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Off-site Exhibitions

CANADIAN TIRE [330 Coventry Rd.]

Ottawa School of Art Presents

Canadian Tire: Choleena DiTullio
December 13, 2011 to February 7, 2012


“Art Everywhere”
 
 Choleena DiTullio
 
 
Artist Statement
 
In this selection of work, I wanted to focus on art as a daily part of one’s life. Whether you’re in your hallway, your living room, or your garden, you’ll be surrounded by colour and creativity.
 
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Choleena DiTullio is a 1994 honours graduate of the Mount Allison University’s fine arts program. Having studied in New Brunswick, her artwork focuses on a quintessentially-maritime theme: fish. She often employs a variety of media, including recycled wire and other found objects, to create a surface above the canvas called ‘bas-relief’.

“Art Everywhere”
 
Artist Statement
 
In this selection of work, I wanted to focus on art as a daily part of one’s life. Whether you’re in your hallway, your living room, or your garden, you’ll be surrounded by colour and creativity.
 
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Choleena DiTullio is a 1994 honours graduate of the Mount Allison University’s fine arts program. Having studied in New Brunswick, her artwork focuses on a quintessentially-maritime theme: fish. She often employs a variety of media, including recycled wire and other found objects, to create a surface above the canvas called ‘bas-relief’.

 BIOGRAPHY

Ottawa artist, Choleena DiTullio, finds extraordinary inspiration for all aspects of her life in the ordinary things around her. And when it comes to art, she has an insatiable need to paint the fish that she sees lurking in those every-day things: the fanned back of an Adirondack chair is an unmistakable fish tail; a Spam can is obviously a fish body; and a bike wheel is a fish eye.

From a very early age, her mind has been drawn to odd and abstract things. She couldn’t fight it so she decided to embrace it. Her art, her work, her interests and her life are all the better for it.

Her artwork presents her whimsical, sometimes-dark view of life — out of, beside, and beneath the water. She employs a variety of techniques and media to create sculptural paintings.

With a little imagination, office supplies morph into insects, clay converts to fossil, and buttons from a calculator change into a “paint-by-number” fish. You never know what creature will reel you in next.

Teach a woman how to fish and it will entertain her for a lifetime
In her early days growing up in Perth, Choleena’s father would take her fishing. On their first expedition, she remembers looking over a bridge, and down at a dark blue river. Within the water was the darker-still silhouette of a fish. A shape difficult to make out with so little contrast but on pulling the fish out of the water she was struck by the thick metallic-gold ring around its eye and shimmering scales of yellow, orange and red. She, too, was hooked.

Form AND function
One doesn’t have to follow the other. A firm believer that art should be everywhere (or everywear), Choleena has developed one of her fish into a printable design for clothing. The “FishTankTop” is her latest creation. Adding function to her art helps her realize her belief that art should be pervasive; in every part of every day.

Hooked on recycling
Her latest piece, Adirondack Fish (above), is a 12-foot-long acrylic on stretched canvas. It completely integrates every piece of an old Adirondack chair — even the fish’s teeth are nails. Respect for the environment goes beyond recycling for her. She attempts to do one thing every day to work toward Green Living. And when you buy her art, you’re doing the same.


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Minto Suite Hotel [187 Lyon St. North]  Ottawa School of Art Presents
  

Minto:  Monique Miller
December 14, 2011 to February 8, 2012
ARTIST STATEMENT
 
The world is happening so fast around us, that as an individual I thrive to live in the moment and appreciate the time and people around me. My goal as an artist is also to live in the moment by slowing the process down. 
 
 
My current work deals with the daily struggles of a person afflicted with mental illness. How they battle with their mind and desperately try to stop the noise. As a society we are living in an era of social media, where it has become the norm for our youth to cry out for help via a keyboard! As an Artist, I want to raise awareness and provoke a dialogue with people of all ages. “Journey through the soul” is a look at those dark places that might be haunting and scary but need to be addressed. For this I have chosen to express my vision through my paints. My paintings are made up of very natural, bold, instinctive rapid movements that come from within. I let the materials guide me on their journey. I want to see where the colors take me and how I can interact with materials at hand. As a painter I enjoy the richness, body and texture of paint.
 
