Jarold Eastman was in attendance and showcased his artwork at the first annual Sizzle Arts Festival that was held on Sept 30, 2018 in Chelsea Manhattan.
Jared is an artist, illustrator and graphic designer. He started painting in 10th grade when he moved to CT. from Venezuela, and was also just learning a new language and navigating a new culture.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Being an artist is about being present in the moment and transforming that instant of existence into a visual communication that inspires, endures and becomes an atmospheric catalyst or wellbeing. What does that mean? That means that my task is not only to look, but to perceive; everyone and everything around me. To translate all that is going on and channel that into the one vibration,the one common denominator that is resonating everywhere at that one instant in time.
My game is to harmonize all of that stimuli, get it down on a two dimensional plane and then shoot it back out into the world. Applying my tools and artistic knowledge, I make all those nuances an enjoyable visible experience. Then I look at it and others look at it and feel something good about it. The product is works of art that contribute to the beauty of the viewer’s environment.
BIO
Since 2013, the year she dedicated her lifelong painting skills to fine art, Lesley Koenig has achieved stellar accomplishments. Her abstracts have been juried into many shows including invitations to international online galleries and also winning an award. So far in 2015, she has been selected for two solo exhibitions. Her inspiration is fueled by many elements; from classical art, architecture, music, nature and observing everyday life. Koenig was born in New York and studied at Parsons School of Design and The Art Students League.
As a professional artist, LESLEY KOENIG goal is to make spaces more beautiful. Choosing high grade, archival, museum grade materials ensures my products endure in beauty and value for generations to come. Email her at: info@lesleykoenigfineart.com re questions on shipping charges on originals or to order custom paintings.
Purchase this CINCO DE MAYO-ORIGINAL painting : HERE
Purchase this SAMBA painting : HERE
Purchase this THROWING CONFETTI painting : HERE
Check out more of LESLEY KOENIG Art Work : Here
I create art because it’s a need–like needing to breathe. Making art has been my favorite activity for as long as I can remember; probably going back before my earliest memory of being given a watercolor set at ag 6. I sat there painting for 12 hours! Hard to believe, but it happened!
My work is colorful, vibrant and energetic. It helps me to put more beauty in the world. That’s my main purpose in life. I’m very fortunate that my work helps not only me but others to connect with that fun, happy, wondrous, bright spark of individuality inside. Original art has timeless, magnetic and magical qualities of providing happiness, inspiration and sense of well being. It’s great to receive so many compliments about how my paintings help others to have, connect and reconnect with positive, pleasurable states of mind and experiences over and over again.
Being a contemporary artist is the path in life that enables the best expression of myself. I work intuitively, picking up colors with no prior thought in mind. In creating each unique piece, I use layers of different mediums, surfaces, tools and techniques.
I strive to create a push-pull of opposites; flat against texture, a color against its opposite, shiny against matte. I love using palette knives, spatulas and whatever different and unconventional tools add to the mix. Using different mediums and varying the tools for different genres is a natural component of my creative process.
There is no intention to develop something with a figurative reference, but this often emerges during the process. This always comes as a surprise and I don’t fight against it. As a former fashion designer and illustrator, I often find this very amusing. From that career, I bring a great sense of line, color, proportion, texture and the skill set to confidently and responsibly research, create and realize products that cater to a diversity of tastes.
Although I embark with no set plan in mind, my instinctive reactions are based on years of being immersed in the arts. Each choice of medium, tools, each mark I put down on the surface, every brushstroke, the type of texture, the way the colors relate to one another and the decisions about the placement of every element in my composition–all this is based on my entire life history up to the moment I create a piece. You might say it’s impulse with a lot of history behind it.
Painting for me is a journey rather than a destination. I observe, looking for clues and taking the turns I feel that lead to the happy outcome of a beautiful interplay of colors, textures and proportions that is uplifting to the onlooker. In creating a piece reaching that point brings me serenity.
Read More On Kennis Baptiste : Here
Robert V. Reid was in attendance and showcased his artwork at the first annual Sizzle Arts Festival that was held on Sept 30, 2019 in Chelsea Manhattan.
Born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago and raised in its rich cultural milieu, light, color, and movement are deeply embedded in Robert V. Reid’s collective unconscious. With graphite, charcoals, watercolor and oils, Reid uses these elements to create emotive renderings of the human form.
Reid’s creative journey began in Trinidad where he was introduced to a number of significant Caribbean artists who mentored him and nurtured his natural, untrained talent. Over a 16 year career, Reid’s work has changed to mirror his journey from the Caribbean to New York City.
He arrived in New York, as a trained architectural draftsman, with a passion for painting and an urge to record, invent and manipulate the human image using raw talent. His immersion into the New York art scene led him to study at the School of Visual Arts and the Arts Students League, where he developed new techniques and sharpened his technical skills.
Reid has since created a body of work that reveals and an impressive range of skills- works ranging from detailed- styled figurative realism rendered in oils, to stunning watercolors that blur the line between figurative and abstract paintings, to drawings in charcoal and pencil that demonstrate sound draughtsmanship.
Reid’s figure paintings are characterized by the absence of a background, his focus is not on the space that the figures inhabit, but on the figures themselves; thereby empowering the viewer to imagine a space of their choice and to create their own answers as to why the figures are there.
The female figure has been one of the important subjects of painting, and has been reinterpreted by painters in various styles throughout history; Reid joins this legion of painters with his favorite subject being the female form, painted from live models.
