“Rooster” by Macei Hamilton, Acyrlic on wood, 12x18in, 2018, Private Collection
“Serious” art people are often skittish about paintings of animals; simple, straightforward, portraits of pets are the work of “hobbyists” they might say. Yet the concept that any artist’s practice draws directly from their immediate environment and experience is a common point of discussion in any critical appraisal.
Macel Hamilton resides in the knobs of Casey County, Kentucky, a rural area in in which her menagerie of12 dogs and 12 cats is not that unusual. So why shouldn’t these plaintive yet precocious subjects serve as a valid expression of Hamilton’s environment? Hamilton was raised in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, so the attachment to the land and its non-human inhabitants comes naturally to Hamilton.
A nurse by profession, Hamilton has only been painting for about 4 years, and for having painted for so brief a time, there is authoritative us of the brush in capturing the details of this “Rooster” that is compelling. Nothing is overworked. The relative lack of experience seems to have merged with the intimate understanding of subject to finish a simple, naturalistic expression of wariness in this Bantam’s face. It is as individual as any portrait of a human subject.
Hometown: Ligon, Kentucky Facebook: Macel's art
“Dobey” by Macei Hamilton, Pastel on sanded paper, 14x10in, 2019, Private Collection
“Horse” by Macei Hamilton, Acrylic on wood, 12x10in, 2018, Private Collection
“Baby” by Macei Hamilton, Acyrlic on canvas, 16x20in, 2018, Private Collection
“Low Rider” by Macei Hamilton, Acyrlic on canvas, 12x16in, 2019, Private Collection
“Time, memory, and the natural world always play a key role in my work.” – Marcia Lamont Hopkins
Photographer, Marcia Hopkins
By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language to her photographic images, Marcia Lamont Hopkins opens the door to the unknown, to multiple realities, both real and artificial, so that one questions what is really happening.
Her images establish a link between the landscape’s reality and the artist’s imagination. While this could, to some extent, be said to be true of any artist using landscapes, Hopkins pushes the limits of our perception of what is real. Each object or environment seems entirely natural and plausible, yet the juxtaposition within the artist’s gauzy, dreamlike atmosphere creates an uneasy sense of mystery. Is our understanding shifting in relationship to time, memory, or some other reality that we can’t quite define?
"Casaubon" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
In her artist’s statement, Hopkins explains it this way: “The series, Causabon’s Illusion, crafts a series of metaphorical vignettes rooted in elements of magical realism and the mind’s tendency to search for all-inclusive answers. In George Elliot’s Middlemarch, Edward Causabon spends his life in a futile and absurd attempt to find a comprehensive explanation for the whole of civilization’s knowledge and mythologies. Deluded, he believes that he alone has the key to humanity’s searching, an illusion which may be reflected in our culture today.”
"The Beekeeper" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
As part of her 60WRD/MIN project, Art Historian and Chicago Tribune art critic Lori Waxman wrote of Hopkin’s work: “We like to control animals and nature, but when they get beyond our understanding things tend to get interesting. Hopkins envisions overgrown forests, historic graveyards, farm animals, and occasionally people, often in combination, in impeccable digital prints that blend multiple shots into believable wholes. The weirder and more convincing, the better: a sheep enmeshed in a dense forest seems as if it and the trees are made of the same stuff, a lama in a rolling meadow becomes one with the horizon and the clouds.”
Hopkins currently has a solo exhibit at Gratz Park Inn in Lexington, KY.
*Burnaway: The Voice of Art In The South, March 27, 2017