 
As a teenager, my father taught me a valuable lesson: “When you are feeling sad, create something with your hands and it will ease the pain.” As an adult, the raw and poignant works of the German expressionist Otto Dix as well as the colorful abstracts of Jackson Pollock inspire me. So as teen suicide came knocking on my door, I took out my paints and gave a voice to my sadness. Teen suicide is a reality; we need to face the facts and not only virtually!


BIOGRAPHY
 
Monique Miller is an abstract painter and a sculptor in glass and metal. She often works en “Plein Air” and while her compositions pull from the colors or landscape around her, they are worked into an abstract representation of the moment and light she is experiencing.
Coming from a tradition of craftspeople, she has learned many techniques, such as hand piecing quilt from her grandmother, sewing, knitting and crocheting from her mother as well as woodworking and the craft of stained glass from her father.
Her aim is to use her skill base to interpret her Art in a contemporary fashion. Her work is driven by events that resonate within her. Her current work is her interpretations of the struggles that people with mental illness live with.
She is studying at the Ottawa School of Arts in the Fine Arts Diploma Program. 

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Primecorp [Somerset St.]

Ottawa School of Art Presents

Primecorp:  Beata Jakubek
December 13, 2011 to February 7, 2012

ARTIST STATEMENT
 
In my painting, I attempt to capture a mood of places and communicate my feelings by using simple lines and colour. I focus on interaction of colours and division of space. I frequently do a detailed drawing first and then simplify it in my studio by eliminating unimportant details and accentuating the important ones. I explore texture working with mixed media and collage to add third dimension to my paintings. The artists whom I particularly admire include Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Matisse. While learning from their work, I develop my own methods of creative expression.


BIOGRAPHY
 
Beata began her career as a medical researcher and medical technologist in her native Poland and in the U.S. She obtained an M.S. degree in biochemistry and for many years worked in hematology, the study of blood. This involved peering at blood cells through a microscope to diagnose diseases like leukemia, anemia and malaria. The cells came in a variety of colours – violet, blue, pink, green – and some had bizarre, irregular shapes. Beata loved studying these beautiful specimens.
 
It is this passion for colour and shape that now fuels Beata’s art. She paints with bright colours and chooses organic shapes over geometrical ones. Nature is her inspiration – it not only crops up in her landscapes and florals, but also in her abstracts, which are often close-ups of flowers. She conjures up these abstracts by squinting and observing nature on a macro level, as if through a microscope. She explores texture by incorporating nature (sticks, seeds, sand) and found objects into her mixed-media acrylics.
 
Her paintings also reveal an East Asian influence. Before moving to Canada, Beata lived in Tokyo, Japan and travelled around Southeast Asia for two years. She studied sumi-e, traditional Japanese calligraphy, and ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement. Instead of haphazardly tossing flowers into a vase, Beata learned to organize them with an eye toward harmony and balance. Now she strives for the same kind of unity in her paintings; she thinks a lot about division of space.
 
Beata has exhibited in solo and group shows at Galerie Old Chelsea (Chelsea, QC), Galerie de la Rive (Rockland, ON), Ottawa School of Art Gallery and the Trinity Art Gallery at the Shenkman Art Center (Orleans, ON). She has paintings in private collections throughout Canada, the U.S., Japan, France, Germany and Poland.
 
For her work Beata was awarded first prize in both watercolour (Arteast 2004; Ottawa Art Association 2007) and acrylics (Ottawa Art Association 2007 and 2008). She is an active member of the Ottawa Art Association, Ottawa Watercolour Society, Ottawa Mixed Media Artists and Arteast, for which she was the 2006-2008 program coordinator. She studied art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Ottawa School of Art and the Visual Arts Centre in Orleans.
 
She lives in Ottawa with her husband, a scientist and photographer.

Web site:            http://beata.jakubek.net


Inquiries on works in these exhibitions should be directed to Cathy Brake, Gallery and Boutique Coordinator at the Ottawa School of Art by calling 613-241-7471 Ext. 27 or by e-mailing This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .