1. Bonnie Waletzko – My Great Aunt, she helped me discover my own style of art by letting me explore her pottery pieces and just the colors of her work are inspiring.
2. Henri Matisse – the flowing colors and movement of his work help me keep my own work fluid.
3. Pablo Picasso – The dual view of the face in some of his work reminds me that I’m not limited by the laws of physics when it come to my own work.
4. Monet – The quickness of his brush strokes to capture the light has always captivated me.
5. Van Gogh – I have always liked his work even in first grade when we painted our own Starry Night pictures.
6. Alexa Horochowski – I came across her work while searching for artists for this assignment and her work immediately caught my attention, the way her work looks like a childhood memory but also a fantasy at the same time.
7. Bonnie Rannald – Her photographs of nature instilled a peaceful calm in me just as I was browsing her work online.
8. Megan Rye – I really liked her art based off her brother’s pictures from Iraq because it reminded me that my Aunt has seen some of the same things during her tours around the world.
9. Lillian Colton – The detail of her paintings using seeds for texture amazed me.
10. Bill Klaila – I liked how his installment titled Grotto was an interactive piece that changed with the viewer and placed them in an alternative world of view.
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Artist's Statement - Bonnie Rannald
Science and art have always been my two favorite subjects and photography became the medium through which my fervor for each could be expressed. At an early age I was intrigued by nature and with my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, I would explore the outdoors around Augusta, Georgia, where I grew up. Upon discovering the Southwestern Desert, a passion grew to record on film the wonders and beauty that I found. Each day during my travels throughout the Southwestern United States, I am taken on a sensory rich drama that begins with the opening curtain of the sun's first light, to the finale of nightfall. With my Nikon and tripod, my goal is to recreate the scene as it appears in nature, to preserve in a photographic image the awesome, yet simplistic beauty of the scene that waits around a bend or over a hill. Sometimes it is a colorful landscape, and many times I am allowed in the presence of the numerous creatures that adapt to life in the desert.
