Laura Spalding Best
Laura Spalding Best is an oil painter who uses found materials to create her work. The paintings often depict Phonix’s urban desert landscape, the beauty of the Sonoran Desert and the scarcity of resources in the desert. The found materials vary, but they all carry meaning from a past life and represent the tradition of handing down family heirlooms from one generation to the next. Spalding Best uses the found materials to symbolize how the climate crises will be handed down from our generation to the next.
“My found objects often suggest the subject matter and composition of an installation and create an automatic connection with the viewer that has them reconsidering their landscape and their role in it,” says Spalding Best.
For more information on Laura Spalding Best’s work, visit her website.
Jackie Brink
A mixed media artist, Jackie Brink’s latest series, called “Deconstructed Kintsugi” is an homage to the Japanese art of Kintsugi and the idea of honoring change and mistakes.
She takes her work in this series further by not returning the found material she works with to its original form. Brink smashes the found material and then uses a combination of epoxy clay, glue and gold leaf, to construct a new design with the material in its smashed state bringing it back to life in its new and current state.
For more information on Jackie Brink’s work visit her website.
Marcy Ellis
Marcy Ellis spent seven years in the classroom teaching art to elementary school kids while she built her art business during her spare time. In 2019, Ellis left the classroom and has been operating her art business full-time since then. She is a multidisciplinary artist inspired by the natural world and the connection to self, spirit and sisterhood. Ellis hopes to encourage women to have a deeper connection with their bodies, the earth and each other. Her work can be found in art prints, apparel, murals, ceramics and tattoo designs.
For more information on Marcy Ellis’ work visit her website.
Lex Gjurasic
“As a child, I spent weeks at a time hospitalized with lung disease. Through spells of sickness, I took solace in my imagination, drawing and redrawing hundreds of versions of the same subject each act of repetition pulling me deeper into a realm where sickness could not find me.”
During the pandemic, Lex Gjurasic found herself reaching for paint brushes to find comfort, just as she did when she was a child sick in the hospital. The result is a series of pieces called “Flower Mounds”. Because the series was created during the pandemic, the pieces are made from materials Gjurasic had available to her at home during quarantine. The resulting pieces range from desolate Sonoran Deserts to the fireworks of the California superbloom.
For more information on Lex Gjurasic’s work visit her website.
Rhyan Johnson
Rhyan Johnson is a painter, illustrator and pencil sketch artist. To see more of her work visit Practical Art’s website or visit their uptown Phoenix gallery.
