Exploring Visual Vocabularies | Sunday Selects

July 21, 2024

Collage and Form | Exploring the Visual Vocabularies of Four Artists

Contemporary collage artists like David Skillicorn, Holly Addi, Deborah T Colter, and Lisa Weiss create stunning pieces by playing with shapes and forms. They take images and combine them in unique ways to tell new stories. For example, Skillicorn's work often features dynamic contrasts that draw the eye, while Addi uses abstract forms to evoke emotional responses. Colter's collages explore themes of memory and identity through layered textures, and Weiss creates harmony from seemingly random fragments. These artists use the fragmented nature of collage to craft art that feels fresh and thought-provoking, encouraging viewers to see familiar images in a whole new light.

Lisa Weiss's work is created out of a need to organize and sift through an abundance of paper fragments from past works, the leftovers. Process always leads in her work.. Movements that inform gesture, repetitive mark and pattern making, all are happenings that bring her to this moment. Weiss is always looking for ways to detach from the past and future with a focus on the here and now.

David Skillicorn has been creating luminous abstract paintings for over twenty years. He explores complex spatial and color relationships through the use of texture, organic line, and sensuous fields of color. In mixed media works on canvas, Skillicorn creates sophisticated, intuitive paintings alive with surface texture, lush paint of vibrant colors in bold strokes over atmospheric passages.

Holly Addi creates abstract paintings focused on the philosophy of beauty in imperfection. With a background in psy­chology, Addi examines energy, color, space, and landscape through tempered abstraction. Addi con­siders her practice as a “composition of imperfectionism” By utilizing abstraction, she creates moments by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, providing a space for con­templation. Her works do not reference any particular form, and interpretation becomes multifaceted.Addi has exhibited nationwide, and has been featured in Architectural Digest, My Domain, and Electrify Maga­zine.

Deborah T. Colter is interested in the pure pleasure of form, line, and color. She describes her work as a continual evolutionary journey of discovery. She works with a variety of mixed mediums, collage and acrylic polymer paints building multiple layers on the surface until the piece begins to lead her to its own conclusion. Deborah holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She is widely represented in private and corporate collections throughout the United States and overseas. Deborah lives and works on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.