Lifetime – Circle Foundation for the Arts

Eriko Kaniwa

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Eriko Kaniwa is a digital artist working under her personal brand, Sensegraphia. Sensegraphia is a conceptual redefinition of photography, in which the visual aesthetics of the photograph are used to develop and express a sense of nature that enables us to recognize that humans are a part of nature and that we are centrally involved in nature's dynamics. Through digital fine art, Sensegraphia puts forward a philosophy and creative activities that reestablish the essential unity between people and nature, even within the context of today's highly advanced science and technology.

"For me, photography is not a philosophical metaphor for death or the past, but rather a crystallization of the temporal dimension with which humans react so vitally, achieved through the medium of light."

Kaniwa spent two years exploring the symbols of Japanese nature worship, after the period of TV program production and the social ventured innovation, which are exemplified in the so-called "eight million of gods" of Shinto. She reflected on how the ancient Japanese viewed their natural surroundings and symbolized it as an object of prayer. Traveling to over twenty locations throughout Japan, she captured images of torii gates built in water, sacred wedded rocks, world heritage sites, and other spiritual landscapes. These images are collected, together with text, in her book "JOKEI - Symbols of Nature Worship, Sacred Places of Japan", which has won multiple international awards as one of the best fine art photo books in the world. In addition to this book, her other works have received multiple international awards, including PX3, ND Awards, Sony World Photography Awards, IPA, Pollux Awards, and more.

Kaniwa also creates digitally enhanced abstract artwork based on her unique philosophy. Her works have been displayed at galleries in London and New York, as well as art fairs and international exhibitions such as Fotofever Paris and Barcelona Foto Biennale. Kaniwa's artwork has been seen in magazines such as British VOGUE, British GQ, London Life, Wired, and OPEN-EYE France and more. While embracing her great concern over the planet's ongoing sixth mass extinction, she is actively exploring whether it is possible to incorporate these issues into her creative concepts.

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Viktoriya Tudoran (COdVT)

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"What would you do if you were not a software developer?"

"I would be an artist."

Viktoriya Tudoran was born in Ukraine in 1980 in the industrial city of Mykolayiv. She has been interested in drawing since childhood, but the social environment where she grew up made her understand very early that being an artist was not a good choice to earn money. Therefore, she forgot about drawing for over 20 years.

In 2003 Viktoriya received a Master’s Degree in computer science graduating from the National University of Shipbuilding (Ukraine). She has worked in this branch ever since. In 2015, being a university lecturer, Viktoriya published a student book titled ‘Human Computer Interaction’ The book is still recommended by the Ukrainian Ministry of Science as an official student book for all Ukrainian universities. The book contains a lot of information on processing visual data by the human brain.

The same year Viktoriya and her husband moved to Poland. As it was a time of change in many fields of her life, she also got back to her childhood interest and started to learn drawing basics from books.

Initially, sketching was just a tool to improve drawing techniques, but soon it became a passion.

Today Viktoriya holds a position of Senior Web Software Engineer in an international company. She conducts ‘Sketch Your Speech’ trainings on the use of drawing as visual aids in public speaking. Her sketches have reached the finals of several online contests in Europe and the USA and have been exhibited together with professional artists’ works.

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Marianne Odok

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Swiss artist, Marianne Odok has received an education as a translator.

"Language has always been and still is, a part of my creative being."

For over 40 years she has pursued different paths in art. In the 80s, Odok lived in Japan for three and a half years, an experience that had an enormous impact on her perception and sense of aesthetics.

"Quite recently, I rediscovered the art of haiku, a Japanese form of lyrics. Also in Japan, I learned the art of Sumi-E, ink painting. I like to experiment with different materials and forms. For many years, I worked with watercolors and digital photography, an art that gave me the freedom to paint without a brush."

In the past few years, Odok prefers to work with acrylic paint, with an occasional venture into tempera painting.

"I like to depict symbolic scenes and to tell hidden stories in my paintings but I also like simple things like still lives and landscapes. Art for me is vital, like breathing."

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Aleksandra Sheren

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An artist and film maker residing in Latin America, Aleksandra Sheren graduated as a theoretical linguist from Saint- Petersburg State University, Russia and received her second degree from the International School of Photography and Cinema and a degree in Directing from a world - renowned School of Documentary Filmmaking . She has been numerously featured in 'Photographize Magazine' and included in the 'Photographize Magazine Annual Book', as well as published at the Marvelous Art Magazine. Sheren has exhibited at Agora Gallery, New York, at the Photo D’Femme Contest “Seeing Women” exhibitions in France, and had an online exhibition in the Marvelous Art Gallery. She has been featured as an emerging artist to watch for by ArtConnect, a platform for contemporary art worldwide. Her style in photography is leaning most towards photo surrealism and cinematic photography, but not confined to it. As a linguist by her first degree, she has special passion to symbols and ancient esoteric symbolic systems. Besides her photo art, Sheren is currently working on a project in documentary filmmaking dedicated to shamanism. Her music short "Portraiture" has received several awards at the film festivals worldwide.

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Cristian Blei

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Romanian artist, Cristian Blei started drawing and painting at a very young age, fascinated by the power of colors and shapes like a magical thing. Coming from a family of visual artists, the plastic language became very familiar to him from an early age, later unambiguously determining his path to the artistic field.

Blei's work is inspired always by an idea, a state, a dream, becoming then a story that is revealed in a subtle and unpredictable form. Introspection is very important in this creative process as a means of revealing the inner chaos, understanding it and overcoming it. This process makes him travel an unknown itinerary for the beginning, caught in a game of duality between logic and emotion between known and unknown, in which the mystery has its role.

As a technique, Blei mainly use the oils in a succession of fine color layers and use any pleasant accident of the colors on the canvas integrating it as part of the shapes game.

His style was strongly influenced by classical and also modern painting, as well as by the surrealist current that explores the idea of dreams and initiates the imagination as a total means of expression.

"I want to paint an emotion, a dream, through lines, colors and shapes, to create something new, different and unique!"

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Cordula Rock

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Katya Dudnik

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"There are no "absolutely grown ups" and no “absolutely childish” people. We all come from the world of the fairy tale, where we see the brightest dreams and the air is soaked in them. The most important thing is not to lose this childishness when you grow up and get wiser, have a free spirit, be loving and always ready to meet fairy tales."

Katya Dudnik is a prominent Ukranian artist. Her first teacher was her father, while her mother was her inspiration.

Apart from an outstanding natural talent, Kate has a notable professional background, studied at the State School of Arts T.G.Shevchenko (1997-2000) and the National Art Academy (2001-2007). She is an honorable Member of the Izmail Art Union and National Youth Assembly of Artists of Ukraine. In 2010 the name of Katya Dudnik was included to the “United Art Rating” (which includes the names of the artists of Russian Empire, USSR, Russian Federation, Ukraine and all the ex-USSR Republics of 18th - 21st centuries, who formed their part of the world’s heritage).

The main characters of her paintings are her two sons, nieces, beloved sister and Katya herself. But each viewer sees himself or someone from his family, friends. Katya Dudnik took part in various exhibitions which helped her become confident, brought her acclaim and incentives for new creative works. She has actively exhibited since 2000, an entire list of her CV is visible on http://katyadudnik.gallery/about/

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Fong Fai

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Fong Fai studied art at the Hong Kong Academy of Art in Hong Kong. He was selected as one of the six leading artists in Hong Kong. He owned an art gallery (Fong's Art Gallery) and also taught at the Oriental Arts Institute in Hong Kong. Fai's artworks have been exhibited in Asia, Australia and North America. Later, Fong Fai was invited to exhibit his paintings in San Francisco and Hawaii, where he fell in love with this country and decided to stay. Today his works continue to appear in the United States. An abstract artist, Fong Fai uses brushwork calligraphy techniques to produce works that integrate concepts of Eastern and Western art. Fong Fai currently lives in San Francisco.

