Mark Schiff

Seltzer

Casa

Sweet Tooth #3

Born in New York in 1938, Mark Schiff was accepted into a program for gifted artists at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY. He attended Pratt from 1943-1950. Schiff graduated from Great Neck High School and received his undergraduate degree, a B.S. in Textile Chemistry at North Carolina State University. 

After graduating, he worked as a colorist for Sandox (a Swiss dyestuff and chemical company). Schiff then received his M.B.A. from Hofstra University. During his years in the textile business, he became involved in photography. In 1983, he combined his love for photography with painting and is now known as a photorealist artist. 

Jemima Wyman

Jemima Wyman was born in Sydney in 1977 and currently lives and works in Brisbane. She received a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Queensland University of Technology in 2001. In 2005, Wyman was awarded the prestigious Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, enabling her to enroll at the California Institute of the Arts. She proceeded to earn her MFA from the institute in 2007. Wyman is a performance artist who also makes installations, videos, photo collages and paintings that are patterned representations of the body. 

Erica Harris

Erica Harris currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. where she teaches children. She also teaches internationally and has facilitated projects in India, Guatemala, Macendonia, Brazil, El Salvador and Southeast Asia. She draws inspiration from the children she teaches and the places that she travels. Harris likes to tell a story with her art and focuses mainly on collages and painting. With regard to the materials she uses in her collages, she has this to say: "Combining discarded materials to make these narratives, such as a schoolgirl with a dress quilted from teabags, or a nest of old road maps, is like creating a shrine, or providing a sanctuary for people, places and objects that need mending." 

Alan Soffer

Untitled II

Alan Soffer has been making art since 1973. Here is his artist statement:

 Usually I begin encaustic paintings with a plan, but a plan that is only meant as a starting place, from which to be psychically involved. Encaustics have a unique, visual vocabulary for expressing space through their inherent translucency. Reduction and distillation both buries and exposes bits of images and sentiments infused in the multilayered final painting. It is the path from the thicket to the clearing. These small works deal with a general concept of space and science, as in galactic, infinite universe or microscopic. I try to find a pattern or structure emerging and unifying this void. When all of this crystallizes, I like to think of these works in wax and pigment as little jewels.

Marius Bosc