Margarita Asiain
Margarita Asiain grew up in New Mexico and coastal California. From a young age she constantly drew and painted, taking after school art classes and entering pieces in County Fair competitions. She explored other art forms with violin, ballet, and tap classes. In college, her interests took a turn towards science and nursing. She became a licensed RN in 2002 and moved to NYC. She continued to paint, taking a plein air watercolor class at the NY Botanical Garden, and enjoyed frequent visits to NYC’s museums. In 2018 she relocated to Saugerties, NY and immediately began watercolor classes at WSA. She began exploring oils soon afterwards, monitored for workshops, and entered works in student exhibitions. She has been on a hiatus from nursing since 2024 to devote more time to painting. She will be a participating artist in the 2025 Saugerties Artist Studio Tour.

Edward Bakst
Edward Bakst sees imagination as the origin of inspiration, individuality, ideation, innovation, and invention. Extensive travel has inspired his art and photography, where exposure to varied cultures, lifestyles, and realities provoke the creator’s sway. His work has been shown internationally, including at MvVO @ Oculus, NYC; Emerging Innovation Summit, Australia; VIDAK ‘22 Invitational Poster Exhibition, Seoul; Human Rights AIAPI-UNESCO, Italy: Qatar International Art Festival; MADS Gallery in Milan, Canary Island & La PEDRERA, Barcelona; NYC Time Square digital billboard; US State Department’s “Impact of Exchange” exhibition, US; and Eunoia International Art Exhibition. As an artist/designer/director he has created internationally award-winning works and short animated films. His work screened at SIGGRAPH Theater. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and has served as a Fulbright Specialist. In his academic career he designed, directed, consulted, and launched new programs at Pratt, Columbia University, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and College for Creative Studies, and was invited by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, to oversee design of the curriculum and building for the new School of Art, Design & Media. He has conducted his Imagination Workshops all over the world—most recently in Pakistan, Cuba, UAE and Beijing.

David Barnett
I’m a mixed media artist, living and working in the Hudson Valley, and have been represented by many New York City galleries throughout my career. For example, I’ve had several one-person exhibitions at George Billis Gallery, Denise Bibro Fine Art in Chelsea, as well as Ivy Brown gallery in the Meatpacking District. Additionally, I’ve been included in numerous group shows nationally and internationally.

In May of 2024, I had a large solo exhibit at Arting Gallery in Baltimore. The gallery also published a 180-page book that accompanied the exhibit.

My work has been included in many art fairs in Chicago, Southampton, Miami Beach, Palm Beach, Bridgehampton, and New York City.

Lastly, I have held teaching positions at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design and SVA.

Carolee Bennett
Carolee Bennett is a practicing artist with an interest in the conflict between human infrastructure and the natural world – and the landscapes and lifestyles at risk. To capture love of place, loss of place, or both, she works in an expressive style that emphasizes distortion, strangeness, and storytelling. Her body of work includes acrylic on canvas, collage, and poetry. As a self-taught artist, her practice evolves through online courses and engagement with fellow artists. Bennett, who has lived in Upstate New York since 1994, was born and raised in northern Maine. She works full-time in social media and content marketing.

Lynn Herring
Born in Chicago to a working-class family, Lynn Herring came to New York in her 20s to pursue a career as an advertising art director and to develop her studio practice as a visual artist in the city that produced many of the contemporary artists that inspired her.

Living in the NYC metropolitan area gave Herring the opportunity to study at the School of Visual Arts while working at her advertising job. She ended up taking a break from her advertising career and graduated from SVA with honors in 2008 with a BFA in Sculpture.

After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Herring began showing her video installations at a funky little gallery on the Lower East Side and had the remarkable opportunity to show her videos at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey before her eventual move to the Hudson Valley.

Upon arriving in Kingston, NY in 2009, Herring found studio space in Kingston’s Brush Factory. Here was an amazing 100-year-old industrial space filled with artists and entrepreneurs quietly living and making their work.

In 2019, Herring completed her MFA studies in sculpture and printmaking at SUNY New Paltz where she graduated with honors while developing a new body of work designed to bring people together with art.

Herring’s studio work is influenced by her life, family, American culture and her career in advertising where bold simple imagery and witty short headline copy are used to execute complex strategies. Her sculpture and print work have a clean graphic aesthetic on the one hand and a cartoon-like form and line quality on the other. It is as if Donald Judd and Dr. Seuss collided with each other. Herring’s interest in minimalism, contemporary culture, social psychology, spirituality, play and humor also inform her work.

Herring has been exhibiting since 2005. Her work has been shown at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, WAAM museum in Woodstock, NY, the Wired Gallery in High Falls, NY and at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey.

