Having worked in the visual arts for over half a century, Richard Aber is best known for his installations that physically manifest his personal exploration of various philosophical thoughts. His father of German and Scottish descent, met his Romanian mother at the Art Students League in the 1930’s. His parents gave Aber early exposure to their interest in painting and architecture, theosophy and Eastern mystical traditions. This background established his life-long interest in Eastern and Western philosophical school of thought, affecting his approach to be about the human condition. Art is more than artifice for Aber, it is a way to find one’s self and one’s connection with humanity and the universe.

Given the opportunity to build his home in Santa Barbara, California, his art works began to shift away from the sculptural object and into painting and proposals for architectural spaces. Painting, for Aber was a release from the physical world. Gravity was gone and he could explore the internal mindscape. He starts his work using a traditional grid structure with golden color-light or stable color of earth that lures the interaction of the viewers to fulfill its form. Aber’s life-long interest in truth and reality comes to fruition as this process of interaction between the creator and viewer comes to be.

“I see with an eye that feels. I feel with a hand that sees…” Goethe

Born of Jewish immigrants who escaped the Holocaust, Razili grew up in Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the middle of Hula Valley surrounded by the Syrian border to the east and Lebanon to the northwest. By living close to nature and supplanted by her early exposure to the arts and crafts through her family library of books on Van Gogh, Miro and Rembrandt, opportunity and luck lead her to study art at the Oranim Art Institute in Haifa, Israel and later at the Otis Art institute in Los Angeles, California. From meager introduction to art through books, she was able now to see original art works and to meet artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Tuttle.

To be in contact with original artworks clarified for Razili of her own approach to art. Art became the physical presence. She moved from an expressionistic to a minimal approach, where she placed herself in direct contact with industrial building materials. Razili states, “It is not the illusion that I am seeking for, it is the real stuff, reality by itself. Next to the refined industrial material, I juxtapose surfaces such as aluminum and wax that either reflect or absorb light until balance and serenity evolves. The form reflects a confirmation of my own existence. I make objects. I see them. I touch them. It’s all around me proving to me of my own physicality.”

Ann Gooding, with an early interest in art was able to study throughout her school years, graduating from Illinois State University in art education and receiving her MFA Degree in art from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. With her work in sculpture and painting, Gooding combines the techniques of both disciplines in her current work. Gooding layers pure primary colors covered with dispassionate, muted, dense blue and then with carving tools, carves with varying pressure into the prepared color ground. She coordinates her pressure of carving to reveal the color desired. She reveals strips of yellow to be followed by carving down to red layer. She is fascinated by visual color vibrations and its effect of a resulting secondary hue, orange.

Gooding’s primary interest is her formal approach to art and maintains color, space, texture and composition as significant phenomena. Having started by combining painted and unpainted wood boards, Gooding adventures into combining solid colors with carved patterns emerging from underneath the layers of paint. Gooding states, “All my works are done by hand; no mechanical tools are used. Paint is applied by brush and palette knife. My current work uses a variety of cutting techniques in addition to the incised lines.”

 Carlo Marcucci

In his still-life painting and his more recent series, Wheatfields, Carlo Marcucci presents his concern for the effects of industrialism’s destruction upon us. He paints a visual criticism of today’s demand for blemish-free produce, which comes at the expense of taste and questionable health safety. In his paintings he utilizes industrial symbols, emblems that represent a synthetic language, concepts and things that become warning signs in making us aware of environmental hazards. His signs liken to computer pixilated images, communicating technological processes and age. He uses layering techniques used in computer software: In his first layer, he paints a rough color of the form to place shadows, highlights and general colors into an overall composition. The second layer is to refine the rendering of the object, finding the true color of the fruit. The third layer is spraying transparent acrylic inks to increase the chroma of the colors and intensify and deepen the color. The fourth layer is adding all touches that soften the image into the background and sharpen the contrast.

In his Wheatfield series, Marcucci follows a course parallel to sculpture. This series of work features wall-mounted sculptures made of pasta, specifically of Italian spaghetti and Japanese noodles. The artist states, “These minimalist compositions are abstract representations of the wheat fields as seen from above, when harvest combines have carved through the golden terrain. Additionally, the geometric shapes of these works are an interpretation of processed food containers and their disproportionate role in modern food distribution. In a metaphorical sense, the box containing the spaghetti is reborn as a box constructed of spaghetti. The theme behind these pieces is our relationship to processed foods in modern age. The notion of food has become ever more distant from its original nature. I try to engage the viewers by removing preconceived ideas of a familiar food and allowing them to enjoy the composition through the rediscovery of the sculpture’s ingredients.”

Mark Greenfield followed his father, Tuskegee Airman Russell Greenfield to military bases from Taiwan to Germany. With this early exposure to art and history at various museums of Asian and European countries, he set his mind to communicate his thoughts through the visual arts. After his study with Charles White and John Riddle at the Otis Art Institute, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Art Education from California State University, Long Beach and his Master of Fine Arts Degree from California State University, Los Angeles. Together with his formal educational background and talent, Greenfield has established himself as a unique force in the Los Angeles art scene. Presently, he is director of Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery for the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles.

Mark Greenfield’s early watercolor paintings of Los Angeles derelicts and his empathetic and compassionate view of humanity links with his recent works where pictorial images are formed in his subconscious. Greenfield states, “It is my contention that we borrow from this subliminal well on the conscious level and alternately navigate through various layers of consciousness to reach the source of our spiritual selves. My initial exploration of this theoretical phenomenon was realized in work which dealt with the psychological effect associated with African-American stereotypes characterized by blackface minstrels. My scope has broadened to include daily mundane occurrences that leave both positive and negative imprints on the human nervous system. Admittedly the process is dependent on a methodology akin to “automatic writing.” The work relies on the spontaneous manifestation of ideas and the tactile manipulation of medium in a form of mental mapping.”