“Tim Mount is a traditional artist from the UK.”

• Website: timmount.deviantart.com

Emma Mount:

“Emma Mount was born with a pencil in her hand, and spent a lot of her childhood scribbling away furiously, her notebook came everywhere with her. Her early teens was lived in the 80′s, and she was hugely influenced by all the exotic women you started to see in pop videos like Duran Duran’s. She loved Nagel’s artwork like the Rio cover, and she also loved all the airbrushed Syd Brak women that were everywhere at that time. She used to draw all sorts, but started gravitating towards sketching from photos of fascinating women she saw in her mum’s fashion mags or her teen music mags. Her icons at the time were strong glamorous women like Debbie Harry and Kate Bush (and glam men of course like Bowie and Adam Ant). At the same time her fascination with the ‘dark side’ of life started to show itself as she discovered and grew up on Hammer Horror, the Addams Family, the Munsters, and started to build a collection of ghost/horror books that would influence her sketches.

She thinks her colourful oil portraits combine inspiration both from the influences of her youth, and from her many years working as a designer for a major cosmetics company in London. She has had a lifelong love of fashion, glamour, kitsch, pin-ups as well as all things ghoulish. Having worked as a designer she is very much caught up in the excitement of creation, and she loves the endless creative possibilities that come from painting, and making a canvas come to life.

She tries to paint subjects who are a little provocative, or challenging, or cheeky or unconventional. She likes the painting to have some ‘life’ or attitude about it. Its great to look to the burlesque world and challenge the conventional idea of what is beautiful, as a woman Emma is bored of body image and ideas of beauty fed to us in the media. She likes that these girls have an interesting mix of nostalgia (in their costumes), as well as being totally modern women, they are not afraid to be who they want, a fantasy even. She likes to make a tribute to them in some way, immortalise them in that moment, celebrating who they are and what they love to do – by doing what she loves to do. And the same goes for her series of film icons, its total nostalgia on her part, and again, a need to make some kind of tribute to those who have influenced her.”

• Website: www.emmamountart.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/emmamount

“Cory Daigler is a Kalamazoo, MI based digital photographer.”

• Website: www.flickr.com/people/corydaigler
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1180421629

Brandi Read:

“Brandi was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1976. At the age of twelve, she was living with her grandparents and twin sister in Bradenton, Florida. Her grandma took her to weekly art lessons. It was at that age that she received her first painting commission. A neighbor paid her twenty dollars to paint five California Raisins, (which were very popular in 1988). She then painted the names of the neighbors family members above the individual raisin characters. She looks back at the painting now as what might be the worst family portrait ever painted by anyone.

Her experience and education in art has expanded since the California Raisin portrait and art lessons at the local art supply shop back to Kalamazoo, Michigan where she graduated magna cum laude from Western Michigan University School of Art. She has won many awards, grants, and scholarships there at the University as well as various juried exhibitions around Michigan, including a travel grant that helped enable her to go to Paris to research as sculpture there for her Nike/Victory series of paintings. Brandi currently shows her paintings on both coasts in various cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Dallas, and Atlanta.”

• Website: www.brandi-read.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/brandi.read

“Erlend Tait grew up on the Black Isle, listening to Heavy Metal, reading comics and drawing pictures. He studied drawing and painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, and then learned the ancient techniques of glass painting and staining while restoring windows in historic buildings throughout Scotland. This has informed his approach to picture-making, where pattern and symbolism combine to convey his state of perpetual confusion and blind positivity.

Erlend exhibits his drawings, paintings and stained glass regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute, and this is the first time he has exhibited in the USA.

We met at Art School and have been together since then. We’ve talked about collaborating from time to time but never quite worked out how to approach it. ‘Feminality Couples’ has encouraged us to find a way…

The process: we started by sitting together, listening to loud music and began a number of drawings each. These were handed over and soon we worked out which drawings we wanted to develop.

‘Double-edged sword’ went back and forth six times before completion.”

• Website: www.erlendtait.com

Pamela Tait:

“Pamela Tait uses coloured pencils as her media of choice and creates portraits that are exquisite destinations for the eyes. The added combination of phrases, usually conjoined with the subject in some form or fashion, add an extra layer of depth that is sometimes poignant and sometimes comical, other times mysterious. These elements – which are sometimes very design based and lend their hand to a sort of pop art feel in her work – make Pamela’s work quite unique in a sea of contemporary portrait makers.

Pamela lives with her husband in the north of Scotland and will be having a solo show this September at FB69 Gallery in Köln, Germany.

We met at Art School and have been together since then. We’ve talked about collaborating from time to time but never quite worked out how to approach it. ‘Feminality Couples’ has encouraged us to find a way…

The process: we started by sitting together, listening to loud music and began a number of drawings each. These were handed over and soon we worked out which drawings we wanted to develop.

‘Double-edged sword’ went back and forth six times before completion.”