Read More about Robert Reid At HERE
Willie Torbert was in attendance and showcased his artwork at the first annual Sizzle Arts Festival that was held on Sept 30, 2019 in Chelsea Manhattan.
Willie works in a variety of media, including oil, ink, and collage to produce singular and highly stylized representations of African American life. Scenes of street life and images of jazz and blues musicians, and heroic African queens and warriors often populate his work.
Also, he graciously acknowledges the almost certain influence of other major black artists. Indeed, Willie has previously stated that “it changed my life” when he saw Romare Bearden’s images of Harlem in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum many years ago.
Answerd Stewart was in attendance and showcased his artwork at the first annual Sizzle Arts Festival that was held on Sept 30, 2019 in Chelsea Manhattan.
Families building their senses of home with neighborly love and spiritual connectedness. Multicolor musical instruments growing legs to dance. Pen-and-ink drawn lovers linked in a nest of the littlest lines.
These are the themes artist Answerd Stewart has been trying to capture for the past 20 years as he labors tirelessly on his latest series of fascinating works, called Brown Images, which explores the nature of relationships within the contemporary, urban landscape.Just like home, music is an important theme as well. As some argue, it is the highest of the arts because of its temporality and ephemerally as each passing note reverberates through us.
Stewart grew up in Brooklyn, New York City, indisputably the world’s foremost magical musical garden filled with the newest flowering of music and art. With immigrants from all around the world, these cultures make a cubist clash of lifestyles, histories, outlooks and expressions that keeps it all struggling in synchronicity.
“I initially created art as a means of relaxation but as people began to appreciate my work, it fueled me to create more. I create art that speaks to the whole human spectrum, any race any creed, as in “Harmonious Beginnings,” a celebration of the tying together of two souls harmonizing together, illustrating the inseparability of emotion and beauty, friendship and family, togetherness and emancipation, and love and spirituality.”
Of Jamaican-American heritage, Stewart knows what it is like to have more than one spiritual home, whether one in the islands or in the urban jungle of New York City or in the public and private places of worship, including his studio. Always unafraid to flex his creative muscles, Stewart spends weeks on each painting, delicately and defly balancing pen and ink, acrylic paints and opaque washes and many other media.
A child at play like any good artist, he is hard at work here, sounding the horn of human expressions laid down as masterfully as a virtuoso on a violin. Through his world history studies at Brooklyn College, he learned his heavy lessons, reflected in the gravity of some of his works. He graduated with a world history degree so he could teach young people, which he did steadfastly for many years.
Also a father, Stewart’s patient, teacherlike and pensive sensibilities are at work when you go to decode his pieces.
And like playing a magnificent album over again, one never tires of finding new lessons which are always embedded in the oil and acrylic swatches of brushwork.
Stewart has exhibited his work extensively nationwide over the years as demand for his creative vision grows.
Donovan Nelson showcased his artwork at the first annual Sizzle Arts Festival that was held on Sept 30, 2019 in Chelsea Manhattan.
Donovan was born in Manchester, Jamaica. He moved to the United States in 1982 and where he received a B.F.A in illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA (1995). In addition, he studied portraiture and figure painting at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Nelson is M.F.A. graduate from the New York Academy where he studied with Martha Erlebacher, Vincent Desiderio, Jack Beal, Alfred Lesley, and Juan Cardenas.A
Carlton D. Murrell has been painting for over forty years with well over one hundred exhibitions to his credit. As a child growing up in Barbados, Carlton began exploring his artistic talent by drawing and painting the various lifestyles of his Island nation. He began his painting career at 18, inspired by the richness of Caribbean living and the world beyond. He traveled to many distant places in search of a universal sense of art, which led him to immigrate to capital city of art – New York City. While there, Murrell was awarded a scholarship to pursue additional advanced studies at the Art Students League. He later attended the Pan American School of Fine and Pel’s School of Commercial Art and Illustration. He has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the National African American Museum, the United Nations and Howard University, as well as numerous galleries throughout the United States.
Master Impressionist painter Claude Monet tremendously influences his painterly style. Drawing on the influence of European Impressionist painters, Murrell’s layering of paints, short strokes and usage of color emerges with a unique painterly style. His ability includes a rare understanding of the effects of light on color. Murrell combines his rich Caribbean heritage with traditional island and urban living to impact upon the viewer thought provoking visual messages.
His works hang in permanent collections of Carver Federal Savings Bank, the Copper Corporation of Chile, South America, Howard University, The Central Bank of Barbados, among others. Mr. Murrell has to his credit received numerous awards, prizes and citations. He has served as curator at art exhibitions at the Community Gallery which was formerly located within the Brooklyn Museum and the Skylight Gallery. He also works his skills as an art consultant and art teacher. His work can be found in the homes of many collectors in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and South America.
Hawwaa Ibrahim is a nineteen-year-old Muslim fashion designer, blogger, and activist who is currently attending the Fashion Institute of Technology. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Hawwaa moved to Minnesota when she was four. During their middle school years, Hawwaa started learning how to sew by watching YouTube videos.
Only a few years after they learned, they participated in the Reality TV Design Competition called Project Runway Junior Season Two and placed third overall. Shortly after, they began to create custom designs and collections that represented various social topics such as the burning political climate and society’s beauty standards all under their point of view. Hawwaa has also been featured in numerous magazines, including “Marie Claire” and “Girls’ Life” for their unique look and openness to a more free kind of thinking. For their future goals, Hawwaa hopes to create a brand that is all inclusive to women, men, and those who consider themselves anything else.
Kennis Baptiste
