The title of this drawing comes from the Irish saying “To Start a Hare Running” which means when an action you take triggers an onward problem, usually unforeseen and out of your control.  The concept of an animal standing in for humans causing trouble interested me and I worked across these four panels with layering and erasure building chaos and confusion. 

I first encountered hares during an artist residency in Ireland. I had never seen such big rabbits & learned quickly not to call them rabbits because they were Irish hares.  They seemed to be everywhere I went day and night, and I often came upon and startled them on my daily walks.

The hare has long been considered a sacred and mystical animal in Irish folklore symbolizing abundance, prosperity, and fortune. In ancient times they were also considered to be messengers from the hill fort and mound dwellers warning mortals not to tread or trespass too closely upon forbidden places or sacred sites.  

www.patriciacarriganartist.com

When I was young, and somewhat quiet and secretive, I preferred animals to people. They seemed to be that way too, and were more beautiful. I mostly still feel that way (some exceptions: black widows, electric eels). We had cats and dogs growing up in the country, and I have cats today, the subject of most of these prints. When my Orion the First and The Princess Fang died, I made the woodcuts that are “Very Superstitious” and “Cave Cats,” which is also an homage to the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux and others in France, which I have visited many times. The etchings “Yellow Eyes” and “Orion the Second” were done at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, where I just completed five years as monitor for the print studio. The large woodcut “La Chasse” (The Hunt) is the result of a visit to a museum in Paris devoted to “Nature and the Hunt,” a monstrous collection of slaughtered and stuffed animals. I photographed many, which I used to make drawings on plywood boards, then carved and hand printed in repetitive patterns of outrage and flight.

www.helencantrell.com/

Inspired and informed by the conceptual template of Dutch Still Life, where disparate species of flora and fauna meet on the same plane, worlds collide, my paintings are about our contemporary personal temporality. Our situation now is a culture of overrun, excess, and saturation.  My work is a reconciliation with living in our contemporary culture, where one moment we are seated in front of a computer screen, receiving information from all parts of the planet in a blink, and the next moment we are asked to wake from our reverie of on-screen existence and navigate the real world.

   For the past decade, I have focused on collections, both high and low, in our culture. Taxidermized animals coexist with real living creatures, kitsch exists next to high culture, and all exist in the human spaces that burst open into the infinite natural world, whether through a window or an opening in our everyday emotional existence.

http://www.heidijohnsonpaintings.com/

I use my art to display how I view the world. Through my art I attempt to portray my ideas about the significant events that I see happening around me. The stories I attempt to tell with my art are based on my experiences and observations of nature and the modern world. I use the interactions of animals and humans and their consequences, both intentional and unintentional, to illustrate my viewpoint. No matter what the subject, I always try to maintain a sense of humor with my art.

In his prints on handwoven paper, Mike Sweeney renders distinctions between figure and ground (or maybe subject and setting) difficult to define. Mike is a printmaker and paper artist who relies on simple line drawings laid over woven strips of his own paper. He draws what he sees around him in everyday life. His drawings are nearly always simple and recognizable subjects that become complicated by misalignment and reprinting, as well as by the material they are printed on.

In his handmade paper, Mike weaves together differing descriptions and aspects of our world from multiple souces. His works begin when he shreds found maps, book pages, magazines, and handwritten notes from flea markets and library book sales.  He chooses diverse typefaces, as well as colors that are emblematic of identifiable publishing formats – maps and children’s books colors for instance, or technical manuals, cookery, or how-to publications. In any given work, he combines any number of disparate sources by reweaving the 1/8-inch strips made by shredding. The weaving creates complicated and fragmentary sheets of paper that intermingle diverse presentations of the world.

Over these handwoven sheets, Mike prints his line drawings, arriving at multi-layered relief or intaglio prints. The interwoven grid of paper along with its color and text fragments are as visible inside the lines of a drawing as they are around it.  You might see a drawn skateboard rider or a dress from another era emphasized in one image while a fox, rabbit or owl occupies another. But in each print, figure and ground remain always intertwined with the material and previous content of the paper.

Mike’s techniques render simple identities complex through the fragmentated character of the paper and the printing. The noisy sameness inside and outside of the printed drawings asks viewers to reconsider their presumptions about where identity and self reside. Through his works, Mike questions whether the distinctions and boundaries we perceive between individuals and groups are as firmly placed as we think.

www.mikesweeneyartist.com

At the core, all creatures are connected.  In bats and burros, my primary subject matters to this day, I’m choosing subjects I relate to and that inspire me. They each come with their own set of stigmas. Stigmas so ingrained in most of us we don’t even question them. I want to question the way I look at the world around me.
Let us celebrate our similarities and differences.

coppertritscheller.com