The Artists of ArtPrize: Passion, Faith And Innovation

I had heard many things about the annual ArtPrize competition. It was described to me as "crazy", "crowded" and "fun". But none of those terms came close to what I encountered in my first stroll into ArtPrize venues Friday night.

What I discovered was a massive art exhibit that gave the art fanatic an added twist, the chance to meet the artist and talk with them about their inspirations, their techniques and their lives. I found out that not only do artists love to talk, they are extremely passionate about their projects, and that made me view their art in a different light.

For my first foray into ArtPrize 2014, I tried to avoid the massive throngs downtown and hit the venues spaced out along the river on North Monroe.

Lesson one: you can't really ever avoid the throngs downtown. Parking was at a premium, even along Sixth Street Bridge Park, so I slid into a space in a law firm parking lot that had graciously opened to the public. Excited, I had to remind myself, to take my time and take it in one small piece at a time.

It was here, along this strip of converted warehouses on North Monroe that I discovered lesson two of ArtPrize, the beauty of the event is in the smallness of its bigness. In the nooks and crannies of the venues, you can meet and talk to many of the artists about their work. With that in mind, allow to me share with you the stories of some of the artists I encountered Friday night.

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see" -- Edgar Degas

The first thing you notice when you encounter Paul Rio near his paintings is his earnestness. There is nothing phony about him, and his passion for his art and his faith are immediate and clear.

After studying art in San Francisco, Rio settled in Orange County, California and into a 55 hour a week job which gave him little inspiration. While diving head first into studying his Christian faith, a vision of Jesus and a phrase became caught in his head. The vision was a portrait of Christ as a Hebrew, and the phrase he couldn't shake was "E Elohe Yisrael", which translates to "The Mighty God of Israel".

"I didn't know what the Lord wanted to me to do with this," Rio told me, "so I prayed on it, and soon He answered me."

What came to him was a portrait of Jesus, comprised mainly of the words from the Bible that describe Christ. Excerpts from Proverbs, Revelations, and Acts come together to form the face of Christ.

"Do you remember how God breathed life or the spirit into Adam after creating him?" Rio asked us. A crowd had gathered around us as I interviewed Paul. None of them offered an answer.

"Through his nose," Rio responded, "so that's where I started."

Painstakingly crafted using photoshop to put the Biblical phrases into the face of the Savior, Rio talked about getting it right. "His eyes are about peace, about love."

Rio said the words were laser printed on to the canvas and then he painted the image around them using a variety of techniques including a palette knife to craft Jesus' hood.

Although Rio speaks with the fervor of a street corner preacher, he lets his faith talk through his work, by allowing viewers to do something we all were warned never to do: to touch his painting.

"People feel the Lord speak to them when they touch it," Rio told us, "atheists, Muslims, non-believers, all feel His presence. One woman's back pain went away when she touched it."

With that, the folks around me, almost all late middle age like myself, and therefore prone to aches and pains, came forward to touch the beautifully crafted work entitled "The Word Among Us". "I got nothing to lose," the woman next to me stated.

Full disclosure, I also touched the painting and although I did feel a sense of calm come over me, I'm not entirely ready to say it was from above.

"The Word Among Us" and its companion piece "The Set Apart Bride" are located at Venue 114, the Monroe Community Church, 800 Monroe NW.

Later in the evening, I came across a similarly thought out piece called "Einstein" by Michael Feehan. Instead of working words into his depiction of the famous scientist, Feehan had put the entire mathematical equation for Einstein's groundbreaking mass energy equivalence into his unkempt hair.

"A physicist passing through told me I got one small part of the equation wrong," Feehan admitted, "but I'm going to let it slide."

Touching the art is also a big must to understand Colleen Ruiz' work, stationed just up the street from the church in the basement of the Boardwalk GR Condominiums. "I want people to touch it, I made it so it's tactile," Ruiz exclaimed, again making me violate the golden rule I had heard about ArtPrize.

Her work, entitled "dis.par.i.ty" is about not only the disparity in our society between rich and poor, Ruiz told me, but about the disparity of the application of the paint.

Ruiz worked the thicker edges of her triptych into vine like curls, leaves, feathers and dots, creating an effect so that it almost looks like the pounded copper panels you might find in the ceiling of an old downtown building.

"I hear that all the time," Ruiz told me, "but I wouldn't even know how to pound those dots into the metal, those are made by me, one at a time by hand."

It was at this point in my initial journey into ArtPrize that I realized the art may be the secondary point of the competition. When I saw Colleen come alive with her descriptions and her desire to discuss her technique, I learned this event may be more about the artists themselves, and their desire to have a forum about their creative process.

I don't have the experience or the desire to criticize or judge Colleen's work, I'll let the jurors and the public do that through the voting process, but what I saw in her was an overwhelming drive to create. I don't think she even knew where it came from, only that she had to get it out.

I came across many professional artists who make their living painting and sculpting, and many part time artists, who toil late into the evening after coming home from a full time job, and the one thing they had in common was a deep driven desire to get whatever was in their soul, be that joy or pain, out. Out into public, or just out of their system, I'm not sure. I only know it needs to come out.

And then there's Allen Deming. He is the sole proprietor of Mackinaw Watercraft, a hand crafted wood kayak and canoe business out of Grand Ledge. Impressed with the handling and lightness of a wood kayak he encountered while on a Boy Scout trip with his son, Deming came home and began applying his skills from his experiences in the construction trade and began teaching himself how to make a wood kayak of his own.

Hand stretched over a plywood frame, Deming's display kayak was so wonderfully rendered, I had to ask him if it actually could be used in the water. "Oh yeah," Deming responded, "they are lighter and handle much better than fiberglass or plastic kayaks."

Deming told me of how he built the first one just to have one, and then he like it so much he kept playing with the design, eventually using wood inlays and creating the "The One Tree" design of his ArtPrize 2014 entry. "I was in it to build watercraft, until one day a doctor bought one to hang on his office wall," confided Deming, "it was at that point I knew it could also be art."

Next to Allen was a woman working with a strange device which looked like a Q-tip attached to what I can only describe as an electrical device. Larissa Uredi told me she was applying an electrical current to treated sheets of titanium to create her unique art.

Uredi explained that each color was created by a different voltage of electricity from her device. In describing me the three pieces of art work in her display, Larissa showed how in each piece she was demonstrating more and more virtuosity in her newly found medium.

"To the best of my knowledge, I'm the only one in the world creating art this way," Larissa told me. "I know because I've been searching online for someone else who does it so I can pick their brain and find out what they've learned. I haven't found anyone yet."

And then there's the thrill of seeing the good, old fashioned trompe d'oeil, or "trick of the eye". Installed high above the crowds just inside the mall area between the DeVos Performance Hall and adjacent Convention Center, is Dominic Pangborn's "Michigan In Motion", a painting that moves with your eye.

A cleverly rendered optical illusion, Pangborn's "gallery in a gallery" moves with you as you walk past it, giving the throngs a stunning illusion. Sure to be a crowd pleaser, Pangborn told me he learned the trick back in 1971 and has been playing with it ever since, and he says can control the "speed" of the illusion using different techniques. I imagine it will score high in the popular vote, as it garnered a lot of buzz Friday night.