Enjy the "Juxtapositions" Exhibition of work by Stuart Roddy, Cathy Staker, Lyle Newby & Jacob Stouffer
Stuart Roddy
Much like poetry, art fills the void where simple words fail to describe accurately our thoughts and emotions”. Those are the thoughts I have when I tried to put words what art means to me. Growing up in Laguna Beach California I found love of being outdoors, sports and creating art while my parents were busy being a part of the corporate world and found the Laguna Beach College of Art and Design, which was a bus ride away from our house. This school became a foundation of learning about art in my teenage years. Saturdays and Weekday nights were a time to learn about drawing and painting after school. Later in college I worked in several mediums including oil, acrylic, pastels, egg tempera and etching while attending the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana, earning a degree in Art Education with a minor in painting. Once I graduated, I researched the egg tempera medium. These egg tempera paintings would take weeks to finish, but this labor of love developed a looser approach to painting. Many of the accidental and random brushstrokes became as important as the strokes that pushed realism. My compositions are planned out meticulously, but the color and brushwork remained loose. The value of painting shifts between control and improvisation. In recent paintings, the color pallet has become more expansive and expressive. The paintings embody the landscape and my emotional response to the landscape. Brushwork is loose but specific and always pursuing the essence of the subject matter. 
Cathy Staker
Cathy resides in Sterling, Illinois. She is a Contemporary Landscape artist. She began working with Acrylics, then graduated to oils. Staker's artistic values celebrate natural light, shadow, color, and plein-air visions that inspire every brush stroke. Her art graces poetry books and has been displayed in galleries near Sterling. Staker takes inspiration from Andrew Teschler and Peter Monsted. She is a self-taught artist who has spent years drawing and painting. She honed her skills and developed her own unique own techniques and paints in both acrylics and oil. Her work is available online and at NCIARTworks until February 5th. |
Lyle Newby
In his young thirty-six years of the study, practice and exploration of art, Lyle Newby combines the ageless technique of artists: That of innovation in media. With the modern person’s desire to reduce the footprint of life and the material left behind time, Newby delivers. With a conscientious insight to the form of useful material debris, items forgotten or thought of as having no further purpose, Newby seizes his opportunities to retake what the modern world once offered—artifacts for some future archaeologists. He integrates them to create lines, shapes, forms, curves, texture and the splendor of his own colors, to create canvas with dimensions. Some of those dimensions get raised or embedded, but they all tell his own style of story by visual. These paintings and canvas reliefs, these demi-sculptures, make their own impression of stories in life, and provide an audience with either a warm, subjective aesthetic of emotional recall, or bring a cool, fresh enjoyment of intelligent insight that embraces the new stage of the world beginning in its art. The purpose of which the audience has yet to divine by its own experience. At this point of life and in its enduring change, Lyle Newby belongs truly to himself, and his work inhabits a realm of this world that everyone shares. Seeing the new era of the super-real in painting and materials, and how one person, one artist, and many audiences, attach each to the other, the paintings cause a rethinking. Whether or not one believes that purpose and meaning in the material existence can or cannot transform itself toward a better whole, in making the once old one Qs into a brand reformed, Lyle Newby adds his contribution to this speculation in his current work. Specifically, what Lyle Newby offers comes in the form of an opportunity to Qescape, for minutes or moments, out of the desperation of collapse, and into a conscious use of the world, one that might possibly enhance the role of art and audience in intelligent evolution. 
Jacob Stouffer
Jacob resides in the Princeton area and creates his thoughtful works of abstract art with his partner in life and art and their numerous dog buddies. He concentrates on depicting joyful expressions of the images in nature and life that he finds all around him. Most of his work is created in acrylic mediums. He and his partner have begun experimenting with AI-generated art and offering workshops through NCIARTworks gallery to introduce concepts and methods of interacting with this new digital art frontier. |