Gary Molloy

Gary Moloy at Christie's in London

My name is Gary Molloy, I’m an Artist, poet and charity worker. I was diagnosed with Bi-polar 1 disorder, which is a severe form of the illness in my mid-twenties. I use Art, as a medium for channeling crippling mood swings.

Help people through Art

Painting still-lives, landscapes and figures, my interest lies in the outline of forms and not in their intricate details. My work is insular and immediate – a characteristic which is accentuated by use of impasto and broad brush strokes.
Ten years ago, I arrived at Core Arts, a mental health charity which helps people connect with and discover their creative potential. I’d never been remotely interested in Art before, but the spark of creativity that my first visit ignited, flared into a blaze of exuberance with flame like forms and scar like brushstrokes. In recent years the glow of this period has blended with more subtle realizations of beauty in the observed object or chosen motif.
Through my art and poetry, I could finally connect with something creative. I had found my vocation and it turned into my purpose. I have rediscovered my dreams, which were shattered by 10 years of illness.
One of the first paintings I sold, in the early days at Core Arts, was titled Freedom. I slowly realized that Freedom is not escape from the Storm; its peace within the Storm. Another Painting I sold was titled Forgiveness. This began the journey of forgiving myself and others.

www.garymolloy.blogspot.com

Dan Casado

Red land

Daniel 'Dan' Casado
Spanish self-taught artist, born in Argentina in 1956.

Living in Spain since 1980,
with home-studio in the island of El Hierro,
Canary Islands

Member of WHO-HA DA-DA Outsider Art Movement, USA
Member of AMIS Art Insolite, FRANCE

www.dancasado.com

Julia Sisi

I AM AN ANIMAL

I am an animal.

A female human animal.

A female animal who paints.

And, when I paint, I want to show,

to share the deep perception of female beings.

Inspired, forced by my inner female condition,

radiating to/from other powerful women, goddesses, mythical queens…

Helping the paper, allowing it to transform itself into windows,

opening to my secluded inner world.

Always self-questioning, always finding unexpected answers.

Still in search, still growing, always beginning.

Proudly living the ME as SHE.

*

CYCLOPS

The first movie I saw in my life was 'Ulysses', with Kirk Douglas.

I was 5 years old, we had no television at home, I was not used to see fiction images...

and I believed all these fantastic creatures moving on the big screen,

cyclops, giants and sirens,

I believed they were real, they actually existed!

The sensation of astonishment these creatures caused on me, half marvel/half fear,

opened my eyes to a new, unlimited world of wonders.

The world was never the same to me, before I went out of the cinema.

More or less by the same time, I was shocked when an strange black machine

talked to me!

In fact, it was simply a bakelite telephone, and it was ringing...

so I put the black machine close to my ear, as my mother used to do,

and, believe me, it talked, said 'Hello' to me!

The unexpected voice coming out from a machine made me understand

that this telephone was a veritable 'Living Machine'.

............

Now, more than 40 years later, after 20 years of hard exile

(the same time Ulysses spent going back to Ithaca),

I found my home in the small island where I live,

surrounded by the Sea.

And now I know, and can tell you for sure, that all these fantastic creatures,

cyclops, giants, medusas, angels and devils,

sky fishes and blonde sirens, living machines and flying chairs...

they exist, all of them are TRUE!

And I paint to show, to share the wonder, to recover and bring to life

these intangible, secret worlds.

*

Julia Sisi was born in 1957 in Argentina,

from spanish mother and south-american aboriginal father (Guarani indians)

In the latest seventies her native country was dominated by military dictators,

and in 1980 she exiled to Spain.

In 2003 she established her home-studio in the volcanic island of El Hierro,

the smallest of the Canary Islands,

not far from Northwest Africa, in the middle of the Atlantic Sea

*

www.juliasisi.com

Liz Parkinson

Woman with creepy crawlies

Liz didn't ever study art formally, and after leaving school, she became a social science teacher.

She taught for a while, and then went travelling.

