"Between Collard Greens and the Sun" by Victor Sweatt, Watercolor on paper and mixed media, 11x14in, 2018, $450
The people we see in Victor Sweatt’s work are people he knows well. Whether or not they are, strictly speaking, portraits of actual people in the artist’s life may seem beside the point, they may very well be, but even if they are not -Sweatt knows them. They are found in his neighborhood on Louisville’ West side and in thousand of neighborhoods just like it all over America. Simple, hard-working folk, but seen through the artist’s eyes as people of innate dignity and humility. As he paints or draws them, Sweatt is bearing witness to the divine in humanity. In the parlance of the church, his images “testify”.
Sweatt has often captured these characters inside of a church, but even when they are not, he paints them with reverence: a body bent over collard greens in the garden, or aged fingers at work repairing a pair of shoes. They are skills from the past, too often taken for granted or thought forgotten. But this artist understands and appreciates that they are the threads that bind a community.
"The Craftsman" by Victor Sweatt, Acrylic on mat board, 11x15.5in. 2018, $450
In 2017, Sweatt completed two large scale paintings for the Slugger Museum in downtown Louisville that depict native son and World Champion Boxer Muhammad Ali on one, and Atlanta Braves legend and holder of the record for career home runs Hank Aaron on the other. Together the work is titled: “Ali & Aaron: United in the Fight”. He also won a design competition to paint an image for the Heritage West development in the Russell neighborhood of Louisville that will be displayed on a billboard.
Sweatt was born in Louisville. He has shown his work in group and solo exhibitions, and appears in public and private collections throughout the United States. Sweat is a signature member of the Louisville Visual Art, the Kentucky Artist Pastel Society, and the Kentucky Watercolor Society.
“Time, memory, and the natural world always play a key role in my work.” – Marcia Lamont Hopkins
Photographer, Marcia Hopkins
By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language to her photographic images, Marcia Lamont Hopkins opens the door to the unknown, to multiple realities, both real and artificial, so that one questions what is really happening.
Her images establish a link between the landscape’s reality and the artist’s imagination. While this could, to some extent, be said to be true of any artist using landscapes, Hopkins pushes the limits of our perception of what is real. Each object or environment seems entirely natural and plausible, yet the juxtaposition within the artist’s gauzy, dreamlike atmosphere creates an uneasy sense of mystery. Is our understanding shifting in relationship to time, memory, or some other reality that we can’t quite define?
"Casaubon" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
In her artist’s statement, Hopkins explains it this way: “The series, Causabon’s Illusion, crafts a series of metaphorical vignettes rooted in elements of magical realism and the mind’s tendency to search for all-inclusive answers. In George Elliot’s Middlemarch, Edward Causabon spends his life in a futile and absurd attempt to find a comprehensive explanation for the whole of civilization’s knowledge and mythologies. Deluded, he believes that he alone has the key to humanity’s searching, an illusion which may be reflected in our culture today.”
"The Beekeeper" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
As part of her 60WRD/MIN project, Art Historian and Chicago Tribune art critic Lori Waxman wrote of Hopkin’s work: “We like to control animals and nature, but when they get beyond our understanding things tend to get interesting. Hopkins envisions overgrown forests, historic graveyards, farm animals, and occasionally people, often in combination, in impeccable digital prints that blend multiple shots into believable wholes. The weirder and more convincing, the better: a sheep enmeshed in a dense forest seems as if it and the trees are made of the same stuff, a lama in a rolling meadow becomes one with the horizon and the clouds.”
Hopkins currently has a solo exhibit at Gratz Park Inn in Lexington, KY.
*Burnaway: The Voice of Art In The South, March 27, 2017
