Artist Highlight: Week of 8/3 – 8/9

Julia Chen is an artist and educator that has enriched the creative community at Educational Alliance Art School for years. Julia received her MFA from New York Academy of Art, and MA and BS from New York University. Julia’s artwork primarily focuses on the human form and the environments that they occupy. Wielding a virtuosic grasp of the material, Julia creates a lush, almost magical, environment for a viewer to inhabit. Whether her subject is a naturalistic portrait or a landscape rendered in soft brushstrokes, her paintings invite you inside a space that is immediately calming and reflective. Encouraging you to view the people and places in your own life with a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation. Learn more about the artist here.

Artist Highlight: Week of 6/1 – 6/7

An accomplished painter, printmaker and sculptor, Mauricio Trenard’s work can be found in private collections throughout Europe, Mexico and the United States. His illustrations for Dance, Nana, Dance won him the 2009 Aesop Award and Bank Street’s Best Children’s Book of the Year. With over 25 years of teaching experience under his belt, the historic Educational Alliance Art School is honored to count him amongst our talented staff of teaching artists. Read more about Mauricio here.

Artist Highlight: Week of 5/25 – 5/31

Thomas Legaspi is a New York City based artist and educator with over two decades of experience working professionally in the arts. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally while accruing awards and various merits of distinction. Thomas’s paintings focus on the narrative potential of figurative art. Each piece transports viewers to a space of deep introspection, allowing them to sit alongside his subjects as they struggle with a palpable and universal sense of internal conflict. As an audience, we enter the lives of each portrait at a time of resolve. In the eyes and posture of each of his subjects one can recognize a certain look of strength, hope, and perseverance. These incisive expressions lend to the viewer a divining rod pointing to an internal wellspring of determination present within each of us. Learn more about Thomas’s work here.

Artist Highlight: Week of 5/18 – 5/24

Artist Highlight: Week of 5/11 – 5/17

Artist Highlight: Week of 5/4 – 5/10

Artist Highlight: Week of 4/27 – 5/3

Artist Highlight: Week of 4/20 – 4/26

Kyle Lee is a ceramic artist and instructor with nearly 18 years of experience creating both functional and decorative ceramics. His primary body of ceramic work consists of traditional, elegantly shaped ceramic vases with a high-end, contemporary design aesthetic. His utilization of bold color combinations and free form painted brush strokes allow him to achieve modernist, contemporary, and abstract surface designs. Kyle has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions and invitationals, both nationally and internationally. His ceramic work can also be found in private collections in New York, Paris, London and beyond. In April 2021, his work is scheduled to display in the 1000 VASES exhibition during Design Week in Milan, Italy. Learn more about Kyle Lee here and see more of his work on his website or on Instagram.

Artist Highlight: Week of 4/13 – 4/19

Olga Burenkova is a classically trained oil painter living and working in New York City. In her spare time, Olga volunteers as a studio monitor in the Educational Alliance Art School’s mixed media studio. Olga’s artwork is often based around themes of identity, prosperity and celebration. Using her striking skills as a portrait artist, Olga balances naturalist representations of her subject with a vibrant, almost surreal, color pallet; evoking a sense of wonder and otherworldliness to her compositions.

Read more about Olga through her own words here.

Artist Highlight: Week of 4/6 – 4/12

Lynn Goodman, Ceramic Artist & Educator, is a native New Yorker. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BFA at the Philadelphia College of Art (now known as the University of the Arts), and went on to receive a MFA in Ceramics at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Lynn has shown nationally in juried exhibits and invitationals, and is a former partner of the cooperative crafts gallery, Brooklyn Artisans Gallery. She teaches wheel throwing, hand building and the occasional glaze calculation class at local ceramics studios in the New York City area and at the college level.

Lynn’s art and process are best described in her own words here. Learn more about Lynn’s work on her website or follow her on Instagram.

Artist Highlight: Week of 3/30 – 4/5

Studio Apprentice, Alex Lebedev, writes about his experience rebuilding a wood kiln in Washington, CT. “My part of this story began in the fall of 2019 when I first met my friend Will Talbot of Bell Hill Pottery. I had been potting for nearly two years and firing all of my work in oxidation at cone 6 in electric kilns. For some time I’d been chasing the dragon of achieving novel and aesthetically interesting surfaces in my work, amassing a collection of chemicals to mix up a great variety of glazes and playing with different combinations and applications of the above with the aim of creating beautiful, organic and varied finishes on my pots. While I was indeed very happy with [most of] the results I was getting, I still had an itch that I could not yet scratch. I was in awe of the effects possible with atmospheric firings (wood, salt, soda) where the vapors create glaze on their own and reduction environments where the loss of oxygen can completely change the colors of chemical components and trap carbon in glaze surfaces, creating wonderful mottled patterns. Under good circumstances, pots fired in these conditions can tell a story of the firing with their deposits and flash marks tracing the path of the flame. I desperately wanted a piece of that action.”

Read more about him here.

Artist Highlight: Week of 3/23 – 3/29

Evan Hagan is a Brooklyn based Ceramist, Illustrator, and Educator with almost two decades of experience working in the arts. His artwork has been exhibited in numerous juried shows, invitationals, and private collections, both nationally and internationally. Evan first began working in clay at the age of 15 when he was accepted as an apprentice to The Peoria Art Guild in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois. Training as an apprentice for 2 years before continuing his artistic studies in college where Evan studied under professional artists who mentored him in a multitude of artistic disciplines. These include illustration, sculpture, mold making and casting, photography, painting, printmaking, and what would become his life’s passion, ceramics.

Evan Hagan is a Brooklyn-based ceramicist specializing in slip-cast, wheel thrown and hand built ceramic vessels. He is also an illustrator. It is very interesting to see interplay between his ceramic work which focuses on smooth textures and simple billowing shapes and his illustrations which are highly detailed often gritty works art that are reminiscent of 80’s and 90s culture.

Here’s a little more about Evan in his own words: “While in high-school, I was fortunate enough to be accepted as an apprentice to the Peoria Art Guild in my home town of Peoria, Illinois. As an apprentice I was given the opportunity to study a number of artistic disciplines: oil painting, photography, metal working, printmaking, and ceramics.

I fell in love with ceramics the first time I sat down at the wheel. It’s almost 18 years later and I’m still throwing, still exploring, and still growing every time I start spinning the wheel. My ceramic work is focused on the tension between utility and embellishment. Pushing the form of an object as far as it can while still maintaining its intended function. Exploring the tension between surface and form.”

See more of Evan’s work at: evanhagan.com.