VISIT MY SOLO EXHIBIT AT GALLERY35

The covid pandemic of 2020 gave many beautiful natural sites a time out from the usual influx of visitors. I chose two—Cathedral Rock in Arizona’s Sedona and a slot canyon located within New Mexico’s Tent Rocks—to include in an online summer exhibit, Art Unlocked! at Gallery35 in NYC. The following video shows my process that began with photography and continued by digitally layering and colorizing abstracted elements to unfold the imagery of these sites At Rest.
Click below to view ART UNLOCKED!—Gallery35’s online exhibit of work created by 14 member artists before and during the pandemic!
ART UNLOCKED!—June-September 2020
Art On Barcelona Gallery
107 W Barcelona St, Santa Fe, NM
Gallery35
30 E 35th St, New York, NY
AKA “Old Man Gloom, “he” is a 50-foot tall cloth behemoth stuffed with papers upon which Santa Feans have written their glooms from the past year. He is then placed at the far end of an athletic field to meet his fate as throngs of locals and visitors chant “burn him!” This is the 95th time this tradition has marked the beginning of the annual Fiestas de Santa Fe.
Earlier in the summer I entered an art competition for the Seventies-themed 2019 poster and T-shirt. It was a labor of love transforming this ugly creature into a disco icon! Even after being notified that my John Travolta look-alike would be silkscreened onto the official adult T-shirt, I had to keep design top secret until the unveiling just one week before the Burning of Zozobra.
Read more about all the winning Zozobra artists at https://burnzozobra.com/2019-official-zozobra-artists/
Back in the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was a new and exciting territory, I joined a wonderful organization called Webgrrls which offered meetings and classes in downtown Manhattan. There I learned enough rudimentary HTML to create my first simple websites! Their lack of “bells and whistles” was more than offset by lots of links—and eyecatching colorful art!
AncientworksGallery.com was one of those early endeavors, created to showcase my growing line of “arT-shirts”—and later complementary jewelry—which featured “unique designs inspired by the petroglyphs, paintings, potter and sculpture of ancient peoples throughout the world.” Unfortunately—and mysteriously— that site has somehow disappeared from cyberspace!
But now, seven of my original thematic prehistoric composites can be re-visited in a new gallery page right on this website. A slide show features the designs, along with their titles and their ancient origins. Be sure to visit!
Twelve AncientWorks* designs have been given new life in this 2018 fine art series, created for an exhibition in Santa Fe.
*created by Virginia Asman inspired by the art of ancient and prehistoric peoples from around the world.
Creating art for a color-themed exhibit can be an artistic challenge, but coming up with ideas for Gallery35’s BLUE exhibit was a breeze! The color blue is abundant in our lexicon—blues music, a blue moon and birds with blue feet!
While all my pieces exemplify BLUE, their styles are widely divergent!
Blue Footed Boopies, the most graphic of the three, was inspired by photographs of these amazing birds that I took during a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Their striking blue feet stand out in a stylized montage.
Bluesy Boogie is a distortion of my drawings of musicians I have encountered in various venues and locations—blended together artistically using digital painting techniques—in an imaginary blues session.
Blue Dog Blue Moon, a composite of photos and drawings, was inspired by my life in the New Mexican high desert, where coyotes live amongst us. The stylized coyote is based on a wood carving by another talented artist.
A long-time exhibitor and chairperson of Gallery35, I am again looking forward to my annual trip to NYC. I hope to see all my “back East” friends at the Closing Reception of BLUE on June 15th.