Ali Herrmann
Ali Herrmann is a mixed media painter based in Troy, NY. Raised in the bucolic Berkshires of rural Massachusetts, Herrmann developed an early interest in the raw beauty of the natural landscape, the ever-changing seasons, and the rich flora and fauna of the region.

A lover of organic and biological sciences, her work explores cellular structures as the origin for her abstract paintings. Creating what she terms ‘micro-biome landscapes,’ Herrmann engages with the natural world as the inspiration for the color combinations and repetitive patterns in her paintings, collage works, and original books, while simultaneously exploring concepts of bacterial and unicellular structures in her art.

Throughout her nearly 30-year career as an artist, Herrmann has been awarded multiple grants including the Statewide Community Regrant from the New York State Council for the Arts (2023, 2022); the A.R.T. Fund Grant (2020); the Martha Boschen Porter Fund Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, MA (2019, 2014); and a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant (2017).

She has exhibited widely including Ford Studios, VA; The Arts Center of the Capital Region, NY; Albany Center Gallery, NY; Laffer Gallery, NY, Emerge Gallery, NY; and The Berkshire Museum, MA. Her work is in the permanent collections of RCA Screen Gems Productions, NY; Sony Pictures Entertainment, NY; Red Lion Inn, MA; as well as several private collections. Artist residencies include the Millay Colony, NY (2020); Main Street Arts, NY (2017); and the Vermont Studio School, VT (2007).

Monica Krajcovic
Monica Krajcovic is a Tillson based artist born and raised in the Hudson valley. They graduated from Montserrat College of Art, outside of Boston, and specialize in painting and water based mediums. Drawing inspiration from folk lore, mythology, and traditional occult sources. Their work often revolves around the human form twisted by and to nature. Featuring motifs of folk tales, nature, botanical illustration, and movement.

Josh Kramb
Josh Kramb is a visual artist born in Texas, and grew up in Dallas . The origin of Kramb’s pen and ink drawings ties into his desire to tap into emotionally charged memories that are rooted in his unconscious mind.. The figures and heads in his work appear to be embedded into or are embraced by hands evoking intense psychological moods and they impart a surrealist sensibility to his practice. Josh Kramb graduated in 2000 with an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn New York and an BFA in Printmaking from the University of Oklahoma,1996. He’s had exhibitions in galleries nationally and internationally and selected works are in private collections.

Pam Krimsky
I grew up in Brooklyn, where I most enjoyed using art materials and spending time at the Botanical Gardens. Not a student, I loved reading books on foreign cultures. While earning an MFA from Queens College, I met my Iranian-born husband, also a painter. After graduating, I moved upstate to paint from landscape, where I taught K-12 and occasionally, worked as an adjunct in Art at Columbia-Greene Community College. When we both lost our jobs at the end of 1991, we decided to move to Iran. I continued painting and taught both Art and English Conversation to all age levels. I was delighted when my painting was chosen to be shown at the Second Biannual in the Museum of Modern Art in Tehran.

I was hired in one of two tenure-track positions to open a new Fine Arts Department in an established university in Southeastern Iran. I taught my Drawing and Design classes in Farsi and still remain in contact with students. I wrote the curriculum for the Design classes.

In 2007, I returned to the Hudson Valley alone and since have been painting and exhibiting in the Hudson Valley, Manhattan and the greater NY area. Several of my works were chosen for the Racism Show at Pocatico, a Rockefeller Estate in Westchester Co. and in West Windsor Arts, in Princeton Junction, NJ. and my paintings were twice selected for inclusion in the prestigious Art in The Loft, a collaborative effort between Arts Mid-Hudson and The Millbrook Vineyard and Winery.

I live and maintain my studio in Highland.

Richard Davalos Léon
Richard Leon was born in the Bronx (1954) and traveled to Ecuador as a young boy and later to Paris, Rome and London. He received a BS in Psychology from Fordham University (1974) and an MFA from the New Jersey City University (2003). In 1987 he initiated a program of independent study under Peter Homitzky at the Arts Students League which progressed for 15 years.

In 2020 he initiated a new work and living space with his wife Gail, also an artist, in the town of Saugerties, NY. We are looking forward to many years of creative explorations!

His work can be seen on Pinterest and on Saatchi online.

Yvette Lewis
My paintings contain images of seeds and seed pods, abstractions of nature showing the smallest of life and revealing the power of the beginning. Images interweave emotional automatic drawing with observational drawings. The abstract layers of images and colors of the natural and mystical world create a complex surreal juxtaposition of these elements expressing a journey through life.

Unstructured full-time painting and drawing classes at the Art Students League after high school influenced me throughout my career. My two years at the Fashion Institute of Technology taught me craft is also part of the creative process, to make something well. Art is both an idea and an object, an inner vision and a manifestation of a vision. As an art teacher, I brought my passion for exploring ideas and the creative process to my high school students. Now retired, I bring that passion to my own studio work.

