N-O-P

Artist Statement

I grew up a farm girl in rural Idaho: ducks, chickens, cows, dirt bikes, the whole bit. I got dirty.

My mom was a talented artist, and she taught me to paint oil landscapes when I was a kid. In high school I started sketching, and in college I began experimenting with abstract art. That was when I discovered the palette knife, and I loved the way it let me build and scrape and rearrange. I got messy.

Then came marriage, kids, career. Art took a back seat for a long time. I don’t regret that season, but I do recognize how much of myself I set aside while I did what needed to be done.

Fast forward 30 years. The kids are grown and gone, and I’ve come back to art, this time with an urgency and passion I lacked when I was younger. I am rediscovering a part of myself I didn’t realize I had lost.

I’ve had many identities over the years, from farm girl to mother to software developer and college instructor. Like many women, I have felt the pressure of expectations, both internal and external, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to be everything at once while still feeling like I was falling short. Art became a way to put myself back together. I sometimes quip, only half-jokingly, that all of my paintings are self-portraits.

My current mixed-media work explores the complexity of identity through layers and texture. I love to repurpose scraps and found materials, because that is how life feels to me… We revise. We improvise. We adapt. 

I’m fascinated by how all of our many selves, and our hurts and joys, and our bits and bobs and scraps somehow come together to form a cohesive whole. Not a perfect whole, but a beautiful one.

My hope is that my work invites you to slow down and reflect on your own layered complexity, your stories, your resilience, and the beautiful mess that makes you YOU.

Tina (TJ) Ostrander

Artist Statement 

I think I'm supposed to dazzle the viewer with my wordsmithing in this space, so... Juxtaposition, Transcendent, Organic. There ya go. I glue things to things, mostly rhinestones to salvaged objects. I have a VISCERAL reaction to unwanted, discarded stuff. Secondhand stores and antique malls REVERBERATE the same upsetting chord as an animal shelter. I want to save them all. I feel a deep calling to revive them and show them a beautiful life. Here a few of my sweet little misfit orphans all dressed up and ready for their forever homes. I began this particular style of art around the beginning of Covid. I wanted to make use of the abundance of time I was afforded by creating some kind of memento to mark the strange moment we all shared as a community on this planet. I found a child mannequin at a garage sale in Roslyn, got a bag of rhinestones from the craft store... and Covid Kid was born. When that project was complete, I didn't want to stop, so I haven't...

At this point I NEED to work on these projects. It has become my therapy and meditation, my mission, my life's work. I feel lucky to have found this kind of love and I can only hope that the viewer will experience even a fraction of the joy it brings me to create it. 

Artist Statement 

 Can You Hear Me Now?

Creating art isn't a choice for Warren, it is simply what he does. Whether painting, wood carving, or sculpting contemporary wire phenomenons - this is an artist who immerses himself in the story he is telling....the materials he uses are secondary to the concept.

His works are varied, some evocative of his feelings about human folly, others expressive of his thoughts about human struggle. Each piece he creates is deeply personal.

Warren’s art chronicles the struggle of racial bias from both sides of his heritage and seeks to connect with the struggle within all of us to connect, belong, and feel safe.

"I am compelled to create and keep creating, my need to tell you what is happening right here, right now has never been stronger, whether it is racial discrimination, the dying of the planet or raging against ageism, my body of work of over 50 years is my story."

“It’s been making me very happy that people actually enjoy much of the beauty that’s infused with a subject that seems very difficult to deal with.”

 Warren Pope creates abstract mixed media and contemporary sculpture from such materials as canvas, wire, steel, banana leaves and wood.