Visitors to the Studios at 307 East Annandale Road this past weekend enjoyed an open house of art, music, and food. We began our visit with the surrealist paintings of Dave Curtis (including an unusual musical take on the Cyclops myth from Homer’s Odyssey) and the surreal abstract art of Dara Friel, who showed us her new paintings of a heart and an angel. Then we espied a more classical view that of Venice: View of the Campanile from Punto Della Dogano in oil on canvas by resident artist Linda Donaldson.
One of the pleasures of attending the event was speaking with the artists. We met, for example, Sam, who goes by the moniker The Strange Lens. She has multiple spaces at the studio where she works in the color pink in different media and on artworks from the traditional to the practical to the abstract. When I asked her about this monochrome color choice, she told me she was influenced greatly by the late David Lynch, creator-producer of the cult television series Twin Peaks. Despite watching Twin Peaks on black-and-white television in her native Ukraine, she always had the image pink in mind. We asked Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV about this, for he is a writer publishing an essay about the esoteric philosophy behind the TV series. Mr. Lincoln had this to say: “The choice of one unique color becomes what Lynch would call a ‘world-within-a-world,’ a space where heightened emotion quietly leaks through everyday objects. An all-pink room or studio is almost a new world into which you escape. That’s exactly how Lynch uses color in Twin Peaks, not as decoration, but as a portal into a different emotional register.”
We also met Tyler Cruse, and we were intrigued by the red and black spirals of his artwork Une Inspiration Japnonaise. He explains to us why he was inspired by Japanese art: “This piece evolved from an exploration of forms in a book on Japanese motifs. While the piece itself is not explicitly ‘Japanese,’ it evolved from and—to me at least—evokes a sense of some of these elements. This is often how I work; the subject or feeling of a piece emerges during the process of creating it. I rarely begin with a result in mind.”
We next met Meaghan DeCelle. Meaghan started renting a small studio at 307 quite recently so she can paint in tranquility; many artists we met at 307 rent a studio there for this reason. Interestingly, several of her family members have a local connection, for they attended Trinity Academy Meadow View in Falls Church, a classical-curriculum school with a focus on teaching visual art. Meaghan, too, has a classical bent, as witnessed in her oil painting Siren, also reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey and specifically the beauties who would lure sailors to their deaths by their beautiful music. The gallery card beside the painting notes: “Siren calls from the deep, hypnotic and enticing. Bold strokes and restless waves of color come to stillness in her gaze, pulling you into uncharted waters. Cool hues resonate as sea foam crashing over the warm burnt umber sands. The maid stands tall amidst the surf, unshakable and unafraid.”
Also new to the 307 coterie—and the last artist we visited at the holiday party—is Cheyenne Ellanah. Our attention was immediately drawn to Cheyenne’s mixed media work “Divine Offering” of a woman bathed in light from above. She told us: “This piece was inspired by my own life and what I had to overcome to make it to this point. The truth I have come to believe is that, whatever I’m carrying, if I bring it to the light, there it can be mended, there it can be made pure … the light I seek out in the world is only the awakening of the light that has always lived within me from the beginning.”
Studio artists welcome visitors regularly, so one need not wait until the next holiday party in order to appreciate the art and the sincerity of the artists’ visions at the 307 studios.