Author: Iris

Born in 1949 and raised in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, Deborah K. Tash is a visual artist and poet whose creative practice explores cultural identity, spirituality, and the natural world. Her artistic perspective is influenced by her mother’s Mexican ancestry and her father’s Celtic heritage. Identifying as Mestiza, Tash embraces the intersection of these traditions, drawing inspiration from their histories, mythologies, and relationships with nature. Painting and poetry serve as complementary forms of expression, allowing her to explore experiences beyond conventional language. Her compositions examine the relationship between visible reality and the unseen, inviting reflection on memory, transformation, and the mysteries of existence. Through atmospheric color, symbolic imagery, and thoughtful compositions, Tash creates visual environments where personal history meets universal questions. Her work encourages viewers to contemplate the spiritual dimensions of everyday life and the enduring connections between humanity, nature, and the unknown. Cloudscape Design Series / The Eye of God In Cloudscape Design Series / The Eye of God, Deborah K. Tash explores the relationship between atmospheric space, spiritual awareness, and the human desire to understand what exists beyond immediate perception. The painting presents an expansive field of delicate whites and pale blues, interrupted by a small, concentrated form resembling an eye. Through this restrained composition, Tash transforms a familiar natural phenomenon into a meditation on observation, presence, and the mysteries concealed within the visible world. The painting is dominated by a luminous cloudlike environment. Layers of white, icy blue, and muted gray create a softly textured surface suggesting drifting clouds, mist, or an endless celestial expanse. Rather than depicting a conventional landscape with a recognizable horizon, Tash allows the entire composition to become an atmospheric space. There is no clear distinction between foreground and background, giving the impression of looking into an environment without measurable boundaries. This absence of fixed spatial references contributes to the painting’s contemplative character. The viewer encounters a surface that feels simultaneously expansive and intimate, as though the sky has been brought close enough to reveal its smallest variations. Gentle transitions between colors suggest movement, while the overall composition maintains an atmosphere of stillness. Near the center-right of the painting, a small oval form emerges from the surrounding pale surface. Its deep turquoise, blue, and dark green tones contrast with the subdued colors of the cloudscape. Encircled by a violet-blue border, the form resembles an eye suspended within the atmosphere. Although modest in scale, it becomes the primary focal point, drawing attention through its concentrated color and unusual placement. The title, The Eye of God, introduces a spiritual dimension to this visual arrangement. Across different religious and cultural traditions, the eye has been associated with awareness, protection, divine observation, and consciousness beyond ordinary human understanding. In Tash’s painting, the eye may symbolize spiritual perception, suggesting that something unseen exists within the seemingly empty spaces of nature. Yet the composition does not impose a single interpretation. The central form might also evoke a celestial body, an opening in the clouds, or an organic structure observed from an unfamiliar perspective. Its ambiguity allows the painting to move between physical and metaphysical worlds. What initially appears to be an atmospheric study gradually becomes an invitation to consider the relationship between seeing and knowing. Color plays an essential role in establishing this relationship. The pale blue and white background creates a sense of openness and tranquility, while the darker central image introduces depth and visual intensity. The purple surrounding the eye provides a subtle transition between these contrasting elements. This limited palette gives the composition coherence while allowing small variations in tone to carry expressive meaning. Equally important is Tash’s treatment of negative space. Much of the painting remains visually quiet, with the eye occupying only a small portion of the surface. This difference in scale emphasizes the vastness of the surrounding atmosphere and encourages viewers to consider the relationship between the individual and the infinite. The central image appears both isolated and connected to its environment, suggesting that even the smallest presence may hold meaning within a larger universe. The cloudscape also reflects Tash’s interest in nature as a source of spiritual reflection. Clouds constantly change, forming temporary shapes before dissolving into new arrangements. Their impermanence offers a visual metaphor for memory, transformation, and the passage of time. There is also a poetic quality to the composition. Like a short poem, the painting communicates through suggestion rather than explanation. Its meaning develops through the interaction of a few carefully arranged elements: an atmospheric field, a solitary eye, and the surrounding silence. Ultimately, Cloudscape Design Series / The Eye of God examines how a minimal visual encounter can inspire deeper contemplation. Through atmospheric texture, symbolic imagery, and carefully balanced color, Deborah K. Tash creates a painting connecting the natural world with questions of consciousness and spiritual presence. The work invites viewers to look beyond the surface of the sky and consider the mysteries that remain outside ordinary perception.

