“After 38 years of nursing people back to health, I now apply that care and tender touch to my paintings” — Carol Jones

There is a phrase – the healing arts, that applies specifically to the practice of medicine, but we might as easily use it as a descriptive for the therapeutic value of making art. Beginning in the early 20th century, art sought to challenge, provoke, and even agitate, but the contemplative aspect of painting has stood the test of time.

Carol Jones was a medical professional who occupies her time now painting, and, for her, making art is a process that echoes her work as a nurse: “As a retired registered nurse, I paint for fun and relaxation. Going into my studio and putting on my uniform, now a painter's smock, I smile as I look at the blank piece of board from my local hardware store. I visualize what the finished product will look like after being massaged with brushes and oils. After 38 years of nursing people back to health, I now apply that care and tender touch to my paintings. Each painting is special, just like my patients were, with its own special needs. I have to step back to study and diagnose what would bring more beauty to the piece - a little stroke of color here or a bold push of texture there. And when it's finally ‘well’, I take joy in sending it out into the world.”

"Drapes" by Carol Jones, 24x30in, oil on board (2012), $600 | BUY NOW — *"Drapes" by Carol Jones, 24x30in, oil on board (2012), $600 | BUY NOW*

"Reflections in a Pinwheel" by Carol Jones, 18x24in, oil on board (2015), $500 | BUY NOW — *"Reflections in a Pinwheel" by Carol Jones, 18x24in, oil on board (2015), $500 | BUY NOW*

Like so many artists, Jones pursues a personal course of study, continually taking workshops and studying under nationally known artists such as Charles Gruppe, Caroline Jasper, Robert Hoffman, Cindy Overall, Lori Putnam, Roger Dale Brown, and Dominic Vignola. “Just as with the continuing education courses I took in nursing, each class gives me wonderful new ideas and techniques.”

Jones enjoys painting landscapes, but it is in the near-abstract imagery of her fabric studies that we see qualities of care and nurturing that seems to express her process and aesthetic. They are quiet, but filled with compassion.

Hometown: Elizabethtown, Kentucky
Age: 67
Education: BSN
Website: http://www.caroljonesart.com

"Evening Sail" by Carol Jones, 24x30in, oil on board (2017), $500 | BUY NOW — *"Evening Sail" by Carol Jones, 24x30in, oil on board (2017), $500 | BUY NOW*

"Irish Fishing Village" by Carol Jones, 22x28in, oil on board (2011), $500 | BUY NOW — *"Irish Fishing Village" by Carol Jones, 22x28in, oil on board (2011), $500 |* *BUY NOW*

Photography

Vignette: Sid Webb

Josh Jenkins · May 30, 2017

“I think of art as making a statement about the artist’s time and place and/or turning points in techniques and tools that give the next generation of artists a new outlook.” — Sid Webb

"Skipping" by Sid Webb, 10x27in, photograph (2011), $89 | BUY NOW — *"Skipping" by Sid Webb, 10x27in, photograph (2011), $89 | BUY NOW*

Sid Webb creates in a variety of mediums, and today we see some of his photographs. “I have taken nearly 100,000 photographs,” claims Webb, “and although I am tempted by beaches, mountains, sunsets, and sunrises and their breath-taking beauty as much as anyone, I rarely find lasting substance in such images. We can count the significant landscape photographers on one hand. Landscape painters fare a little better because technique and interpretation come into play.”

Webb prefers people as subjects for his camera. Here we see a young boy approaching a large 17th-century canon at Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine with appropriate trepidation, sheepishly inching his foot forward, a look eager anticipation mixed with supreme caution on his face. The shot is from a distant, raised point-of-view, and if the child had a clue he was being photographed, would he have been so expressive?

"Cigar Roller" by Sid Webb, 11x17in, photograph (2013), $45 | BUY NOW — *"Cigar Roller" by Sid Webb, 11x17in, photograph (2013), $45 | BUY NOW*

The locations here cover a range of territory, from Germany to Portugal, and Webb’s camera finds the ordinary, universal truths of people instead of the divisive artificial barriers that arise from nations and politicians. Webb sees people experiencing the wonders of the world as a respite from their normal, daily existence.

“It is my feeling that about 80 percent of creating art is the process of making it,” says Webb. “By which I mean just being focused and absorbed in the process of creation. Another 15 percent or so has to do with skill and craft, and 5 percent is drawn from our sensitivity to the world around us and how finely tuned we are to form and balance and color. Somewhere in this mix is a bit of rational thinking and reasoning that lead us in deciding subject matter and content. Generally, artists are thought of as being creative and original. And artists think of themselves in those terms, too.”

