Karla Winterowd

For thirty years, Sarah Bienvenu's experiences painting and exploring New Mexico's mountains, canyons, and deserts have given her a unique ability to disentangle and interpret these past layers of change. She finds beauty in nature's ability to reveal accidental compositions through patterns and asymmetry: "I look to the land to tell me how best to paint it, using the natural abstract shapes I see." Being attuned to such abstractions--the undulations of a dry riverbed, the jaggedness of rock against sky--is where abstraction becomes detail: detail of texture, detail of shape, detail of light and color and composition.Watercolors provide the perfect medium for matching the immense variation and subtlety of Bienvenu's Subject. A closer look reveals that each individual element, as in nature, harmonizes with the collective whole. Realism is discovered in consonance: from a cast of light to a balance of colors.

Tom Kirby's art interest began at a young age, first by emulating his father, a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter. Kirby draws inspiration for his work from extensive travels throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, and North Africa. His work is distinctly modern yet deeply influenced by past masters, most importantly, Caravaggio, and is a synthesis of expressionistic and minimalist influences.Since the late 1980s, Kirby has exhibited his work nationally and his art can be found in private collections worldwide. He received his B.F.A. in painting from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico in 1989, and later taught printmaking in the college's art department.