stephsuganuma

I've been painting and doing art in various mediums for 30 years. I started painting as a hobby back in 1989 and quite by surprise, I found was rather good at it. I spoke to a gallery owner, who told me to have my work framed and bring it in to the gallery. She appraised it. I sold those two pieces for $350.00 and $600.00 a few months later. I was living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time and they put on a world class art festival every year for two weeks at the end of May. I entered the art exhibition and received a first runner up honor. I was doing mixed media art at that time, which I still do today. It's my favorite medium. I do wall art and free standing sculptures. In mix media, an artist can explore the different textures, shapes, translucency, flow, and colors in their creations. It's an endless stream of discovery.

What I like about people who view my work is that sometimes they get very close to it, to examine the textures, colors and reflections on the piece. Their emotional reaction is very interesting too, it's not always positive, but it's a strong reaction and that says a lot about the piece . Their response has created an emotional reaction in their brain. And that's what art should do.

My art work on Society 6 are from my photography collection and my art-boards. The art-boards are the easel and wood planks I work on. I started photographing my art-boards when I noticed how interesting they looked and I needed to preserve the shapes and colors before I lost them under more layers of paint. So I photographed them. I have over a hundred of them. Around 2005, I started to work in digital art and I took the art-boards and combined them with other images to create collages. But I couldn't sell them because the images weren't mine to sell. The first thing I had to do was photograph my own stock of images. While I may be able to call myself an artist, I am not a photographer, but I'm okay with that since my imagery is submerged in the collage with overlays and digital manipulation.

There is still much to be finesses and that's what drives me. Sometimes, I'm like a babe in a candy store. Yes, too much of a good thing can turn on you real quick. But after a nice little nap, I'm back in business.

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