Art, a universal way of communication, is my means of communication with the world. This communication is done with an exaggerated photorealistic style which focuses on the intensity of color. As an artist, I take pleasure in capturing everyday objects from our world and enlarging them using vast proportional sizes. It is in this magnification that their genuine characteristics are accentuated. Some of my preferred subjects to portray using my distinctive style are: kitchen items, shoes, toiletries, and food. I am inclined to work with these objects because all people can make meaningful connections with these simple, yet complex images.

Daryl Gortner

Sonic Landscape "Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?" --- John Cage Every city is filled with sounds that combine to form a sonic landscape. I have spent time in many different cities and have always been interested in the sonic landscapes of urban areas. I grew up in Tokyo during the smoggy 70's and was annoyed and depressed by the yellow flags that signaled dangerous pollution levels in the air. But along with the pollution came a sonic landscape of cars, sirens and trains that I truly enjoyed. It was an environment that seemed natural to me. I began taking piano lessons when I was three years old and feel that classical music provided a sound structure that helped me decode the sonic landscape that was evolving around me. I didn't realize at the time that these industrial sounds were being incorporated into modern musical scores. Sound is my inspiration. Sounds fill my canvases. I turn sound into color. Many classical composers have taken a similar route and have created charts that assign colors to notes. I decided to create visual images inspired by urban noise after I saw Michiyoshi Inoue conduct a performance by a symphony orchestra by pointing at different parts of a large painting. The colors and textures of the painting became intertwined with the music. I was also inspired by John Cage's use of notation in Water Music. His musical score looked more like a drawing than a traditional score. All of my recent paintings have been composed using collage techniques. I feel like a modern DJ when I am painting. I cut and paste from various ready-made sources to create a work with new meaning and a sense of history. I have incorporated architecture, Japanese comics, dreams, beat poetry and sound into my latest series of painting.

Fumiko Amano

Painting for me refers to the process necessary to make an object. This process becomes a play between construction and destruction where metaphor and message is sent. When I begin a new project, there is an underlying process of problem solving that occurs. Within each painting is a set of conflicts and struggles that are dealt with, overcome, or manipulated. Most art is related or wed to a vast language of abstraction that we have inherited. This is a fact that seems to parallel the information age of what to do with what has been created. I like to think of Kandinsky's statement, "the spirituality of the materials". With new materials available, and knowledge of past criticisms, schools, and theories, we are more free than ever to move this matter around with a hopeful, devotional quality. I would like to have the sense of time and history, present in the surface, as well as filtered through the dense repainting, erasure, and layering. Painting in this way allows me to suspend doubt, and address an untapped source.

Andrew Moore

Jean Christofori Howton is an artist from the Pacific Northwest, USA. She is dually located in Oregon, USA, and in Normandy, France. 
Over the years Jean has produced multitudes of painting and drawings which are displayed in private collections, worldwide. She has developed a reputation through her exhibitions in the US and in Europe. Jean has produced a wide variety of subjects from representational to abstract. She has the ability and the skill of the artist to manage different type of mediums and subjects. All of her works are the result of soft yet solid and sensitive inspiration. The evolution from the earlier works show her eagerness to evolve within her own style. The quality of the detail, the richness and subtlety of the colors, gives strength to these paintings. "Jean's newest work is, in a word, extraordinary! Jean has actually translated to the canvas how jazz feels to the ear". Catherine Lenox, National Public Radio, April 2001

Dao Droste is a Cosmopolitan born in Vietnam and living in Germany.
She is ex-chemist (Ph.D.), Taoist and diverse artist (painting, sculptures, installations, video-art).
In 1987 she opened the Atelier & Gallery Dao in Eppelheim (near Heidelberg).