The Rental Sales Gallery is delighted to announce that we have just accepted nine new artists into the Gallery. Between this, and our Invitational Show in February, we have seen 16 outstanding regional artists join RSG in 2022.
As part of our continuing mission to bring greater diversity into the Gallery and create a space that is more representative of the city and region as a whole, the team here has been working hard to recruit new artists. This focus on diversity and representing our rich artistic cultures is a key mission for both RSG and Portland Art Museum as a whole.
After a period of carefully considered and targeted marketing, we opened up submissions to our New Member Artists Show, in the hope of attracting submissions from the broadest range of individuals. The response we had was beyond all of our expectations, with more than 300 artists submitting works to be considered by our jury team!
After a long and stringent process, we decided to accept nine new Member Artists. We are delighted to welcome each of them, as they will all bring work to the Gallery that is both outstanding in quality and richly varied. So let’s meet them!
This gifted ceramics professor creates delightfully intricate and intimate pieces. Inspired by plants and human bodies, and fueled by her deep sense of joy and compassion, she creates delicate and sensual works.
“I believe in the power of the natural world and physical materiality to help us navigate through this process of creating our own emotional identity.”, says Lisa. “The natural world can serve as a touchstone to help ground us as we evolve and develop our own sense of self.”
William is a Portland-based painter whose artwork creates a bridge spanning his past traditions and memories to his life today as an artist, family man and Peruvian living in the Pacific Northwest. His surreal subjects and graphic, illustrative style creates layered narratives infused with lingering emotions from whimsy to melancholy.
On the subject of his art, he says. “I would like people who appreciate my work to feel a sense of comfort, joy and wonder. I like to convey a positive feeling that is portrayed in images and stories that the public can recognize and incorporate into their daily life. I hope my art takes on a life of its own and can affect other people’s lives in diverse ways.”
Wayne’s delicate and still work covers a broad range of styles and scenes, and his pieces at RSG are going to start by focusing on his restaurant and still lifes series.
The fundamental nature of Wayne’s aesthetic rests in the use of simple, quiet compositions, which visually communicate emotions in the style of narrative realism: intimate scenes, unusual renderings of ordinary objects, subtle glimpses of everyday life.
Wayne says, “In my work you might find influences from 17th Century Dutch genre paintings as well as 19th and 20th Century American Realism. When composing my painting and choosing my subject matter, I draw inspiration from modern and documentary photographers like Walker Evan and Sally Mann.”
Kim Lakin a gifted multidisciplinary artist based in Oregon. From her varied works, we will be showcasing pieces from her “Collage – Sea and Weather” series. These beautiful little collage works are all named for different weather or ocean forms, as they reminded Kim of these phenomena when she first started creating them.
Kim explains the process of creating these striking pieces: “First I make large black ink paintings on Japanese rice paper. I tear these into small pieces. Then I paint large swaths of colored liquid acrylic ink onto rice paper which I also tear into small pieces. Working with these torn bits of paper, I move them around on heavy handmade paper layering the papers until I have a composition that I am happy with.”
Inspired by Botanical Art classes that she took at the New York Botanical Garden in 2004, Janet creates exquisitely beautiful pieces capturing flowers and other botanicals in superbly-realized detail. She works with a range of materials, including ink, watercolors and colored pencils, which produces delicate and superbly-detailed pieces.
Janet says, “I now find natural subjects infinitely interesting—the beautiful symmetry in the arrangement of a dahlia’s petals, the amazing juxtaposition of purples and greens in a budding hyacinth, and the astonishing blue that emerges as it opens. Studying and drawing these subjects transports me to another place. It’s both meditative and energizing —a feeling brought about by nothing else that I know of.”
Adrien Saporiti is a multi-disciplinary creative, working as an artist, designer and photographer. A recent arrival into Portland from Nashville, TN, we are delighted to welcome him to RSG!
Working with spray paint, Adrien creates beautiful works, which combine a richness of feeling and energy, with a simplicity and elegance of form. He’s a street artist and muralist and he’s worked with organizations such as Instagram, Google and Facebook, and the GRAMMY-nominated band the Lumineers, to name but a few.
Described as “engrossingly emotive” and “visually innovative”, artist Sara Sjol takes her love of line and color and weaves them together in a vibrant and visual manner that carries through both her paper and mixed media works.
Sara says, “I have always looked at the world through my own lens. I was first intrigued with graphics – shapes, lines, patterns, and form – which lead me to countless creative endeavors. My technique evolved organically moving from pattern and line doodles in notebooks, to some ink and watercolor experiments on a left-over piece of screen printing paper, to the work I am creating today.”
Sara also works with Portland Street Art Alliance to support working artists and to bring more public art to Portland and the greater Northwest.
Patricia is an artist, teacher, practitioner, curator and more, working in a wide range of multimedia disciplines. The purposes and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements and has been shown all across Portland and beyond.
Her latest paintings and drawings address the state of the natural world and the legacy of indigenous cultures across the Americas. In terms of color, technique and form, these new works are heavily influenced by painters Rufino Tamayo, Fernando de Szyslo and James Lavadour; in content, they are drawing from Latin American and Indigenous iconography and narratives, ecological theory and Zapatista literature.
“These pieces”, says Patricia, “are the product of countless hours reading and venturing into the wild, observing, reflecting and sketching.” We are delighted to showcase Patricia and her powerful and evocative works.
Haelyn Y is an artist who works primarily in oils and charcoal, producing highly expressionistic pieces. She explores issues related to memory and feeling through the process of painting. Her work often reflects a deep fascination with memory and interpretation of shapes and forms, representing her own attempt to examine the dichotomy between the present and the past.
“In my view,” says Haelyn, “memories have their own lives – some remain still while some change because we, who do the recalling, change. So my works are representations of them, expressed wholly and realistically or in fragments and abstractly.”