From her base in Athens, Greece, Vicky Tsalamata examines the connections between human experience, historical memory, and the pressures of contemporary society. Her practice approaches the present as something shaped by earlier lives, inherited conflicts, and cultural narratives that continue to influence how people understand themselves. Irony runs through her observations, bringing uncomfortable questions about power, morality, and personal worth into view. Drawing on the social scrutiny associated with Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, she considers how individuals navigate circumstances larger than themselves. Yet her concerns also reach into the private spaces of loneliness, friendship, and the desire to communicate.…

Jane Gottlieb approaches photography as the beginning of an imaginative journey. Across a career spanning more than fifty years, she has transformed photographs taken around the world into artworks shaped by color and experimentation. Her work combines photography, painting, and Photoshop, allowing familiar places and objects to acquire unexpected visual identities. An exhibition at the UC Santa Barbara Art, Design & Architecture Museum explored her images of France, presenting the progression from hand-painted Cibachrome prints to versions transformed through Photoshop. This relationship between observation and reinterpretation remains central to her practice. Her artworks have appeared in museums, galleries, public spaces,…

Born in Montreal in 1964, Adamo Macri studied commercial art, graphic design, photography, art history, and fine arts at Dawson College. That broad education remains visible in a practice that moves among sculpture, photography, video, painting, and drawing. Sculpture holds a central place in his work, but his interest in form is not confined to objects that can be viewed from every side. An image can also feel sculptural through its attention to volume, surface, and the space a figure occupies. Macri often brings these concerns together, asking how a setting can shape the presence of a person within it.…

Philip Murphy has worked as a full-time artist since around 2020, following his fine art studies at the College of Marketing and Design in Dublin. Working in oils, charcoal, pastels, and graphite, he moves between landscape and figurative subjects. His interest in mark making leads him to use brushes, palette knives, fingertips, and even balls of sheep’s wool. Some passages approach abstraction, allowing the movement of a hand or the pressure of a material to carry as much meaning as the subject itself. Time runs through his practice: its passing, its effects on the things we see, and the traces it leaves behind. In his figurative work, Philip also explores a feeling that a person exists beyond physical form. Energy and instinct matter to him alongside appearance, giving his images room to express what may be sensed but cannot be easily seen. Philip’s range of materials suggests an artist who wants each work to develop through the act of making it. Oil paint allows him to move between dense, worked passages and more open gestures. Charcoal and graphite can leave a direct record of pressure and movement, while pastel offers another way to build or interrupt a surface. These differences matter because a mark can convey more than an outline. It can feel tentative, insistent, hurried,…

Alan Brown first became absorbed in image making in a darkroom, where photographs emerged gradually under red light. The experience taught him to wait, watch, and notice how an image changed as it came into view. What stayed with him was a way of looking: an ordinary scene could reveal something unexpected when given time and close attention. That sensibility offers a way into A Walk. Its subject is familiar enough—a person trying to get down a city street in bad weather—but Brown holds the moment at its most uncertain. The man’s hat might blow away. His papers already have. Each…

For Allan Wesaquate, painting begins with feeling rather than a fixed image. His abstract works use acrylic paint, vivid color, and fluid movement to give emotion a visible form. Layers seem to turn and shift across the surface, creating an atmosphere that can feel restless one moment and reflective the next. The paintings draw on personal experience, yet they leave room for viewers to find their own meanings within them. That openness also shapes a mixed media work Wesaquate made after seeing a couple in a Minneapolis park. The encounter took place while he was working on a commission concerning…

Mike Garibay creates paintings that bring color, movement, and emotion into active conversation. Working with oil paint, oil pastels, ink, and other materials, he develops everything from expansive canvases to smaller works on canvas and panels. His abstract compositions are guided by instinct, yet their lines, shapes, and colors form carefully balanced relationships. Garibay also creates detailed portraits, revealing his ability to shift between spontaneous expression and focused observation. His mural projects extend his visual language into architectural environments, where color and form can influence the experience of an entire space. Rather than beginning with a fixed narrative, Garibay allows each…

Vandorn Hinnant is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative practice explores consciousness, ancestral knowledge, intuition, and humanity’s relationship with unseen dimensions. For approximately five decades, his visual art and writing have developed alongside personal experiences that he associates with the world of spirit. Hinnant approaches ancient accounts of shamans, ancestors, and non-physical beings not as distant mythology, but as part of an enduring human effort to understand realities beyond the five senses. Describing some of his images as “soul sketches” or “spirit whisperings,” Hinnant attempts to give visible form to energetic phenomena that cannot be observed physically. His work is informed…

Camille Ross is an American photographer and visual artist whose work reflects a life shaped by contrasting cultures, inherited histories, and an enduring search for belonging. Born in San Francisco in 1964, Ross spent her formative years between the radical atmosphere of 1970s Berkeley and rural Mississippi. Moving between these remarkably different environments gave her an early awareness of cultural divisions, social identity, and the many ways history influences personal experience. Ross’s biracial heritage and Cherokee ancestry have become central to her artistic perspective. Her images frequently explore migration, memory, spirituality, and the invisible bonds connecting one generation to another. Rather…