Presenting Artists

As an artist / educator, I work with others to conceptualize an art idea, and explore how each contributing participant might incorporate his or her unique vision into that idea. A studio or classroom becomes a stage where collaborating young artists create unique multiples, which are then merged together into a collective vision. The process of clustering and/or framing a fractured group of unique individual parts is the underlying thread passing though my work. Collective forms are arranged, stacked, and drawn together, then architecturally combined to mutually reinforce each artist's contribution, which is both expressed by and combined into the completed work.

P. Timothy Gierschick II is an artist living and working in Philadelphia. He received his BA in Studio Art from Messiah College, and is a founding member of the Church Studios in Fairmount. His paintings and works on paper have been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally. To pay the bills, he is employed by the Barnes Foundation as collections assistant.   

Shape is important, but edges even more so.

Colors are important, but their relationships even more so.

Ideas are important, but their execution even more so.

Answers are important, but the questions even more so.

Keith Crowley is a painter who resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  In 2001, he received his MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design.   Keith is represented by Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, and recently had an exhibition titled Wilderness.  Keith has been a resident of the Olivet’s Artist-in-Residence since 2004.

This current work is moving through a series of glimpses into a present “wilderness”.   The vital concerns within the work are the perception of color and how it relates to the edge qualities within every shape of the image.  The works relay autobiographical events and occurrences during ritualistic travels, giving way to broader metaphors from art history.

These paintings are all executed in oil, watercolor, and gouache.

Currently my paintings present a combination of story telling and introspection. They are the pictorial leftovers from a personal interrogation and confession.  I initiate a painting with little or no planning.  Color and shape arouse memories that spawn narratives.  This begins a cyclical process of action and reaction.

Detached phantasmal characters with encrypted history litter familiar spaces awkwardly waiting for something.  Personified emotion and action commingle with superficial characters representing vague recollections.  The landscape and figures are at times blurred and half realized, often rendering a humorous and bizarre effigy.

The painting medium reinforces the content and concepts of my work.  The two-dimensional limitations imposed by painting conversely allow for spontaneity and immediacy, two elements crucial to the stream–of-consciousness-like process in which I work.  Marks are viscerally made and then edited, rubbed, and scraped away as I advance the painting.  Therefore the painting remains in a state of flux even after it is deemed finished.