• Website: www.pamelatait.co.uk

“At first glance Alan’s work seems to have an eerie feeling of a Catholic fascination with the collective memories of his youth. However, Alan goes beyond to bring forth emotional action by subconsciously choosing subject matter filled with cultural connotation. Ventriloquist dolls, Catholic artifacts, insects, bones, textural mediums and forgotten antiques engage his audience not entirely with their own love for oddities but with the introduction of their calming cultural familiarity into unsettling formalities.

Alan’s artwork is a reminder that there is much more after death. That the essence of life in a forgotten metal, or organic being is just the beginning. He wants to show the beauty in the after life, and allow others to celebrate it as well.

Plainly ingrained with Mechanical, and religious references, Alan’s work is not only inspired by ancient history, but also the works of past experts amongst his influences Georgia O Keefe, Georges de la TOUR and Philippe de Champaigne with additional influence by French and Spanish religious paintings.

Alan is constantly exploring and finding new ways to express his idealistic beliefs with an underlined dirty romance of stylistic creation and technique with social connection. Alan was first thrust into the art world at a gallery called The Hive where he is now currently a full time resident artist there. He has now shown in other galleries throughout the United States, and has a constant need to create for his collectors.

Alan Deforest grew up in San Diego CA. He has been self taught, but has attended Otis in Los Angeles CA. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles where he paints, sculpts, assembles happily amongst his endless collections of marionettes, taxidermy pieces, paintings, bone, books, and odd antique toys.”

• Website: www.lostmuertosart.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1117872343

Bethany Pratt:

“Bethany Pratt has attended many art schools including Oregon College of Art and Craft, California College of Art and Craft, Pacific Northwest College of Art and Otis. She was raised in Portland Oregon by two successful ceramic tile artists. During her childhood she learned much from her parents in the way of arts and crafts. The first of many was jewelry making. Through out high school she continued to make jewelry and took classes at the local art school in metalsmithing. After learning to knit and crochet she started to incorporate this into her work, and thats were the creation began of Bethany’s wire sculptures’. She makes jewelry using semi precious stones and sterling silver. and small sculpture using textile techniques in wire. Bethany owned and ran the venue Nocturnal for 4 years she had events such as art shows, swing dancing, craft night, and independent film night. Now Bethany currently resides in LA where she continues to work on her art and jewelry, and she is a resident artist at The Hive Gallery, and is attending FIDM for jewelry design.”

• Website: www.bethanypratt.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=541458876

“ARTIST STATEMENT:
First and foremost, I create because I absolutely love to. There is really no greater joy then creating and bringing an idea to life. Tapping into some sort of minute divine moment when an idea flourishes and then following through until its completion is simply put, ecstasy.

I have artistic ADD. I have trouble staying focused on one type of “art”. I feel I have many areas and ways to create, and I try very hard to make sure I stay open minded and experimental and not conform. That being said, I have many “styles”, all of which are my styles’. I create from my child and adult minds, separately and at times in harmony. I have to appeal to both sides or weird things start to happen.

I seek to create my world of creepy clowns, jesters, baroque oddities, mystical creatures, ethereal beings, and other theatrically bizarre characters all set in a phantasmic, vividly dark, Russian, surreal, cirque world. With my themes I want to bring the viewer into my world through doors and windows of imagination. Whether it be painting, sculpting or collage I want the viewer to be entranced in their fears and ecstasies of a place that is a little off and surreally odd.

In my art I aim to show that just because my work is “dark” or the characters creepy, that that is only the surface, underneath the façade they can also be benevolent and carry their light in a world that can be even creepier and darker than they are.

BIO:
I was born a mad man, I am a self-taught artist.”

• Website: www.brandanstyles.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/madtatters

Ellie Rusinova:

“ARTIST STATEMENT:
I take old-fashioned concepts and transform them into an imaginary reality where the odd meets the beautiful, the disturbing collides with with the quiet, and sincerity peace and sexuality all balance each other. My characters are often bizarre but easy to relate to. They all live in a place between our world and another. It is my belief that we, as people do the same: live between the realm that everyone knows and our internal world where oddity, melancholy and imagination reign. The pieces often have a story seeping through them about love, betrayal, searching for acceptance, understanding and wearing your strangeness proudly. I go back and forth between three dimensional work and painting, depending on what medium would describe better the mood and feeling of the character I’m working on. Sculpture gives the viewer the immediacy, the clear understanding of the reality we are accustomed to seeing, while painting allows me to control better the surroundings and background by being more accepting of abstraction and impressionistic simplification. I believe that art is incredibly important for humanity’s collective soul by bringing ideas, imagination and inspiration to us all when the monotony of our daily “Grind” threatens the very core of what makes us human – our curiosity and creativity.

BIO:
I am Bulgarian – Russian – American, and I love mixing my ancestry into my art. I have been educated on the old continent as well as the USA. Currently I live with my partner Brandan Styles , two kids and three doggies in Denver, Colorado, where we organize surreal circus events and do art.”

• Website: www.madtatters.com/ellie.html
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/madtatters