Art in the Sanctuary
First Free has a long history of providing a stage for creative expression that encourages connection, dialog, and understanding. Our series of visual art exhibitions presents contemporary artwork with in the context of a sanctuary for meditation and worship. Continue to become creators with us.
Installations
Andersonville Arts Weekend: October 4-6th 2024 -- With a penchant for color and contrast, Ortiz combines a variety of different colors, patterns, and forms from multiple sources (inspiration) such as ethnographic patterns (Native American pottery and baskets; Islamic tiles; and Italian mosaics), architectural elements (antique vent/register covers; tin ceiling tiles; antique church stained glass windows, wallpaper, and African printed textiles), and botanical forms (florals - orchids, succulents, and most recently focusing on the rose). His finished paintings reflect a collage-like process of overlapping layering, obliterating, and refinement of images with decidedly contemporary color choices.
Sergio Gomez is a visual artist, known for his striking large-scale figurative abstraction paintings and charcoal drawings that delve into the profound cycles of life. Sergio's work has been featured in over 45 solo exhibitions across the United States, as well as in museums in Romania, Italy, Mexico, and Vienna. In addition to his solo exhibitions, he has participated in over 150 group exhibitions in a wide array of countries, including Spain, Sweden, Mexico, Austria, Italy, South Korea, England, Kairo, Belgium, and the United States.
September 2023 Buddy Plumlee, Chicago Artist Buddy received formal training at Scuola Lorenzo de Medici in Florence, Italy, where he immersed himself in Renaissance art and traditional studio practices. He […]
Brooks Anderson, a fifth generation Californian from a family of artists and musicians, graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from California State University in Northridge, studying at that time with established artists of the Los Angeles art scene. Brooks has exhibited nationally, from San Francisco to New York City, and his work is collected in private, corporate, and museum collections around the world. In 1996, Brooks lived for a year in the south of France, completing fifty luminous paintings of the region.
Cat’s paintings combine Indonesian textile patterns, processes and tools used in batik painting (an Eastern painting process using a hot wax resist and pigment dyes on textiles) with Western encaustic painting techniques (a painting process invented by the Greeks using hot beeswax and pigment fused with a heat source). Layers of pigmented wax are applied to the surface, and then “branded” using the solid brass tools. The wax melts away, revealing the colors below. The viewer is introduced to a kind of visual excavation, as top layers are burned away to reveal what came before. Cat uses these elements to vividly represent and express human emotional and spiritual states, and to explore relationships between beauty and structure.
Artist Larry Jon Davis is a native of the Mississippi River town of Clinton, Iowa. During his career Davis’ works have found their way into a broad array of private, corporate and public collections. Much of this art was influenced by travel in the UK, Continental Europe, Japan and North America. Over the decades his style has evolved from realistic towards a more expressive and abstracted manner. During the last four years he has eagerly pursued new effects through the introduction of cold wax medium into his oil painting technique.
Joan Geary is a lifelong resident of the Chicago area, growing up on the north side, and currently residing in the southwest suburbs. She first studied art as a teenager at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Later, at mid-life, she studied painting and sculpture at the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn, and also did workshops with several internationally known artists,...
Melynda Van Zee shares her artwork at exhibitions and art fairs throughout the United States. Her works are in the collections of numerous private and corporate collectors around the country...
Jeff McNutt was born in Iowa in 1967 and began his artistic pursuits in 1989 while working for The Walt Disney Company. In 1991 he moved to Los Angeles and continued his art education in animation houses across Hollywood, with street artists in LA, and also at Cal Arts in Valencia, CA. In 1993, Jeff moved back to Iowa to study graduate painting at The University of Iowa where he started to merge the ideas of animation, street art, and the beauty of nature.
Steven Carrelli was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1967. He received a BA in Studio Art from Wheaton College in 1990 and an MFA in Painting from Northwestern University in 1995. As a 1995-96 Fulbright scholar, he studied egg tempera painting in Florence, Italy. Carrelli has returned to Italy on many occasions to teach and to work.