In 2020 I exhibited in a group show “If Only” at the Olive Free Library, a show of women artists exploring feminist issues. In January 2024 I was in a group show at the women’s collective, Ceres Gallery in NYC. Solo exhibitions include the Art Society of Kingston, Oriole 9 in Woodstock, Peace Nation Cafe in Kingston, Sawyer Bank in Saugerties, and Unitarian Fellowship in Poughkeepsie.

Iain Machell
Iain Machell trained at Portsmouth College of Art in England and Grays School of Art in Scotland, with an MFA in Sculpture from the State University of NY at Albany.

His work has been shown at the Drawing Center, Sculpture Center, Artists Space, Center for Book Arts, and Dieu Donne Gallery in New York City, ARC Gallery Raw Space in Chicago, Islip Art Museum on Long Island, and Contemporary Outdoor Sculpture at Chesterwood in Stockbridge, MA. His handmade book Objets Perdus is in the Artist Book Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2015 he completed a Residency at the Platte Clove Preserve in the Catskill Mountains, NY and recent solo shows were at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties NY, and the Unison Arts Center, New Paltz, NY.

His works have been featured in The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, New Art Examiner & Chicago Sun-Times.

Machell is Art Professor Emeritus at SUNY Ulster, receiving the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012. He has been a Visiting Artist to numerous colleges and universities including Parsons School of Art, University of Massachusetts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ball State University.

André Malkine
André Malkine is a self-taught artist from Woodstock, NY, whose work is shaped by a lifelong love of comics, fantasy, and surrealism. He was inspired by his father, Gilles, an artist and draftsman whose creative work modeled artistic possibility and whose technical discipline revealed the craft of drawing by hand. He is also influenced by the paintings of his grandfather, Georges, who was active in the early surrealist movement in 20th-century Paris. André works primarily in black and white, using pencil and ink in both traditional and digital forms.

Ann Morris
I have been a multi-disciplinary artist all my life, with a 50 year ceramics practice. In the last few years, I have widened my focus to include printmaking, particularly collagraph, movable collagraph, woodcut, collage, abstract drawing, and encaustics.

I have studied at the Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, The Art Students League, The Woodstock School of Art, R&F Handmade Paints and with various ceramic artists in NYC and the Hudson Valley.

I have been trained as a press assistant at the Woodstock School of Art and assist at print classes and the Monothon where I have been an invited artist since 2023.) I assist at encaustic workshops at WSA.

Tracy Phillips
Tracy Phillips moved her studio to the Catskills in 2015. Prior she spent almost 40 years in Brooklyn where she developed her painting practice. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally. She studied Fine Art at Parsons School of Design, graduating in 1983.

Chris Seubert
A contemporary draftsman, painter, printmaker and educator who works from observation and memory describing light and how it creates volume, form and life.

Has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dahesh Museum in Manhattan and appeared in American Artist Magazine. Art Renewal Center 2nd International Salon, 2005 Finalist, permanently on view at artrenewal.org. Actively exhibits locally in one man and group shows and featured in the emerging artist exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. Exhibited watercolors, oils, drawings and prints at the Stone Ridge Library as their Fall Artist. Director and participant of the High Falls 350th En Plein Air Paint Out in the Hamlet of High Falls sponsored by the High Falls Conservancy. Is an Associate Member of the American Watercolor Society.

Chair of the Arts Department and Program Coordinator of the Fine Art/Visual Arts program at SUNY Ulster Community College. Recipient of SUNY’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015 and 2 Title III Mini Grants for program development in the Fine Arts Department.

RESIDENCIES & MEMBERSHIP
· Artist in Residence at Platte Clove Preserve – 2017
· The Prince of Wales Institute & the New York Academy of Art,
At the Forbes’ owned Chateau de Balleroy, Normandy, France – 2000
· American Watercolor Society – Associate Member – 2023

EDUCATION
· New York Academy of Art, Tribeca NY – 1998 – 2000
· MFA, Cum Laude, Painting
· Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY – 1988 – 1992
· BFA, with honors, Illustration
· Woodstock School of Art
· Anatomical Life Drawing with Deane Keller – 2000 – 2002
· Printmaking – 2013 – 2015
· Bard College 1999 – 2000
· Life drawing with Cheryl Wheat
· The Art Students League, Manhattan NY
· Anatomical Drawing, Michael Burbon – 1993 – 1996
· Watercolor, Irwin Greenburg – 1993 – 1996

Clark Stoeckley
Clark Stoeckley is a multidisciplinary artist whose latest work includes photographing stray cats and painting geometric abstract murals. As a courtroom artist, Clark illustrated and authored The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning: A Graphic Account Inside the Courtroom. His art has been exhibited in the International Spy Museum (Washington DC), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (NYC), apexart (NYC) Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery (NYC), EIDIA House (Brooklyn), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Hartware Medien Kunst Verein (Dortmund), and Contemporary Art Platform (Kuwait). His work has appeared in ARTnews, VICE, Hyperallergic, Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Nation, MSNBC, and PBS. Clark has participated in artist residencies at Revolt Gallery in Taos, NM and the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY. He earned an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Art from Brooklyn College and a BFA in Alternative Media from Webster University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art & Graphic Design at the American University of Kuwait, and he previously taught at Bloomfield College in New Jersey and the Brooklyn College Community Partnership.

