Andrea Keys Connell

I have admired the work of Andrea Keys Connell for quite a while now. Her ceramic sculptures and large installations are so impressive to me. I would love to have the opportunity to see them in person one day. For now, I will continue to follow her work online...and continue to be constantly amazed.

Andrea is influenced by many things, but she is particularly "interested in intergenerational trauma and how a person’s past, particularly a past that has been interrupted by a traumatic event such as war, can influence patterned behaviors that are passed through the family." Heavy stuff indeed...and it certainly comes across in her work. To see more sculptures, take a look at Andrea's website.

Alexa Meade

Prepare to be blown away. At first glance, the figurative paintings above, by Washington, DC artist Alexa Meade, seem like beautiful, colorful portraiture. Alexa captures her subjects with bright colors and heavy brush strokes, but wait...the hair looks SO real. Too real. That's because it is. In fact, this isn't a flat painting on canvas...it's an actual person sitting in a chair, who has been painted to look like they are in an actual painting. Make sense? No. Well, take a look at the pictures at the bottom of this post to see what I'm talking about.

Alexa has innovated a Trompe-L'Oeil painting technique than can perceptually compress three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional plane. She paints her representational image directly on her three-dimensional subjects. Her work is an impressive combination of installation, painting, performance, and photography. All of Alexa's work, the hours spent creating these images, is gone in a matter of hours (or however long it takes the model to jump in the shower and scrub the paint off their bodies). What remains after the scene has ended is a photographic reminder of what was. It serves as documentation of the performance.

Are you blown away? I thought so. To see more of Alexa's impressive work take a look at her website.

Michaelene Walsh

Micaelene Walsh is a ceramic artist and Associate Professor of Art at Louisiana State University. According to Michaelene, "dolls and animals have always interested me because they seem to possess an inner life." I really hope these little guys don't possess an inner life because they remind me of something that would come to life in the middle of the night and attack you in your sleep. Kind of creepy, I know, but that's one reason I am drawn to them. I like to live dangerously. It's the same reason I like to go on all the rides at a county fair. Who doesn't love the thrill of stepping onto a old, mechanical ride that was put together in a day and could fall apart at any second. It gets the adrenaline pumping. Sorry...my mind tends to stray. Let's get back to Michaelene. If her unique creations weren't enough to interest me (although they totally were) just take a look at her bio and artist statement. I was hooked after I read this:

Bio: This is my story... I was raised by a family of mountain gorillas. This partially explains my love of animals. When I’m not loving on animals, I’m generally eating them.

The end

Artist Statement: If you have eaten ice cream, marveled at a monkey, played with a doll, drawn a heart or written a secret note on blue lined notebook paper, we have something in common, at least on the surface.


So great! Take a look at Michaelene's website to see more of her ceramic scultpures, drawings and installations. Speaking of her installations, I couldn't resist throwing in this photo from one of her installations titled, "Bittersweet."