Reception: Art for Art's Sake - October 4, 6 - 9 pm

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present new works by artists Lois Chiles, Richard Deutsch, Carole A. Feuerman, and Beth Lambert.  

Lois Chiles’ recent paintings are focused on the natural representation of the human form in a way that is simultaneously classic and modern. Many artists inspire Chiles, including John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, and George Bellows. The beautiful colors and rhythms of the human form are of interest to Chiles as well as the bravery and innocence of each girl willing to disrobe in front of a stranger, presenting herself in a unique way in order to be immortalized on canvas. 

Born in Houston, Texas, Lois Chiles convinced her parents to let her go to New York for her senior year in college.  There she was discovered by GLAMOUR Magazine and began modeling. While modeling, Lois studied acting and was cast in such films as The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, Death On The Nile, Broadcast News, and the Bond film, Moonraker. In the mid 80’s, living in California, Lois was asked to join a life drawing group led by costume designer, Theadora Van Runkel. There she began drawing the human form. In the mid 90's Lois began working with Laddie John Dill, one of the California Abstract Expressionists, in his life drawing class for Cal Arts. In 2002 Lois met her future husband, Richard Gilder, in Maine and in 2005 they married and she moved to New York City where he lives. Wanting to learn to paint, Lois enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Fine Arts, studying with Cornelia Foss and later Gabriela Dellosso. In the winters in New York she paints nudes and portraits and in the summers in Maine she paints landscapes, studying with landscape painters T. Allen Lawson and Deborah Paris. In 2013 Lois began private instruction in New York with Kyeong Kuen No.  

Richard Deutsch, over his 30-year career, has fostered the imaginative inquiry required to design sculpture and public art environments of stone, water, bronze and stainless steel. The recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the National Endowment for the Arts, Deutsch’s work is marked by an ease of understanding space and environment. Conceived for a particular architectural or social context, complex programs and rich histories are distilled into art projects with simple sculptural forms and strong visual impact. The artist is committed to creating work that is thought provoking and accessible and, through art’s intangible power, builds community and sustains interest over time. Concept, layers of meaning, the organization of form and space, and the human experience are all central to his exploration.

Among Richard Deutsch’s commissions for sculpture and art-integrated environments are significant projects for Stanford University, the Oakland Museum of California and major urban plazas for San Francisco, Oakland and Washington DC. His sculpture is in the permanent collection of San Francisco’s de Young Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.

Carole A. Feuerman began sculpting in the 1970’s and established herself as one of America’s most acknowledged hyper-realist sculptors. Feuerman sculpts life-size, monumental and miniature works in bronze, resin and marble. Known for her sensuous themes of swimmers and bathers, complete with realistic looking water drops, her work takes the concept of art imitating life to a new level. Executed in painted resin with tactile flesh and meticulous detail, Feuerman’s sculptures have a presence which is both contemporary and classical. In the past decade, she has also developed an original technique of sculpting with molten metal, creating multi-layered, organic bronzes which the artist calls “painting with fire.”

Feuerman lives and works in New York and Florida. She has had six museum retrospectives and her work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 2008 Olympic Fine Arts Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, The State Hermitage, and The Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, to name a few. Among her many honors are 1st-Prize-Best in Show at the Beijing Biennale, the Amelia Peabody Sculpture Award, the Betty Parsons Sculpture Award, and the Medici Award. Her work is in the selected collections of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Forbes Magazine Collection, the Caldic Collection, and Credit Swiss Collection. Selected public collections include Grounds for Sculpture, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Bass Museum and Art-st-Urban.

Beth Lambert is a native New Orleanian and studied art at LSU, Tulane, and the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art.  Lambert has been painting and drawing for 35 years, and her concentration for a majority of that time has been figurative work.  Although the artist considers herself a painter, her work has recently been focused on dumpsters using the medium of digital photography.  This body of work, begun shortly after Hurricane Katrina, represents for Lambert a clearer awareness of one’s surroundings and a realization of things that cannot be controlled.  The use of digital image allows for an instant detail on the dumpster, revealing incredible texture, color, and mark.

By exploring possibilities of our perspective, Lambert’s work has a conceptual foundation that goes deeper than the surface.  While working through varying media, the artist’s intention remains to spontaneously produce pieces that reveal the beauty of the familiar.