Urban landscapes capture what we all experience in our environment. Throughout our lives we modify our living and working space to fit our needs. We are constantly surrounded by an ever-changing landscape of mood and color that I capture in various media. These landscapes have always been a part of my vision. I choose to depict cityscapes through a more refined interpretation of the composition before me. The use of shadows, texture, and color establish areas of movement and light that can create a certain mood.

Following the US Presidential Election of November 8, 2016, I began a series of drawings in an effort to relieve the negative stress I was experiencing. I approached the drawings using the idea of the automatic drawing style of the Surrealists as a means of expressing the subconscious. But I was soon surprised by the tightly, controlled outcomes of the drawings. I’ve come to understand my creative process as a means to organize the chaos in my world, similar in theory to the Buddhist practice of Sagyeong.

Sapira Cheuk’s work revolves around issues of the body, embodiment, and women’s sexuality. Her work incorporates traditional Sumi Ink painting techniques and geometric elements to depict the complexity of the subject and corporeality, while building an alter- native narrative of not only bodily desires, but also intersubjective relations. Cheuk has exhibited in over fifty exhibitions, including those at the Orange County Contemporary Art Center, Riverside Art Museum, Rochester Contemporary Art Museum, Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Robert & Frances Fullerton Museum of Art. She received her BA at University of California, Riverside and MFA from California State University, San Bernardino.

Over the past several years, my prints and drawings have reflected an on-going interest in simplified abstract lines, angles, forms, and edges. My series, Formal Thought Revisited, is directly related to this. I am also interested in the suggestion of space and motion using limited means.

Play is the sacred part of childhood,a precious segway, competition, and rite of passage. This is a series on the importance of play and the right to childhood. This is a collage of torn ink textures.

Enterprising Machines are works inspired by machine aesthetics that reference common tools and domestic utilitarian objects. My work is created by intermingling woodcut, the first print form, with current digital processes. This combination of old and new techniques amplifies the relationship between the human hand and machine within these images.

Consumer catalogues published in the early 1900s for Pratt and Whitney tools, and the Enterprise Manufacturing Company, maker of domestic gadgets, inspire these works. Digitally printed elements I compose recall blueprints or plans and create a foundation for the modification of the context of these implements.

Working from observation of actual objects and making forms with the assistance of 3D modeling allows for transposition and mutability between layers of printed and observed information. The objects explored are simultaneously transformed, denying their original functional purpose, and asserting an animated physical presence and internal narrative.

The third movement of the Views collection is focused on dialogue.  It is a point/counterpoint exploration of communications, technology, and queer sexuality. Images and hand-writing create a visual environment where language reveals varying perceptions from viewpoints that show dichotomies from straight to queer, celebratory to predatory, religious to lecherous, or supportive to radical.

These narrative landscapes are physically-layered over ink paintings, raised by just a few centimeters. Duality is present in all my works, which seem to argue within one another through symbolism and meaning.

This hybrid reality recalls the layered existence of queer masculinity. The paintings explore the objectification of the human experience, using a visual language of power, light, and sexuality. The encounters —from online comments to locker room glances— are recognizable because they are harvested from our post digital reality.

Each of the works is paired with cut companion pieces, offering an attempt to reconstruct context, while simultaneously emphasizing the solitary nature of holding a single view.

The theme for this work, A Dialogue with Nature, is inspired by mankind's existence, side-by-side with the simple beauty of trees and flowers. The images used come from the artist’s frequent trips to Japan and California.

Intimate organic textures and majestic stellar expanses are suggested by the unique qualities of ink and acrylic media.

This range of expressive possibilities is only possible with the singular characteristics that ink provides.

As an integral part of my art process, ink allows me to create these enigmatic images, in which I continue to discover new aspects of light and form.

