Winners Showcase 2022 March 5 - March 27, 2022
Featuring Kyle Blumenthal, Donna Corvi, Gia Horton Schifano, Margaret Minardi, Lily Newland
Kyle Blumenthal
Kyle Blumenthal's life is steeped in art. From a very early age, she immersed herself in art books, art prints and art works. Her father was a sculptor and served as her first teacher. She experiences life as an artist, always looking at color, shadow and form in order to better portray them on canvas.
An Illustrator, a Fine Artist, a Stage Designer and Display Artist, Kyle holds an MFA and an MA in Painting and a bachelor’s of fine arts in painting and art education. She experiments through various media, and she encourages the viewer to contemplate and interact with her paintings. Her paintings convey a message of hope and enlightenment and her subjects echo their spiritual identity through the use of forms, patterns, media, light and color. “My entire life I have been fascinated with the metaphysical world. The concept of what is real and what is illusion has always been the basis for my creations.” As an art educator, Kyle imparts her knowledge as a teacher and mentor, especially for students in junior and senior high school. “I am immersed in art in all I do as art is infused in my soul. I dream of creating beautiful works of art which combine the visual arts, music, dance, painting, color and light.”
Donna Corvi
Born in New York City, Donna Corvi is a graduate of the High School of Art and Design, Parsons School of Design, and The New School. Her career began in illustration using watercolor, airbrush and colored pencil. After a commercial art career of 20 years in NYC, a change was in order.” Now, painting in both oil and acrylic, I can focus on painting what resonates with me most…trees, branches, wind and color.” The artist takes daily walks along the water, in the woods and across fields to record her reference material for her expressionist views of tree branches, wind and the ever-changing seasons.
Most recently, I have been exploring the 3-dimensional. “Inspired by seeing so many areas up and down the east coast with dead or dying trees, it saddens me to see the effects of strangling vines, pollution, disease and neglect on forests. Trees give us life. They give us the air we breathe. Thus began my "Pollution Trees/Tree Totems" series. Using dead or live branches, spray paint, cement and other materials, these creations represent a stark visual reality to an otherwise slowly progressing degenerative process that we might hardly ever notice.”
Gia Horton Schifano
Gia Horton Schifano is a self-taught artist. Her love for Long Island and its beauty from coast to coast is what inspires her. Her sense of composition and realistic style bring to the viewer a sense of peace and beauty in nature.
Her love of art began at an early age and was her focus during her childhood and adolescent years winning awards in elementary and high school, honors that now have followed her as an adult. Though life has brought her down many different paths, she never put down a pencil or brush always driven to create.
Over the years, Gia has worked in charcoal, colored pencil, and acrylic but her latest love is water-mixable oils that lend themselves beautifully to the techniques used for her landscapes and portrait work. Gia’s art focuses on the serenity of the east end of Long Island…from the bluest summer skies with their reflections in mirrored water to the winding country roads. “My paintings portray the images of less public spots that I loved so much growing up spending summers in the North Sea area of Southampton. “The nature, the light, the smell of salt air and honeysuckle is all the inspiration I need to put brush to canvas.”
Margaret Minardi
I have been working on a White on White series for more than 3 years. The series includes high realism portraits of my students and my daughter…subjects that are close to my heart.
As a 30-year high school art educator, I was privileged to work with teenagers that were magical and complex. They created images that seemed impossible for ones so young. They glowed with strength and agonized with fragility. It is my hope that some of their beauty is captured in this series.
Some of the works in this exhibit are rendered using Prismacolor colored pencil. They are heavily layered and seek a subtle color palette found in white subjects. Dramatic light is another tool used in the making of this series.
The majority of works in this exhibit are solar plate etchings. Solar plate etching is a process that utilizes light to etch a specially prepared surface. Once the plate is etched, it is inked and wiped the same way a traditional etching is made. The plate is then run through a printing press onto a wet piece of paper. The etchings shown all relate to my White on White series.
Lily Newland
Lily Newland is a Long Island based artist. She received her BFA from Binghamton University in 2019 and is currently pursuing an MAT in art education at Queens College. While Lily is well versed in multiple disciplines including painting and printmaking, her passion lies with drawing. For Lily, drawing is the purest expression of the form. She enjoys the subject of the figure in its endless variations and in her desire to distill its fleeting presence. "Drawing has remained a constant for me, when life becomes fussy and my creative enthusiasm gets a bit lost, I can usually find it again by simply returning to my sketch book."