“With nature as the holiest of places, my paintings combine the use of landscape painting with Baroque virtuosity and illusion, anthropomorphizing natural elements, to create mysterious, monumentally scaled portraits of a spiritual journey or condition. The path of spiritual growth is often equated with internal struggle or combat between good and evil. I narrate that conflict indirectly, depicting a battleground rather than a battle itself. As sites of pleasure and pain, anxiety and tranquility, these intimate and contemplative “Battlescapes” mirror the human interior where man is constantly both revitalized and victimized by his own psychological surroundings. I use imagery – complex in signification and often steeped with literary, symbolic or historical reference – purposefully to keep secret and/or to reveal narrative.”
i had not stopped to think about your smile and my heart beat fast as i walked up and down the terminal steps, throwing glances at the opening overflowing with next day returnees.
The streets were crowded and i could barely make you out somewhere across the spinning sea of swimming faces.
i laughed nervously feeling the slow collapse of my breathing pattern.
no air,
as we walked in our small beginning, sat cross-legged in the grass, passing a feeling back and forth.
i don’t remember if you sat next to me as we bumped and bruised our way back home or if the door was locked when we finally reached our destination.
i don’t remember if you put your hand on my face or if i could hear your heart beating through your chest.
all i can recall is the lack of oxygen escaping into me, my sure inability to breathe, the simplicity in my thoughts as there was no air.
it was getting close to midnight when i walked you down to the street.
we stood locked in mystery for what could have been a moment, might have been a lifetime.
the bus tossed itself around the corner and we left it there.
i shouted something as i crossed to other side, as i fell away from you, and then you were gone.
swallowed by the light-less street.
i sat on the stoop for a long time, engraving every second of every minute with you, into me.
i watched the pale pink of morning place its soft touch on this city.
i watched the anxious beings in their early Saturdays, pacing quickly through their thoughts.
i watched the teenage romantics make up and break up.
the mother clasping her child’s hand as she balanced the imbalance of life.
“As an environmental artist, my mission is to produce murals and recycled artwork for civic exhibitions. I’ve found that art is a solution and can be used as a creative instrument for expanding people’s perception and knowledge about our environmental challenges. I enjoy organizing eco-art projects in which art is used as a way for encouraging environmentalism and awareness in young people. I’m hoping to develop more projects that merge art and conservation efforts to intensify the environmental arts genre and support a culture of young environmentalists.”
-Tree Rivera
To see more examples of Ms. Rivera’s eco-art project, visit her website at treerivera.yolasite.com.
Frost Newton has been painting for over 20 years and sees his artwork as a channel for individual exploration and imagination.
Newton describes his work:
“The central core of all my paintings is a surrealist view of our reality. There is room to explore uncommon juxtapositions through our common experience. Where reality has saturated our perceptions there are seams that can come unhinged.”
About the work:
“My work presents invented spaces that are based on reality, but revel in artificiality. In these desolate dreamlike non-places, I subvert nature and construct or destroy architectural sites alluding to the making of a utopian and/or dystopian environment.”
Christopher Reiger is an artist, writer, and teacher who is currently living and working in San Francisco, California. Reiger’s art has been exhibited in many galleries from the West Coast to East Coast. He describes his artwork as “…principally concerned with contemporary man’s mutable conception of Nature.”