In the dawn of prehistory, when I was younger, I spent a summer in a heightened state of awareness sans drugs. I was so exhilarated by the visual world around me, I borrowed a camera and started taking pictures of fields of daisies, Japanese beetles, and dew on the grass. Later I had a series of explicit dreams: the photographs I had taken arrived in collaged compositions that actually had a form-content relationship. I was not an artist at the time, nevertheless, I printed and cut the photos, pre-Photoshop, into these compositions.

Recently, I decided to return to work with those images. After wasting a lot of paper and telling myself to keep trying to get the technique right, I produced some lithographs. Autumn Window is a series of photos of dying lilacs and apples from a bitter November day long ago.

As a Hispanic female artist, I express myself best through my art. By reflecting on my own life and heritage, my creativity flows.

I am a printmaker who pushes the boundaries. Woodcuts and other print-making techniques have allowed me to experiment with a variety of papers and media. Thanks to family members in Japan, my studio features a wide range of washi papers.

My ink wash, Lovely Lady, exemplifies my use of ink in multiple ways by washing it with water. The inspiration for this depiction of a breast cancer survivor is drawn from my own experience as a three-time survivor.

The Parched Earth series illustrates the threat climate change poses to biological diversity. Lyke is inspired by the need to protect diverse animals, including: African elephants, emperor penguins, and endangered California wildlife. For these species, climate change and human over-population constitute real dangers to their habitats. Lyke evokes the damage climate change has wrought on Earth using a relief method of printing to suggest the earth with etchings of endangered animals printed on the surface of the parched earth. In Survival, the cracked earth calls forth the dry, brittle land of California during its five-year drought.

I have developed several series of artworks under the archetype of ‘Observer.’ The ‘Observer’ is one who sees beyond material achievement and loves watching, looking, and experiencing. I see the ‘Observer’ as a dreamer, very attuned to their surroundings, who allows the cultural minutiae of everyday life to seep in and out of their consciousness.

In this new artwork, I am attempting to show the difficulties –loneliness and isolation– and the beauty of starting a new life, in a new state, by combining some of my favorite art and nature from both places. It represents an attempt to normalize this dramatic change in my life.

I am primarily interested in the emotional and narrative content of the figure. Using gesture and intensity as a driving visual force with the provocation of gesture as it relates to paradox and contradiction, the challenge of finding visual forms to hold emotion, and the narrative of experience.

I am interested in creating image where beauty and bravery meet, and to tell the truth, of what is haunting me. Like a black hole that absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive.

I often work from an unconscious, intuitive place. Surprising myself by what comes out of that. I am interested in the revelations that result from observing the figure from a range of  perspectives, approaching an idea using a gamut of mediums­ —each medium revealing  another layer of intimacy. I allow myself the freedom to drive into the image  by changing scale and exploring the figure within a wide spectrum of techniques and possibilities. I call this `Degrees of Freedom´, allowing myself to enter any territory that could bring me new revelation and insight into the narrative of human nature revealed by any particular figure that I am working with.

I love to work with lines and gesture to express images. The developmental process of drawing generates surprising changes that unfold as the images take their place on the canvas. Images that vary in shape, size, and intensity of color create a collage effect that compels the viewer to notice something new in each observation of the piece. Even the space between the images and the shadows and light create visual stimulation. The Escalator is an up and down shopping experience.

I am continually astounded by Man’s relentless conquest to tame and command nature. Our foolish attempts to control nature are comical. The bird is the one in control.

I describe myself as a California artist. As a fourth generation California native, much of my work explores the powerful natural elements that dominate the Southern California landscape and the iconic culture that has been born of it. I am influenced by the work of artists such as Peter Alexander, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha and Richard Diebenkorn.

Working with mixed media, I often include gels, resin, fluorescence, pearlesence,  and iridescence —materials that capture and reflect light to imitate the changeable conditions of nature.

My Riviera District  paintings are an exploration of the beaches and waters of San Clemente. Calafia uses warm washes of acrylic stains interspersed with golden edges and splatters of bronze ink, reminiscent of summer sunsets simmering like the desert sun.  These colors beckon you to a good today and a happy future.