Subsequently she studied silversmithing, which she taught instead, and spent a lot of time developing her unique pen and ink style. In 1977 Liz met Herbert Eckert in Sydney, and he sent examples of her artwork to Jean Dubuffet in France.

The latter then recommended that some of these should be purchased by the Collection de L'art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, so they purchased three pieces.

Since then, her drawings have appeared in various Outsider Art exhibitions in Australia and overseas, and are now included in several significant collections.

These days she lives near Terrigal, NSW, on the edge of a rainforest, and some of the creatures from there have a habit of finding their way into her work.

http://www.lazylizard.com.au/liz/main.htm

Jade E. Zivanovic

My Dark Crystal

Jade E. Zivanovic grew up in rural Queensland, moving to Melbourne after studying Science at Central Queensland University. Working a myriad of jobs has allowed her to meet many diverse, fascinating people from varying backgrounds, all with different stories but the same underlying emotions experienced by all, despite circumstance and location. It is these emotions she seeks to depict in her unique figurative, maritime and cityscape paintings, to in turn evoke a story personal to each viewer.



As an untrained artist, Jade has researched classical and fine art techniques. She draws inspiration from many sources; old masters like Bouguereau and Rembrandt, to inspiring contemporary artists like Robert Bolser, Graydon Parrish adn Miodrag Jankovic. She has often been referred to as a 'cranial artist'.




Jade lives on the Mornington Peninsula with her husband, composer Vladan Zivanovic.

John McNelley

Sunrise

Painting to me is firstly painting yourself. Each painting no matter if its a landscape, portrait or marine, its a self portrait. I paint to re-connect with something sane. The world outside so to speak is lacking mostly of sense, everything is way too fast and way too empty. Painting fills the void of a life that is pretty much work and nothing else.

I want to paint stillness. I want to paint so that the viewer has some appreciation of nature and some indication of a life beyond the mechanical grind. I don't like abstract or modern art if it does not convey stillness or nature's power in some manner. I have never done a successful plein air painting because it lacks that something else that I need to go above the daily grind. If I can't feel it then nor could the audience.

Mostly then I paint in the studio after I have gone for a walk in nature or visited a place where peace exists. The notion is to carry this into the artwork so that the painting can add something to the home in which it lives.

When I look at a painting, the first question I oft ask is “ would it look good on my wall ?” I thus can not paint a Piccaso-esque work because well … how would I feel first thing in the morning if I woke up to that? My favorite artists are probably many and varied. I love some of Cezanne's works, some of Monet's and Renoir's. But I also find Fauvist works of painters such as Brian Simons exciting stuff indeed [ www.briansimons.com ]. So my tastes are really a little varied. My only teacher of art said there is no really wrong way to paint – I might add, it depends upon what energy within yourself you want to connect with and to express thru the painting to the audience.

Photo realism in art doesn't excite me. Bravo to the people who can do it but my camera a $50 special, can do that sort of thing far better than I. What tho I like to do is to take several photos and put them together to make a painting. Often only 1 element in a photo is just what you need in a work. Rarely have I copied a photo exactly. My favorite subject is landscape and still life.

I would like to work as a full time artist but a the moment its working to make a living at anything I can get and painting when I can. I like the odd plein air adventure and I am inspired by David Hockney's example in painting his native Yorkshire.

Art to me is a healing thing. Quite needed in a crazy world. It is an exploratory adventure in developing your senses. If you can feel what you are painting, the painting is half way to being a successful work. If you can sense what you are painting then alas, it might just be ok but nothing one would want to hang anywhere. I really like any style so long as it conveys stillness, not deadness, life not sterility.

If I don't paint, I see the day wasted. Even if its making a few drawings or mixing up a few paints or preparing a canvas for a painting. I like putting symbols in my paintings, I think they say a lot. I like abstract figures but struggle getting something graphically pleasing. At the current time, my interest lies in suggesting curved space rather than three dimensional space. I feel this is a new direction that painting could take and it is adaptable to both abstract and traditional methods of painting. But its a new thing for me and have only had 1 attempt work out.

www.johnmcnelley.com