Linda Suskind-Kosmer
Linda Suskind-Kosmer (b.1955) is a mixed-media artist in paint and ceramics. She lived in Long Island, NYC, and Brooklyn before moving to upstate New York. She holds a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art and studied at Tyler School of Art in Rome.

Linda has participated in numerous solo and group shows in New York City, New York State, and Philadelphia. She has been awarded residencies at Millay Colony in New York and, most recently, at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France.

Her abstract and surreal artwork draws inspiration from everyday objects, dreams, and landscapes. Her psychological and visceral art serves as a medium for exploring her emotions.

In addition to studio practice, she paints plein air in her sketchbooks while traveling in Italy and around her rural home, documenting and inspiring her studio work.

Carl Van Brunt
I was born in New York City and grew up in Westchester County in the town of Chappaqua. Both of my parents were interested in the arts. My mother, who played the organ at both the local Synagogue and the Congregational Church acquainted me with the music of Stravinsky and Bartok. My father, whose plans to be an architect were dashed by the Great Depression and World War II, took me to museums in New York to see Picasso, Mondrian, and Kline.

I began taking art seriously when I was a teenager. I have used the process of art making as a way to find something I could believe in. At Williams College where I majored in Art History, I painted simplified semi-abstract paintings that aimed at capturing the mystery of altered consciousness. After graduation, a year at the
School of Visual Arts, and two years of teaching grade school, I tried to make a living in advertising. I lived in Greenwich Village and there I experienced the musical artistry of Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and most importantly, John Coltrane. Coltrane literally changed my life. His music gave me the inspiration to attempt to fuse thought and realization in the ineffability of the moment to make my own art. And his masterpiece “A Love Supreme” showed me for the first time that a serious artist could take spirituality seriously.

Later when I had a live/work studio on Lafayette Street in Soho, I made impromptu sculptures and installations from objects found in the glorious junk shops of Canal Street. With minimalism still the art of the moment, I rebelled against it, making a series of cartoonish paintings about a flat man named Bill Smith contoured by right angles with a face revealing the dazed look of a person trying to eliminate the shadow that haunted him. After that I embraced the non-hierarchical simultaneity of postmodernism, but with a distinctly non-postmodernist point of view. I believed in absolute truth. The problem was, I hadn’t found it. I made large improvised searching paintings in acrylic including one featuring Jung’s Anima archetype walking away from the viewer into the sea.

Around 1980, I became aware of digital art. Though I still had a painting studio, the computer desktop gradually replaced a physical space as my studio of choice. Although my first computer had limited capabilities, I was taken with the promise that digital offered. Here was a way to close the gap between thought and the act of creation that I believe Pollock had crossed only to reach a dead end when he ran into the inherent limits of paint itself and perhaps those of pure abstraction as well. In time, as the hardware and software improved, I learned that digital painting, working with a pressure sensitive stylus and tablet driving sophisticated software, could yield images beyond the reach of my traditional painting techniques. And to me, the picture and the wordless message it conveys are what counts not how it was made.

In 2001, my family and I moved to the Hudson Valley. As my art developed, I was still finding more questions than answers. Like many in my generation I looked to the East for guidance. Eventually I found that Buddhism made the most sense to me. I took up meditation, became a vegetarian, read a lot of Dharma books and focused my efforts on actually experiencing the freedom from unnecessary anguish that Buddha promised we could find within ourselves. In my art practice. This has meant making work from a meditative point of view. Eventually, as I mastered the digital tools that I use now, I came to know how to let the picture, and its constellating meanings, reveal themselves. Transitioning from the traditional painting process to working digitally has been the key to my further development as an artist.

The drawing I have submitted for the notebook show is an example of the kind of pencil sketch I make. The geometry utilized in the sketch is one I developed over the years and is rooted in Buckminster Fuller’s concept of closest packing of spheres. It is basically an overlapping dual grid of equalateral triangles and circles. My drawing method often begins with a freehand improvisational interpretation of this grid with no fixed pictorial goal in mind. The finished work I have submitted is a digital painting of the sketch made with a Wacom tablet and stylus in Photoshop which will be printed and framed as per the instructions provided in the application.