Your Presence is Requested
at the Opening Reception of the
2012 CFF "Summit" Show 


   
Saturday, January 12, 2013
1300 NW Northrup
7:00 pm to 11:00 pm

Featuring Original Paintings from the Winners of the
Prestigious Calligram Falcon Art Fellowship:
  
Stephanie Buer, Samir Khurshid, Molly Maine, Nathaniel Praska, and Alexander Rokoff























Dear Friends and Art Lovers,

Come see what direct support for working artists can help create. Be among the first to view this collection of stunning new oil paintings completed over the course of the first Calligram Falcon Fellowship. Meet the artists and launch them into the next phase of their careers.

We would love for you to join us in a night of art, music, and libations to celebrate this career-changing year with five of Oregon's most accomplished painters. Be a part of one of the Northwest's largest arts fellowships. Direct support for artists benefits us all.

Please scroll down to see a few of the pieces that will be available and to read more about the 2012 fellows. Please direct any questions or comments to [email protected] or [email protected].

Most Sincerely,
The Artists and Staff of the Calligram Falcon Fellowship
  

Stephanie Buer
 
Growing up in Detroit, Michigan, Stephanie Buer developed a love of industrial buildings left abandoned to time and nature. Finding a peacefulness in the juxtaposition of decay and growth, Buer's work forces the viewer into a scene, rather than distantly observing a more obvious narrative. There, they can question their own notions of what is beautiful and reflect on how we spend our resources and care for our land. Placing prime importance on exploring and knowing personally the scenes she's drawn to, Stephanie works solely from photographs she has taken herself. While much of her work depicts her native Detroit, these pieces are based in her new home, Portland.


Alexander Rokoff
 
Inspired by time spent in his second studio in Astoria, Oregon, Alexander Rokoff's latest series shows us the vast power of the sea and shares what it is to seemingly stand at the edge of the world. Exploring a more textural style than he's used in his previous work, these large pieces allow for many different stories to be told as the viewer stands at varying distances. Up close, the paintings showcase the fact that they really are just paint, while stepping away a bit allows the beauty of the figures and small details to become visible, and moving even farther away reveals the atmospheric nature of the entire piece. One figure is featured in each painting, creating powerfully iconic images evoking ideals of humanity interacting with nature; at turns nurturing, commanding, observing, or simply meditating.

Samir Khurshid
 
After years of being forced to paint hundreds of portraits of Saddam Hussein and the royal family as his required military service, Iraqi native Samir Khurshid brings us a series based in freedom, fighting, and change. Feeling that being in America is an amazing dream, he is inspired to paint late at night, when few people are around and he's able to be wrapped up in the story of what he's creating. With this large-scale series, he shows a world left wide open to the interpretation of the viewer, full of vibrant color, impeccably crafted passages, and visions of struggle and rebirth. Wanting people to be able to come to their own conclusions about the underlying story of each painting, he names his works simply, with monosyllabic titles that could refer to many different themes within the piece.

Molly Maine
 
Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as The Decameron, Charles Darwin, La Primavera, and the Unicorn Tapestries, Molly Maine's latest series depicts figures wearing deer skull masks surrounded by circles of bones and vibrant flowers. Creating a dialogue with an historical tradition of sacreds, from medieval religious iconography to the sublime of perfectly executed art to the secular sacreds of inquiry, natural history, or science, Maine's work draws the viewer into a mythology entirely her own. These paintings evoke a feeling of evolution through the confluence of things that are dead and things that are growing. 


Nathaniel Praska
 
Evolving from a background in traditional, and often plein air, landscape painting, Nathaniel Praska presents an entirely new series of abstract paintings about the perceiving of color and its relationships. Through apprenticeships with the painters Ken Roth and Eric Jacobsen, he understood that the quality of a mark takes precedence over what the mark represents. Drawing inspiration from nature, his work invites the viewer to experience what it is to stand under a pin oak or a maple tree in the fall, completely immersed in incredible,distilled color. Showing the foundation of things is incredibly important to him, and he finds that what may be seen as severity or austerity can create a sense of ease through its purity.
 
 
 
The Calligram Foundation and The Falcon Art Community have partnered to offer a new fellowship program to Portland artists, with the first fellowships awarded in January, 2012 and continuing throughout the year. With $110,000 in direct cash stipends from the Calligram Foundation and studio space in the Falcon Art Community, the Calligram Falcon Fellowship becomes the state of Oregon's largest visual arts fellowship and aims to support Portland artists' living expenses, in order to free them to focus exclusively on their art. The program will culminate with an end-of-the-year show of the work completed during the Fellowship. 
 

The Calligram Foundation was founded in late 2011 to offer direct support to skilled and visionary artists in order that they may focus their time and efforts on their craft. Calligram's mission is to foster a cultural renaissance by engaging the spectator with art and supporting the direct patronage of artists.

 

The Falcon Art Community is made up of artists in a wide array of media who are committed to upholding standards of care and excellence as they create contemporary work. These artists have a common thread: believing in the values of craftsmanship and vision. Their hub is the bottom floor of a 1911 apartment building on Albina Avenue and Killingsworth Court, where gallery walls lined with the works of modern masters and Falcon artists wind around 25 artist workspaces, designed to provide a safe space for creativity and inspiration at every turn.