An interest in dream interpretation then drew me to psychology and later to working as a family crisis mediator. I found painting offered insight and expression for the complex and turbulent emotions I encountered in that work. Art became a crucible for the visual representations of dynamic themes in conscious and subconscious material. Images would emerge from lines and shapes, finding their own form. Just as dreams lend themselves to many interpretations, art elicits various responses reveled in self-dialogue.

Moving away from purely figurative, the work with squares is an exploration of narrative within the abstract. The squares together become symbolic of an inner remote dialogue excess-able through the imagination. Dialogue rises from their contrast, from ambiguity, incongruity.

The Cityscapes are a study of duplicity: anonymous, cold, manufactured, but also the homes, cemeteries, the dwelling places of humanity. Using planes of color rather than strict line to form composition. These pieces offer narrative with subtle imagery.

In pursuit of an articulation of representation and abstraction which then inspired my use of crosshatching as a vehicle to composition. Desiring the reintroduction of representation, cranes fulfilled the narrative. As purely
utilitarian tools of creation these kinetic not static cranes are here forced into a new role, incongruent as the subject of creation. The crane is understood in context: movement and impermanence, always suggesting what is coming after. The crane then becomes paintbrush for the city. My crane work explores-- with the narrative of folk, the incongruous harmonies of jazz-- along with the subtleties of our human condition. A marriage of representation and abstraction retaining the narrative both personal and universal.

The vibrant designs bring together vivid colors and distinct patterns, creating images that mirror and project a unique and lively view of the world around us. Ranging from dancing circles and orbits filled with bright yellow and orange hues to black and white rectangles arranged in perfect, illusion-like patterns, my contemporary pieces express the mirth, symmetry and tranquility that coexist in life.

My recent and newest works are acrylic and mixed media on canvas and wood. Recent works explore the themes of loss and separation in the context of the war and life in general. Others from my Eco-series reveal a kind of hope for the future. Newest works explore the persistence of memory and coming of age, complete with the candy-coated accoutrements of childhood. Shown as a body of work, these pieces expose my constant struggle between an acerbic pessimism and my hope for positive change.

The Mobile is a unique blend of engineering and artistry. I believe that a mobile should be more than just a series of repetitive shapes balanced at the end of wires. The structure should be a cohesive composition of form, color, and motion. Each part is essential to the whole, every connection carefully chosen to choreograph the interaction of the various elements, designing by intent instead of necessity. I strive to give each of my sculptures a life of their own, a poetry of motion in space. Sophisticated yet playful, whimsical yet meditative – a tangible expression of infinite possibility.

Andrew Cronan is a 38 year old native of Silver Spring, Maryland. He spent the earlier part of his life as a closet art fanatic, building small mobiles to liven up his cubicle. For the last eight years he has been seriously studying and producing mobiles and other metal sculptures. His current series of figurative animal mobiles is breaking new ground in the genre of mobile sculptures. He has been working as an artist full time for the last four years.

All of these photographs were damaged in some way: overheated film, flawed scan, drastic underexposure. All are more interesting because of it. How many moments in life are flawless? These are captured in all their imperfection. Sometimes the best thing you can make is a mistake.

Just like me, my works are ever changing, from face cast masks to glass masks. I find we all wear masks, at one time or another, so buy the mask...the party will come...

Light is the single most important ingredient
in creating photographs with impact.

Time-honored photographic techniques are combined
with modern technologies in the image making process.

On a much needed trip, I visited a good friend in America’s Southwest. The American Southwest has long attracted artists eager to record its magnificent forms, light, and spirit. Thankfully I brought my camera, because I found inspiration in the most unlikely locations. It takes the vision of an artist, along with the persistence of a hunter to hunt, to shoot, and to capture, these images onto film.

In Utah, I found images that reflect what I perceive of my future: the loneliness I feel as a single man. In New Mexico, I was reminded of the spirit of life and family. Colorado is where I ran into my father, the passionate mechanic.

I feel this exhibit expresses the dearest parts of my childhood and adolescent experiences.

Passion for composition is only part of my life. Passion is my life. I learned passion while watching my father’s passion for the vintage automobile, my mother’s passion for beauty, my family’s passion for life and religion.

There are great photographs waiting to be found everyday. But they are almost never to be found easily. My inspiration in finding beauty in what is vintage or old or things from the past or forgotten years are expressed in my photographs.

These photos scream of past years that have been forgotten, but with the assistance of cameras, lenses and darkrooms, the images come to life and carry on a legacy.

Compassionate words and sayings for life and love, and for the greater good, set to visual art to lift heart and spirit. Whether your purchase is all about you, for you, or all about unconditional love and caring for a child, relative, friend, or colleague, Cindy Engquist's art reaches the emotional touchpoints that make us all feel more at peace with ourselves and our world.

I am very pleased to be showing my work for the very first time. Since childhood, when my father first scribbled onto a piece of paper and told me to transform it into something..art has been more than a passion to me..it is a way to alleviate the emotions in my head..a place to showcase the beauty that I see in simplicity and a picture to capture all the chaos.