Category Archives: meet our artist

Sam Tucibat

meet our artist

Sam is a lifelong resident of northwest Illinois. He has developed a deep appreciation of the unique beauty of the area’s natural environment. After studying photography as part of his Communication degree at Western Illinois University, capturing images of the area has become a hobby, avocation and occupation for Tucibat. He learned photography in the traditional darkroom, but has developed a distinct affinity for digital processes and used them exclusively in his workflow.

Most of Sam’s images are an amalgam of several photographs that are processed and combined in the digital darkroom using Adobe PhotoShop. Individual elements in source images are isolated with selection tools and moved to their own layers in the destination image.

Further editing and composition techniques are then employed to refine the overall image. Commonly-used processes included layer mode settings, layer styles, opacity settings and transform commands. Filters are used with extreme reserve.

Lidia Wylangowska

meet our artist

My art tells my story. It’s a story of my world, of my thoughts and emotions entwined in an internal dialogue. And some of it can be expressed only through painting.

It is incredible, how fairy-tales I heard once-upon-a-time, in my childhood actually influenced my life and defined who I am. As an adult, I still believe in happy endings and that good will prevail.
The Enchanted Pencil is one of the stories I remember very clearly. This special pencil could materialize anything drawn, such as doors that lead to any place imaginable.

I realized this story has become hardwired in me. And now my paintings are those doors. Doors that lead me to my own world of peace and harmony. A world where dragons, wyverns, basilisks and dwarfs roam free. Where life has a deeper meaning which I do not yet comprehend but searching for this meaning is a fascinating process.

Cindy Marrazzo

meet our artist

Engineer and Scientist, Cindy Marrazzo says, “Art never fails to bring me happiness, whether in the form of painting or dancing, art renews my passion.”

Most of Marrazzo’s childhood and high school years revolved around art. As a teen, Marrazzo received multiple awards for her artwork. Cindy and her three art teachers had their sights set on the Art Institute of Chicago for Cindy. However, her parents wanted something more practical. So at 16 when she graduated high school, she locked her paint brush away, and at 17, enlisted in the US Marine Corps. With the help of the USMC, Marrazzo traveled throughout most of the US, where she explored her love of nature and details became an integral part of her character.

Marrazzo’s background as a US Marine and as an engineer has influenced the Marrazzo Style. Cindy says, “I apply my science and math education to my art.” She often uses math in her designs to deliver realistic accurate details to every scene, while her use of darks and lights provide amazing light to her paintings. In those details, her paintings represent the character and heart of the builder, whether the builder is Mother Nature or a gifted craftsman. Her style makes the viewer feel like they are there with her, actually walking up the steps, admiring the architecture and craftsmanship, touching the flowers and enjoying the moment.

Jack Magurany

meet our artist

As a child growing up in the south suburbs of Chicago, drawing and painting have been Jack Magurany’s passion – a passion that led him to study art at Columbia College in Chicago. Magurany received a BFA with honors in 1993 and have spent most of his professional career as an illustrator and graphic designer. However, his true passion and self-expression comes from being a painter.

For Jack Magurany, painting is a way to explore the relationships between various color harmonies and surface textures and allows him an opportunity to experiment with spontaneity and chance. It is also a way for him to develop his own unique artistic voice.

The medium Magurany primarily paints with is acrylics. Its pure pigment allows him to translate his
vision with intense and dramatic colors.

He enjoys the challenge of trying to capture a subject’s likeness while intensifying its beauty through the use of bold and vibrant colors.

His work explores the interaction of color, composition, drawing and representation of a
subject to convey a meaningful experience to the viewer.

He also experiments with the possibilities allowed through di¬fferent application techniques. With the use of large brushes, trowels, and pallet knives he makes broad spontaneous marks on the canvas to create texture, emotion and enthusiasm to the painting.

Pedro Roldan

meet our artist

Born in Rute, in the province of Córdoba, Spain, where he evolved his studies of art, obtaining at that time numerous awards for drawing, painting and other techniques, both within within the region and also at a national level at the age of eight .

He continued his studies in Barcelona where he has completed his career, surrounded by modernists and very near the impressionists, but mainly alongside the great creators who shaped the art world in the last decades of the last century. Some were his teachers, as is the case of the Catalan figurativist Gónzalez Carbonell, to which our artist had great admiration.

He obtained countless awards in painting that made him renowned in the art world. His works have been exhibited throughout national and international territories, especially in the United States and central Europe, forming part of private and institutional collections.

They say that he creates magic with colors and that his paintings are as if taken from a dream, that his brushstrokes covers the whole world, flooding everything with color – painted poems from a master who sees things differently.

We will never be clear if the simple passage from reality to mystery, in Pedro Roldán’s work, is spiritual evolution, intellectual progress or both at the same time.

The reality is, when we see the landscapes of Roldan, we leave a world that vivifies our spirits weary by the brutal cult that surrenders to the most vulgarity.

Roger Goodspeed

meet our artist

Since his retirement from active medical practice, more time became available to Roger for picking up the paint brush and attending workshops to hone up his skills.