Hometown: Lexington, KY
Education: Majored in journalism and political science, University of Kentucky; Atlanta School of Art (High Museum)
Website: http://www.sidwebb.com/

"Boys and Guns" by Sid Webb, 11x17in, photograph (2014), $45 | BUY NOW — *"Boys and Guns" by Sid Webb, 11x17in, photograph (2014), $45 | BUY NOW*

"Fairy Dust" by Sid Webb, 11x17in, photograph (2013), $45 | BUY NOW — *"Fairy Dust" by Sid Webb, 11x17in, photograph (2013), $45 | BUY NOW*

Are you interested in being on Artebella? Click here to learn more. — *Are you interested in being on Artebella? Click here to learn more.*

Drawing

Vignette: Sarah Johnson

Josh Jenkins · May 26, 2017

“Iconography has given me the opportunity to undergo a reflection and transformation…”
— Sarah Johnson

*"The Holy Trinity" by Sarah Johnson, 14x22in, graphite on paper (2017)*

At this point, it is fair to say that all art speaks to tradition; even the most radical work usually sees Dadaism as an ancestor. There was a time when virtually the only way to make a living as an artist was to create religious imagery – the church was one of the only paying customers, and private collectors rarely wanted secular art, except for portraits. Iconography is not always religious, but the use of recurrent symbols and themes in churches arguably laid the foundation of how we think about such things. Sarah Johnson here picks up that tradition in designs that show fealty to the rigid, highly symmetrical compositional formula that were essential in this work, but with a soupcon of individual interpretation in the details of character.

“I have the opinion that art is supposed to reflect to its audience a message,” says Johnson. “I believe art has a very significant role to play in our daily and personal lives as well as having the capacity to influence our entire culture, spiritually and politically. The best examples of that kind of art have one thing in common: it touches the soul. I have a strong desire to share my belief and perspective and Iconography has given me the opportunity to undergo a reflection and transformation and to learn a time-tested medium. I aim to continue in my study in Iconography.”

So Johnson’s images are unabashedly ecclesiastical; a personal expression of spirituality rooted in the long and rich historical traditions employed by some of the greatest artists the world has known: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, not to mention untold numbers whose specific identity has been lost to time.

Hometown: Maysville, Kentucky
Age: 32
Education: Studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati
Website: http://www.sarahcatherinejohnson.wordpress.com

*"Christ Pantocrator" by Sarah Johnson, 14x22in, graphite on paper (2017)*

*"Archangel Michael" by Sarah Johnson, 14x22in, graphite on paper (2017)*

*"Saint Andrew" by Sarah Johnson, 14x22in, graphite on paper (2017)*

Painting

Vignette: Charlotte Pollock

Josh Jenkins · May 25, 2017

"The mind includes more than intellect. It contains a history of what we learn through our feet. It grasps the world that meets the eye, the city we know through our legs, the places we know in our hearts, in our guts, in our memories, and in our imaginations. It includes the world we feel in our bones." - E. V. Walter

Charlotte Pollock doesn’t just paint what is in front of her. Some landscape painters may, in fact, be documentarians; capturing with accuracy the details of color and light they find before them, but for Pollock, the choice of subject has specific meaning for her: “This series is the result of my desire to understand the meaning of place and its relationship to self. I paint places that emotionally resonate within me as a way to map my biography. Light and color articulate mood and combine with my paint application to make an interior world accessible to the viewer.”

“A sense of place,” is an elusive phrase that can be parsed many ways, but when we speak of art, we are trying to describe how an individual point-of-view of one moment in time might attempt to communicate ineffable aspects of a location. The artist doesn’t create a picture-postcard; instead they share their own unique experience and understanding of a given place, which may be markedly different than the viewer’s experience. It may also strike unexpected chords of universal experience - anything is possible. The E.V. Walter quote that partly inspires these paintings perhaps says it best: “It includes the world we feel in our bones.”

*"Have You Got Good Religion" by Charlotte Pollock, 36x48in, oil on canvas (2017)*

For Pollock, these paintings occupy the realm of autobiography, but on her own terms. What you may glean about the artist from these pieces will not be a complete picture, but what is there to discover just might only be available through her work.

Pollock’s solo exhibition, Lore & Landscapes, opens June 2 at Art Sanctuary with a reception that evening, 5:30-9:30pm. Reception is FREE, family-friendly, and open to the public. Refreshments will be available for purchase.

She also has work in On the Waterfront and Beyond through July 29 at the Jane Morgan Gallery in Louisville.

Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Age: 26
Education: BFA, Allen R. Hite Institute, University of Louisville
Website: http://www.charlotteannpollock.com

*"Old Louisville in November" by Charlotte Pollock, 24x36in, oil on canvas (2017)*

*"March 29, 5pm" by Charlotte Pollock, 16x20in, oil on canvas (2016)*

*"Golden Hour on River Road" by Charlotte Pollock, 36x48in, oil on canvas (2017)*

Vignette: Kenneth Hayden

Josh Jenkins · May 23, 2017

*"Birth of Venus" by Kenneth Hayden, 70x60in, acrylic on linen (2015)*

Kenneth Hayden’s dense and eye-popping collage-like paintings seem light-hearted, with easy surface appeal for their candy colors. In fact, some of the paintings include gumdrops among the image elements. Yet Hayden is expressing themes that are much weightier, even darker than his Pop Art palette would suggest.

“’Birth of Venus’ was inspired by both Botticelli and the Black Lives Matter movement,” explains Hayden. “I show Venus as a crow rising from a Technicolor field of gumdrops borne by a lotus blossom. Tibetan Buddhism recognizes the crow as an incarnation of Mahakala, whose name literally means the Great Black One. Gumdrops are colorful and delicious. They are an unhealthy earthly treat unsuitable as an offering to Buddha for the attainment of enlightenment.”

In another painting, ‘The Mathematics of Providence’, Hayden employs the image of a gun, a recurring motif in his work that immediately cuts through the busy compositions characteristic of his work. The artist’s reasoning about how the image functions can be complex and mercurial: “A diamond refracts the light/energy/debris exploding from a skull in two different directions. The path heading off to the right has no definable destination or explanation. The left bearing path travels through a black hole represented by a crudely painted diagram complete with cast shadow and illusionistic masking tape holding it to the picture plane. It’s an astrophysicist’s note describing a theoretical portal to another realm to be considered or removed. The letter ‘z’ is the path of entry. ‘X’ and ‘y’ are the event horizon, the point of no return; the boundary in space time beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer.”

*"The Mathematics of Providence" by Kenneth Hayden, 56x46in, acrylic and graphite on canvas with painted paper collage and glitter (2017)*

“I make paintings about topics that I find interesting or otherwise create in me a strong emotional response. By posing questions surrounding themes such as standards of beauty, our knowledge of our own mortality, or the contradictions of science v theology, I want my work to open avenues for discussion that one might not otherwise consider. I don’t pretend to have the answers, nor do I want to rigidly define the specific purpose or meaning of a work. Titles often provide clues to deciphering my thinking. The image elements themselves frequently have a duality, much like the subjects I contemplate. For example, I use the lotus as a totem for acceptance and awareness, and as a warning to illuminate ignorance. A gun can kill. Or, does it speed one on to ‘the afterlife’ as an unexpected perk? Is death a punishment or a reward? Does an opioid high bring inner peace? And sometimes – a picture is just a picture.”

*"Lotus Geometry" by Kenneth Hayden, 56x46in, acrylic on paper and canvas (2017)*

In 2016 Hayden was the recipient of an Artist Professional Development Grant from the Great Meadows Foundation, Kentucky.

Selected Curated and Juried Corporate Art Collections:
21C Museum-Hotel, Louisville, KY
Atlas Brown, Inc., Louisville, KY
Brown Forman Corporation, Louisville, KY
Cafe Lou Lou, Louisville, KY
Churchill Downs Corporate Office, Louisville, KY
Commonwealth Bank (various locations)
Credit Clearing House, Louisville, KY
Dean-Dorton, PLC, Louisville, KY
Jones Ward PLC, Louisville, KY
Olin Brass/GBC Metals, Louisville, KY
Republic Bank, Louisville, KY
Sewell, O'Brien & Neal, PLLC, Louisville, KY
Sortino Group, Inc., Louisville, KY
Tachau-Meek PLC., Louisville, KY
Tamdem Marketing and Public Relations, Louisville, KY
Ventas, Inc. (Louisville and Chicago)
Waterfront Park Place Condominiums, Louisville, KY

Hometown: Owensboro, Kentucky
Age: 59
Education: AA in Photography, Brescia University, Owensboro, KY
Website: http://www.kennethhayden.com

*"Gumdrops for Buddha" by Kenneth Hayden, 84x48in, acrylic on canvas (2014)*

*"Milk and Honey" by Kenneth Hayden, 48x46in, acrylic on canvas with painted paper collage (2017)*

Vignette: Carol Jones