In a world currently filled with uncertainties the attention to “all things Nature” allows us a freedom of, and connection to the differences in our global community that add to creating a more available quality to life.

Each day we are called on to make choices about how to live, reaching to our core value to be. A showing-up for and able to develop critical thinking skills in the not so simple phenomena of the physical world, landscapes, animals, and plants;  the not so easy human condition, man-made structures, social rules;  and the never superficial inherent beauty of things — their sense of magic. Each with a language of its own and we can’t look away from what they demand of us, personal growth.

Art has a way of saving “things” from extinction.  Even if it’s just a simple easy, depth of a new color, sound, or distraction from — there is nothing so compelling when it comes to an artistic view.

Art is a powerful influencer. Art that encourages choice creates a kinetic pull in such a way that it takes the action of “walking away” from it to realize something changed and a safe place using space / time / location experiences now exists.

Ross is a Los Angeles-based visual artist, whose concepts of self, the human (metaphoric) figure, and how exposure to higher vibrations, deep thinking, and taking actions are able to twist perception to make changes by offering conscious choice, to affect growth on the cellular level.

My work is about transformation.

I am interested in reconfiguring shapes and patterns by printing a repeating pattern, on a transparent material that interacts with light, to create a unique visual experience.

From a distance, the works function as abstract compositions. Upon closer inspection, recognizable shapes take form supporting the whole object.

Chinese calligraphy is prized above painting for its moral and physical components, using ink and brush to go beyond traditional meaning of words. The language has developed different styles over thousands of years, and I have worked years to develop my own abstract styles after having mastered the traditional styles. My work blends ancient and new, demonstrating timeless themes. I use traditional Chinese single xuan paper, brushes, bamboo pens, and mixed inks along with Western paints in compositions using Eastern and Western art sensibilities. For example, Chimera abstracts the characters for "devil king" in a soft and dreamlike setting, but without the strength of upright characters much as political rhetoric is often delivered. The work allows for viewer interpretation, regardless of their knowledge of the written language.

Big Bang II looks at the beginning eruption or the genesis of heaven and earth. From the molten explosion of colors, giving rise to the cool of wind and seas, and the pushing upward of the dark bumpy layers of the earth’s crust, our solar system miraculously and divinely supports and nourishes our diverse humanity.

Each of my paintings can stand alone, allowing the viewer to find his or her own personal message within. Media include acrylic paint, pouring medium, and Sumi ink.

My current work combines two divergent images to create a new image with content that each individual image does not possess on its own. The work explores the elusive quality of reality and how our personal conceptions contribute to what we comprehend as truth.

My creative research is informed by my interest in pattern, camouflage, mimicry, layering, and relative scale. I find inspiration both in the natural and human-made world, creating abstract and non-representational works of art that gradually reveal and obscure information in richly textured layers.

Since 2000, I have focused my studio practice on the reduction woodcut. I find its sculptural physicality, in combination with its working immediacy, very appealing. I am exceedingly seduced by its inherent quality, requiring the gradual destruction of the matrix during the creation of the work of art. The reduction woodcut print is born out of a creative one-way voyage that provides constant challenges and requires total commitment to any decision made. This process does not tolerate any detours or returns. Consequently, the reduction woodcut is always a unique, fresh, direct, powerful, and honest expression of the artist’s creative intent.

Ever since I was seven years old, I was obsessed with time. I was fascinated by the world’s different coexistent calendars, our internal biological clocks, and the way scientists tried to understand the physics of the 4th dimension. My work today deepens and extends that never-ending conversation I have with the historical past I love and the future I am dying to know.

I want my work to get people talking and debating the future. What will it be like? How will we react? What about virtual worlds, EEG brain wearables, augmented reality, reverse aging, driverless cars, gender disappearance…?

Change is happening on a scale never before experienced. Rather than getting dragged, kicking and screaming, behind the challenge is to step in and create the world we dream is possible. We can start by stopping our instinct to fear change. Only if we can imagine the world we want, can we build it and make it real.