Fiercely Feminine II – A Group Exhibition

Join us for an exhibition featuring some of Oh Be Joyful’s leading ladies – Marissa Vogl, Mary Sinner, Meredith Nemirov, Ivy Kim, and Tracy Schwartz!

Marissa Vogl

It is important to me to never settle on a defined style. I need the creative freedom to explore regularly. This is an important part of my process—to be able to play with shapes, color, texture, tools, and ways to create unique marks. It is all part of creating a visual language.

I find that painting both abstractly and representationally is a symbiotic relationship, such as between a bee and a flower. The bee takes the pollen from the flower to create food. The flower needs the bee to reproduce. Such is with painting: When I’m painting from life with the intent to create a representational piece, my experience with abstract keeps it painterly and spontaneous. On the other hand, when creating an abstract painting, the representational experience provides important elements that create a strong painting, such as shape, value, and balance. I find this to be an ongoing dialogue that is always fascinating. Without the other, one would lose important information.

Sometimes, my abstract paintings begin as representational compositions that are then deconstructed to better convey a certain feeling. This is fun because the viewer has the freedom to create his own narrative and experience. At times I allow recognizable elements to remain, but they are recorded in my own “words.”

Other times, a painting is entirely intuitive and  inspiration is from a memory of a particular place in time. The word intuition is important to me; it’s taken years for me to truly be able to act on my intuition.

Intuition: the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.

My natural response to visual inspiration can be so strong that I paint it without knowing but instead feeling. This is a meditative process that has become more focused over the years.

Mary Sinner

Mary has an MFA in Painting and BFA in Painting and Drawing from The University of Utah. She embraces her sense of curiosity and is interested in iconic symbols that migrate through the cultural strata.

Her work has been selected for numerous prestigious group exhibitions including: The Springville Salon, The University of Utah President’s Gallery Exhibition and 35×35. Mary’s entry was given a juror’s choice award for the 2017 West Elm x Minted Challenge and her work was selected to be part of Anthropologie’s 2018 and 2019 Art/Home Décor collection.

Meredith Nemirov

“My vision for the work is to convey the idea that nature is not observed simply from one particular location. Nor is it fixed in time but has an invisible and intangible aspect…”

Born and raised in New York City, Meredith received a BFA from Parsons School of Design. She was a figurative painter and worked as a freelance illustrator. After Lawrence Alloway made a studio visit to jury her work into the inaugural show at The Queens Museum, she devoted herself to painting full time. Her work has been exhibited in one-person and group shows at museums around the country.

“… being outside painting, in the moment, is so much more than making a painting of the scene observed. It is a record, an act of being a witness of all that is before you, capturing what occurs during that passage of time. The weather and light changing, the wind, and also the agitation from the mosquitoes buzzing about, the urgency to make a painting of the total experience.”

In 1988, Meredith moved to a small town in Colorado. This change in environment brought a change of theme as she faced the mountains instead of the rush of humanity on the streets. She started painting the landscape and also focused on the aspen tree that she considers the figure in the landscape. She has taught classes based on this body of work for The Smithsonian Institute through The Pinhead Institute and the AhHaa School for the Arts in Telluride, CO, and through an NEA grant in Montrose, CO. Meredith was an Artist in Residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO in 2008, and received a grant from the Vermont Studio Center for a residency in April 2010.

Ivy Kim

The directness, flow, and pauses of the multi-voiced conversation in the landscape inspire Ivy’s drawings and paintings. She uses playful marks, patterns, spontaneity, and abstraction to describe the expressive spirit of nature. This loose and immediate quality of the imagery conveys the energetic feeling of being in the land. Through her work, she shares a joyful sense of nature’s rhythms and patterns. She invites viewers to connect with nature’s depth, poetry, and power that holds and sustains all life.

Her academic training includes a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a Master of Arts in Ecopsychology from Naropa University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Tracy Schwartz

Growing up in a small midwest town surrounded by little moments of beauty, Tracy eventually moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to complete a Bachelor’s Degree in Outdoor Recreation Leadership and Management. That pursuit pushed her forward on the path to adventure and exploration that eventually led her to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado that she now calls home. 

Never without her camera or a sketchbook, and always seeking the most spectacular moments of light, dawn and dusk are when she feels the most inspired, whether to photograph, paint, or draw. Tracy is also deeply driven by personal encounters with the wildlife species that call the mountains home, and this is the most prevalent subject matter in her fine art. 

“Where there is wildlife, and a beautiful landscape, that is where you’ll find me. I’ve called the West home since 2013, learning, exploring, soaking it all in. It’s different than home, Wisconsin. It’s more grand, more alive, and in that I find constant inspiration. Whether I’m hiking a mountain, watching a moose through a crack in my tent, or feeling the sun leave my face as it fades with another spectacular sunset, beauty is everywhere. The job of my art is to convey those feelings of beauty with people who weren’t there, because I will never take for granted that I was lucky enough to see it for myself, nor the fact that the places and animals I enjoy so very much may not be there one day.”