Smelt Art & Skittles will feature 16 artists at the upcoming Think Again: LOVE event. Smelt Art is not your conventional art gallery. This gallery promotes the arts while serving as a skittles alley – the European indoor pub game similar to bowling!
Pam Fleischauer works with kids and has an appreciation for design. Birds, flowers, poetry and shadows inspire her daily. She confesses a lifelong love affair with paper and has dabbled in calligraphy, origami, and cutting silhouettes. In her spare time, you can find her kayaking on the Haw or learning to play her ukulele.
This piece of art grew out of a wish to find a home for treasures that hold meaning to me. In the process of looking at these items once collected, I was reminded how complex we are as individuals. Given our unique experiences, stories, memories and perspectives, how baffling and beautiful it is that we can connect to one another at all.
Joseph Pio AsteritaThe Flower of Life is a universal sacred geometric pattern that represents the basic design for all creation. Metaphysically, it aids in bringing one to enlightenment; physically, it just makes one who gazes upon it feel relaxed and peaceful.
There are 19 9” diameter rings which I fabricated from 2 20’ lengths of 1/8” by ½” flat stock of hot rolled carbon steel. Each length is cut down to a specific size, polished, rolled and welded into the 19 rings. The rings are down laid out into five specific patterns, then placed on top of each other forming the intricate Flower of Life finished art.
I have chosen steel as the media for my work. Steel is primarily made of iron, which I view as one of the basic building blocks of life. Our blood contains iron, the foundation of hemoglobin, that carries oxygen through out our body. Iron makes up the core of the Earth and generates the Earth’s magnetic field that protects us from harmful solar and cosmic rays. Plus, iron, in steel, is the major structural component in cars, buildings, roads; iron keeps us and our civilization alive.
Visit my website to other sacred geometry steel art forms.
Artist Onicas Gaddis calls his painting “Spiritual Expressionism”, which describes his work in general terms, but merely touches at describing the depth and breadth of where his paintings come from.
Onicas has been painting for over twenty years, having the privilege to study under master abstract expressionist painter Sarah Carlisle Towery. He discovered his talents at drawing after an artist visited one of many group homes he had lived in as a child. He knew he had found a purpose for living here in a world that was most often not a very kind nor happy place for him. Art literally saved his life.
From his early work drawing portraits (pencil and charcoal), he moved to painting. While living in Florida, he was inspired to tap into his Florida Highwayman heritage (his uncle was one of the original traveling landscape artists of the 1950’s). But it was the time spent at the Alabama Art Colony studying with Carlisle Towery, Moe Brooker, and other accomplished painters that truly taught Onicas how to put the paint to the canvas, give up on any idea of a finished piece, and simply allow the spirit of the painting to flow through him.
Gaddis works on canvas, paper, and wood, using primarily acrylics. His brilliantly-colored abstracts are characterized by somewhat haunting images of faces and figures, restless, gestural lines and layers plus semi-hidden landscapes, perhaps a synthesis of his explorations with portraiture, landscape, and abstract studies. When looking at any of his paintings overtime, the viewer will discover forms and figures that seem to remain in an ever-changing process of moving and settling and coming into definition. Find him here.
Marcela Slade is a local artist, designer, curator* and teacher based in Carrboro, NC. Slade moved back into the area in 2016. She is a US-Colombian with additional multi-cultural background. Slade lived in Barcelona, Spain for 8 years, where she debuted her career, most recently in Quito, Ecuador.
*Slade curated this Collective Art Show at Smelt art & skittles as part of the Abundance NC team.
In Quito she taught art and design at Universidad Catolica del Ecuador and Universidad San Fransisco de Quito. She also owned xerrajeros galeria studio shop in Cumbaya. The gallery housed her studio and her husband, Christian Molina’s, architectural practice. xerrajeros was dedicated to the sales, creation and promotion of architecture, art and design.
As gallery owner, Slade was able to represent re-knowned and up and coming artists. She learned a lot from the artists she represented but specifically the Ecuadorian painter Luigi Stornaiolo. Slade improved her painting through assisting Stornaiolo in his own creations and projects.
Her work conveys life experiences as well as fascinations like love. Her style has been categoraized as expressionism with an instrumentalist twist. Anatomy is not depicted as it should be. Slade’s strokes guide her to pull out what she sees.
sladesign is Slade’s line of fashion and accessories. Every piece is handmade and one of a kind. Her next fashion show will be a collaboration with silkscreener, designer, artist, musician, Ron Liberti, at the Station in Carrboro in December.
Slade has a BFA in Graphic Design and MFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is a member of the Orange County Arts Commission Board AT LARGE, teaches private art and design classes as well as at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro where she lives with her two boys and husband.
For commissions, curating, classes or more information website: xerrajeros.com
email: marcelaslade@gmail.com call: 1 919 448 4888.
Alisa Esposito paints mythic portraiture in oils and gouache in the Magical Realism genre. She has painted throughout her life, but set the brushes down when her three children were born. When her perceptions of reality were blown open in the mythic rupture of her own life, she picked up oil painting at the urging of a friend. Alisa is grateful for the common ground she’s honored to share in capturing other’s stories, imaginings and alchemies in mythic imagery on canvas, to which she adds storied elements of cultural expression, sentimental beauty, magic and ancestral inheritance. A dedicated traveler of the West’s many dark and winding rabbit holes, when she’s not painting you can find her popping seeds in the garden between fits of poetry writing at her sweet little renovated Chatham NC farmhouse, or at such renegade learning halls as Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School and Martin Shaw’s School of Myth. You can find some of her work or book a commissioned portrait at her website
Noble Orphan Art.
“Mark…loves the thrill of the hunt for cool vintage relics, reclaiming wood and found materials to make his art. Salvaging all his materials, his passion is to rescue cast-off stuff and give it new life almost in a historic preservation kind of way. Self-taught, his assemblages and sculptures capture a rustic and primitive spirit.” – Jason Andrew, New York City Art Curator
“A few years ago my wife Jo Anna gave me a compressed multi-colored color pencil for Christmas. I had dropped out of art school in the 90s since life happened. I started drawing and doing collages daily and posted them to Instagram. I ended up showing at the Scrap Exchange and the Carrack community shows in Durham selling a few pieces. The next thing I know a painter in Hillsborough wanted to teach me to paint in exchange for help with his social media presence. The next thing I know I end up taking a class with Marcela Slade at the Arts Center which led me to showing at the Smelt!” Find him here.