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Jane Lawton Baldridge

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Jane has shown work in Lincoln Center, Times Square, the Louvre, Museum of Computer Art, Mint Museum, Cameron Museum of Art, Fayetteville Museum of Art, World Festival of Art on Paper (Slovenia). Jane grew up sailing on the coast of Texas. She studied art at High School for Performing and Visual Arts (Houston, TX), California Institute of Art (Valencia, CA) and the Alfred G. Glassel Museum School (Houston, TX).

Jane has won competitions at both local and international levels. She has been published and her print of “We the People,” her 911 tribute, lives in the US Library of Congress. Most recently Jane completed a commission for a new commercial building that is 7' x 7'!

“Being a creative requires being somewhat fearless. Unafraid to make something new and so different no one understands what it is.” Jane was taught by John Mandel and influenced by Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, all at Cal Arts, to never repeat what has been done, to do new art. Arthur Turner at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, taught her to try multiple mediums, to keep the creative ideas flowing.

Her new studio is in Stuart, Florida. Primarily a painter, Jane also likes to use a varied mixture of pencil, charcoal, acrylics, latex, glazes, inks, watercolor and digital.

She is a licensed boat captain and lived on a boat with her husband and their dog. They have settled in Stuart where Jane now maintains a beautiful art studio. She has a profound respect for water. She watches how the water moves, how it sculpts shorelines as well as deposits sand or takes it away.

“Mixed media artist, Jane Lawton Baldridge has a comprehensive body of work belonging conceptually and contextually to five series: 'Tides & Currents', 'Revolution', 'Reflections', 'Sail Away' and 'Erosion & Alchemy'. Her works featured here are from the latter series and reflect upon her love and respect for water. Naturally, the predominant color in these abstract works is blue, connecting the artist’s practice with an extensive legacy of artworks from antiquity to post-modernity.

Jane's works are full of life. Masterfully combined hues make up fluid compositions which like water carry the viewer's eye in a back and forth, wave-like motion across the corners of the canvas. The works have a painterly quality adding a calming effect and indeed, gazing at each canvas brings up a similar feeling of fixedly looking at the ocean which is also Jane's main inspiration.

Although her images supply the viewer with an abstract backdrop for resting their relaxing thoughts on, Jane's pieces are also an engaging attempt to bring to mind environmental issues and our species' non-reciprocal attitude towards the life-giving element of water. In her own words, "As sea levels rise and powerful storms erode the landscape, lack of moral compass erodes society." In this sense, the works in Jane Lawton Baldridge's 'Erosion & Alchemy' series can be seen as a visual metaphor for the decadent course humans have taken; far from - if not against - our own nature and our neglected responsibility toward this ecosystem which has nourished our existence.

Jane's works are rich in texture, with a winding, vibrant rhythm and reveal a remarkable talent for unapologetically blending color as well as balancing shapes in dynamic, powerful compositions that are perfectly captivating for purely aesthetic reasons, relative or not to the intended message behind them.” - Circle Foundation for the Arts, Director

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Eriko Kaniwa

"For me, photography is not a philosophical metaphor for death or the past, but rather a crystallization of the temporal dimension with which humans react so vitally, achieved through the medium of light."

Viktoriya Tudoran (COdVT)

Marianne Odok

“Art reflects the fabric of our soul.”

Aleksandra Sheren

"In my work I am pursuing to explore sensuality and otherworldliness of humans. I am mixing photography, digital art, videography, and sometimes sound. My portraits show how I see who people are when nobody is looking at them, their inner search for freedom, and their answer to this search."

Cristian Blei

"I want to paint an emotion, a dream, through lines, colors and shapes, to create something new, different and unique!"

Cordula Rock

"In art the cosmic beauty that underlies everything can be experienced. Art gives me the space to allow something new. The artist must not allow himself to be determined - he must be the creator himself. He has to leave MARKS!"

Katya Dudnik

Fong Fai

“Abstract art, it is a reality that does not exist, a product of thought, momentary feelings, and music melody... all that could be my inspiration to create.”

Jane Lawton Baldridge

"I have had a fascination, maybe an obsession, with water for as long as I remember. I prefer to be in it, if not in than on and failing that let me stare at it. Watching my childhood sand castles fall to the continued impertinent rolling in of waves and tide captivated me."