From Roger : I have enjoyed exploring the conversion of sound into vision as Walt Disney attempted in his ‘Fantasia’ productions. I listen to a piece of music and convert the pictures the music produces in my mind to a 2 dimensional painting. Difficult, but sometimes rewarding. I believe an artist should hope to renew the joy and curiosity felt by small children, which we seem to lose as adults. Whether the vision comes through the eye or from deep within the mind, it is a precious blessing to be savored

Roger has always been fascinated by the relationship between musical sounds and light. Even as a child, when he would shut his eyes and listen to music, he would visualize colors and dancing shapes…bass notes are large shapes and dark cool colors, treble notes are smaller, sharp & jagged and bright warm colors…

H. Hargrove

meet our artist

H. Hargrove was born Nicolo Sturiano on June 16, 1947 in Palermo, Italy. Nicolo was raised in Marsala, Italy, where his parents, three brothers and one sister lived. During his youth, he spent every summer on his Grandfather’s farm, which was not unlike those of rural America. Hargrove’s earliest recollection of drawing was at the age of six or seven when he received a set of colored pencils as a gift.

He was fascinated by the colors and began to draw and experiment with them. Thus began many years of experimentation, for Hargrove never had any formal art training; his works today represent his relentless desire to constantly perfect his techniques and explore new ones.

David Willardson

meet our artist

San Diego native and self-proclaimed California Boy, David Willardson, enjoyed a successful career in design and illustration before teaming up with Disney. He had always loved all things Disney–from the first time he visited Disneyland as a kid in 1955, to working there as a cast member throughout high school–but he never considered a professional relationship until he received a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg (head of animation at Disney) in the 80’s. Katzenberg had seen an illustration of Goofey that Willardson had done for a national ad spot, and asked if he would be interested in creating an entirely new look for the animated movie poster campaigns that featured the reissued classics and new movies. Then for the next 17 years, Willardson was the artist of choice for those Disney campaigns.

Lurking behind his beloved Disney characters, Willardson discovered a team of animation geniuses that had left an indelible mark on American culture. He sought about learning their craft in order to figure out what made his heroes tick. “As a young kid, I studied them in minutiae,” Willardson remembers. The first poster Willardson created for Disney (and Katzenburg) was for the re-release movie poster for “Bambi.” His fully rendered images for the Disney animated movie posters are still the most widely used to date and include such well-known movie posters as: “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” “Pocahontas,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Robin Hood,” “Beauty & The Beast” as well as Classics, such as “Snow White,” Cinderella,” “Pinocchio”, “Jungle Book” (to name a few), earning him a permanent place in animation history.

Willardson had a long run at Disney, but when computer graphics took over much of the former hand illustration work, he decided to make a change and closed his design studio in 2003 to embark on a bold new venture as a Disney fine artist. David Willardson is now the creative force of the “Pep Art Movement,” an innovative new genre where cultural icons are rendered with an unprecedented infusion of color, personality, and energy. Unlike traditional “pop art” however, the subject’s of Willardson’s “pep” imagery are not soup cans or Brillo boxes; they are classic Disney characters. “They were my childhood heroes” Willardson remembers. “I never lost that.” The images in his work express an untapped inner verve bubbling within, giving us a sacred glimpse into their technicolor souls. “And they do have souls,” Willardson says of his subjects. With joy, sadness, frustration, and exhilaration, Willardson’s characters exude personality and soul first granted them by the old masters. “They are living legends to me,” Willardson says, “just like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and James Dean.”

Marcus Uzilevsky

meet our artist

Marcus Uzilevsky (1937 – 2015) was born in New York City to Russian and Polish immigrants. Encouraged at a young age to follow his natural inclination for art, Uzilevsky was formally trained in illustration. Upon completing his studies, Uzilevsky worked in the commercial art industry for an automobile accessory store. Though he was creating original works, Uzilevsky did not find commercial art to be the best outlet for his creativity. In order to fulfill this need, Uzilevsky taught himself guitar and eventually performed with Bob Dylan and the New Christy Minstrels under the pseudonym Rusty Evans. Through his musical expression, Uzilevsky rediscovered his passion for the visual arts.

Uzilevsky moved to California in 1967 and began to attach his real name to both his visual works and composed music. In the 1970s, he began a series of landscapes inspired by the Marin hills. Famous for his intricate linework, Uzilevsky’s pieces display an unmistakable optimism: “I want the art and music I make to enhance each other so the total environment will have an uplifting effect”.

Justin Bernhardt

meet our artist

Justin Bernhardt has been creating art since he was a young child, growing up next door to artists on either side of his home in Kalamazoo Michigan. In his youth on a trip to the Washington D.C. National Gallery of Art, he was set in awe by the Hudson River School Painters, especially Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. His work continues in that American landscape tradition, in its own fashion, along with other American artists such as George Inness, Charles Burchfield, Neil Welliver, and Wolf Khan. He is also influenced by Post-Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist artist’s color and freedom of brushwork.

In 1999, he earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago concentrating on figure and landscape painting. He also studied painting at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina where he was awarded the Lang Art Scholarship in 1997. After graduation, he traveled around the United States, painting the landscape from his van to later create larger paintings and exhibit the work from his trip. From 2001-2005 he owned The Lovell Street Gallery and from 2007-2008 he owned the Lucid Gallery in downtown Kalamazoo Michigan. In these galleries, he exhibited his own work and the work of other local artists. In 2006 he earned a Merit Scholarship to study painting at the Ox-Bow School of Fine Art in Saugatuck, Michigan. Since 2009, he has been working on a water microcosm series, among other projects. In this painted series, he uses the inherent qualities of water, intensifying the energy, movement, and color as a metaphor for the human experience and an exploration of ecological interconnectedness.

Bernhardt’s work has been purchased for public and private collections throughout the world and exhibited in various nationwide galleries and institutes. Since 2002, he has taught as an Art Instructor at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. In 2013 he earned an MFA from Goddard College, concentrating on painting and drawing. Currently, Bernhardt creates from his studio and home on a wetland protected lake in Southwest Michigan.