May 20 - July 29, 2023

Corinne Galla

Corinne Galla, Artist Statement

      I’ve lived in Georgia all my adult life, but I grew up in a little Quaker village in South Jersey near the shore (Actually, New Jersey’s so small we all kinda lived near the shore.) I still miss my farm life childhood, and I wish I could, after all these years, find someone here who can make a good hoagie.   

      I graduated from college with a BA in apparel design where best of all I loved my drafting classes. I guess all those straight pencil lines and hip rulers kind of satisfied a sense of order for me.   Nowadays I live out in the middle of nowhere in Meriwether County, Georgia, where I raise chickens, occasionally plink around on the piano, work on my art and take time out to teach oil painting in Newnan, Georgia.

      Oil’s my favorite medium, and over the years I’ve worked with other mediums mixed in: oil bar, oil crayon and oil pastel. Currently, much of my work in oil involves the use of cold wax medium and oil wash, and I love the versatility it adds to my paintings: I’ve always liked impasto marks, and this medium lets me get to a result I like much more easily There’s a push and pull where I let the painting take me where it wants to go, but only to a point. I guess you could say my ideas always win out in the end. My works in oil are, for me, meditative exercises that bring my focus to a large painting and push away the overthinking that comes with creating small works.

Robin Robinson

Robin Robinson  Artist Statement
      All my life I thought being an artist would be the most amazing career. Once the jobs of raising a special needs child and a high achieving child were complete, I looked around at my life and wondered, “Is that all there is? What do I do now? “ It came to me then that if I ever wanted to become an artist, I would have to begin creating art every day. The clock was ticking on my life, and if I didn’t start walking on the path, I’ve never arrive at becoming an artist. I would need to treat it as a profession, painting every day.

      I began with acrylic painting and quickly found an audience with a series of floral paintings. Since then I’ve moved on to oil painting, watercolors and mixed medium paintings. Now I choose whatever medium suits the vision in my head. If the vision calls for new skills to be learned, I don’t shy away from trying new paths to creation. My subject matter varies greatly dependent upon my emotional state and what is going on in the world. Often focused on emotions, the beauty of all living things and the comfort of home, I can also veer off into niche interests for my subjects.

      The collection at Artisans on the Square in Greenville, Georgia contains several happy, mixed medium pieces, landscapes in and around Georgia and Figurative works. I’m thrilled to team up with Corinne Gala for the 2023 show. As we both have vibrant, rich works with tight composition, I believe viewers will be moved by the pairing of our collections.