Welcome Elaine (Laney) Richmond - Guest Artist

Dining Room

Elaine (Laney) Honey Zwickel was born in St.Thomas where she attended art classes at a very young age at Alma College.  She moved and grew up in London, Ontario.  She was uniquely talented and studied art at Beal Art School, where she blossomed.  She credits much of her enthusiam to the incredible teachers there.

Elaine married and raised her children in a world where art was central.  She studied pottery and practiced for 7 years.  She also owned her own boutique, "Miscellaneous", where her creativity continued to flow.  Travel was also a huge part of her life and an inspiration for many of Laney's artworks.

Blue Lagoon

Laney's attention to detail and her ability to add several dimensions creates a whimsy that always takes your breath away.

In 2004, Laney went in for bi-lateral knee transplants.  Hours after surgery, while in the hospital she suffered a devasting stroke.  Laney was diagnosed with aphasia.  She could not write or speak.  Now, she can walk and talk, and paint!

Little Blues

Initally, post stroke, she had to be motivated to produce more artwork by her son.  Now in her 7th year of recovery, her attention to detail has surpasssed her pre stroke art. The difference in her painting style during these last seven years is quite profound.  Laney feels her need to do artwork is even stronger than it was before.

Welcome John Koyounian - Guest Artist

The AGL would like to welcome John Koyounian as one of our newest Guest Artists:

Details in the Fabric

For many years John has used the traditional method of the triptych to propel his narrative. Often grouping symbols that at times seem both ambiguous and mysterious in order to create a dialogue with the viewer.  These panels/symbols compete with each other and demand our attention simultaneously.  However, we cannot mentally internalize each symbol and or marking simultaneously and that is where the conflict begins.

Talk of the Town

He has recently moved to layering images physically over top of one another, sometimes this image is represented in a hard contour line and at other times developed as part of the negative space matching the tone of the original substrat.  The symbol exposes itself to the viewer, yet is silent in its presence. Not unlike Plato's Cave, they are names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind.  The viewer makes inferences for things that are not truly there, we may acquire concepts by our perceptual experience of physical objects.  But we would be mistaken if we thought that the concepts that we grasp mentally were on the same level as the things we physically perceive in the material world.  The contour shapes of objects over the drawing or paintings are much like the things we do not speak of and carry within our person.  At times the silence of these shapes is based on suppressed feelings in order to protect ourselves for fear of reprisals from others.

John's Artist Statement:

My work focuses on the use of narrative elements to not only physically convey a concern/observation, but also to imply an intrusion of the viewer into private events.  The characters are cropped much like a fragment in time or like a frame in a movie.  Most often the characters are devoid of facial recognition to suggest a greater universal experience.

Days of Autumn