2024 Mixed Media 2D
Sara Burrier | Des Moines
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Born in the city of Des Moines Iowa, but with a heart for the woodlands and prairie, Sara creates pieces that explore the imagination and voices of nature. She is a professionally educated illustrator with 20+ years of experience in watercolors. Yet, in 2019 she began exploring, foraging, and building fairy lanterns. This has now become her mission - to bring the Iowa prairie into focus as a resource that is vital to the earth's survival. Sara has always had a passion to create using natural elements; pencil, charcoal, watercolor, and now "treasures" from nature assembled to create fairy dwellings and portraits. To Sara, the fairies represent the personalities of nature. They are a visual representation of our elements and ecosystems. In this way, Sara is able to communicate, through their homes and faces, the wonderment and majesty of the world around us. Created by the Creator, Sara finds ways throughout each day to create. Whether it be in her fairy gardens, organizing the house, drawing, or building. It all comes from, and in pursuit to, better understand what it means to live as one with our planet. Her favorite media is watercolor, dried flowers, sycamore twigs, acorns, and fungi. You can find these often in some, if not all, her work.
The work brings watercolor and acrylic paint combined with natural elements, and found objects to create wondrous pieces of one of a kind art. It displays imaginative subjects such as fairies, gardens/nature, mermaids, and unicorns, with an awareness of humans relationship in the sphere of the natural world through imagination and creativity. |
Susan Cunningham | Central City
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One of my first passions was drawing with pen & ink. I love capturing the beauty of the flora and fauna I find in my home state of Iowa.
Using micro pens on Bristol board, I create pen and ink drawings of the many marvelous things I find inhabiting my yard and other places around the Midwest. I especially enjoy drawing insects, birds, plants, trees and the occasional rural landscape or piece of barn wood. I add color to some pieces with colored ink washes. |
Michael Lundberg | Ankeny
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Iowa native and animal lover, Michael Lundberg, received her bachelor's and master's degree in painting and 2-D mixed media from Iowa State University. Michael has always loved nature, animals and telling visual tales. Although her work varies greatly in subject matter and medium, Michael is constantly changing and challenging herself artistically. She is a veteran Inktober participant on Instagram. Following designated weekly and daily prompts have encouraged her artistic productivity, creativity and development while interacting with artists around the world. Mixed media illustrations using watercolor, gouache, ink, colored pencils, and copic markers. |
Kristy Niemeyer | Norwalk
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I am a curious soul and I love that! That curiosity holds clues about who God created me to be. I find myself digging in and making discoveries about life and joy. His creativity deposited so much into our souls wonder and awe, for example. My whole art-making process is an adventure in noticing life details; recognizing those that captivate my attention enough to research, ponder, doodle about it, and eventually getting out the watercolor paints...following the trail of curiosity.
Ninety percent of my work is watercolor and ink; I have a few pieces that are just watercolor and a set of work done in ink and colored pencil. |
Rhonda Scott | Ames
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Rhonda Scott is a teaching artist from Ames, lowa who works in multiple media. She is passionate about the value of creativity and lifelong learning. She is especially fascinated by age-old processes with a modern twist, such as lampwork and paper marbling. These two art forms have many things in common, aside from their long history; both allow her to play with colors, pattern, visual texture, mark making, and negative space, as well as surface tension and chemical reactions.
Rhonda primarily uses the Turkish method of paper marbling with a carrageenan bath, alumed paper, and acrylic paint. She also uses suminagashi techniques on paper with inks and creates paste paper with acrylic paint. She sells the hand-decorated paper, cards, and framed art. Rhonda does not sell copies or prints of her hand decorated papers, nor use copies or prints in her paper packs, cards, journals, or framed work. |
Rick von Holdt | Minburn
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I have been doing letterpress printing since 1976 as a private press, basically using classic and antique handset metal and wood type and engravings and pulling hand-inked prints by hand. I have no motors on any of my presses and do not do commercial printing. My entire approach is as old school as it gets. I have managed to assemble the 2nd largest collection of handset type in private hands in the United States in 50 years of collecting.
Hand printed posters and ephemera primarily focused on typography or the promotion of events. |