Fresh from the Studio

Thu Apr 27, 2023

12pm

Fresh from the Studio invites W&TW artist members to share what they are working on now with you! In this virtual format, artists will share work in progress, newly finished artworks, and recent or upcoming projects. Each presentation will be about 10 minutes with time for your questions and comments afterwards. Fresh from the Studio is your chance to see what is new and hear from contemporary artists. This program is free and open to the public.

This segment of Fresh from The Studio will feature artists like Rebecca Bennett, Erika Alonso, and Samantha Melvin.

About the Artists

Using the sensual qualities of oil, Rebecca Bennett creates layered abstractions which explore the dynamics of color, line, and texture. The viewer is encouraged by their abstraction to interpret their experience of the work rather than the work itself. Her work plays with the abstracted modern landscape. She uses light and dark, space and scale, encouraging the viewer to step into the work to react and reflect. Her process is one in which the artist and paint are partners negotiating the surface of the canvas as if the paint had animated qualities. Bennett’s work can be seen in corporate, hotel, residential, and hospitality settings across the US and Europe.

Erika Alonso is a Cuban-American painter, working and living in Houston, Texas. Her childhood was spent in Southern California, a place she often “escapes” to while painting. Alonso is a self-taught artist and an unabashedly painterly painter. Her current makings involve experimenting in abstract expressionism through a series of whimsical, abstract-figurative-landscape paintings that are meant to capture a moment in all its fleetingness—the movement and rush and whirl of it. Alonso’s fantastical paintings and drawings have been exhibited throughout the Houston area and in group shows at Spring Street Studios, Winter Street Studios, and Hardy & Nance Studios. Alonso’s paintings can be found in numerous private collections in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, as well as in the not-so-private and world-renowned Lester Marks Art Collection in Houston, Texas.

Samantha Melvin is a Texas-based artist, art educator and advocate. Her research-based artistic practice includes drawing, painting, and printmaking through which she investigates order and chaos in the spaces we inhabit. She exhibits her work regularly in Texas. Her work has been included in invitational group exhibitions in California, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas, juried shows in New York, Virginia and online. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Arts in Art Education from the University of Florida. Melvin is a community press member and instructor at Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Austin. She is a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design in the spring of 2023.

Interested in participating in Fresh from the Studio? Click here to learn more about artist membership benefits and opportunities!