Danna Eve Rzecznik creates functional sculptural vessels by inspired by nature. The artist cites both domestic and wild influences on her work; the beauty of nature mingled with the nurturing skills taught by the women around her at an early age.  Learning to sew from her grandmother, and her mother baking pies, helped influence the creativity of her hands in her future work.

Danna’s style is inspired by ‘the tension between pleasure and tedium of everyday domesticity, and the imagination experienced in child-like play.’  Her art is a vivid blend of colors and textures applied to everyday objects, like a cup or a teapot. Beautiful and functional, her art is also craft that anyone can use.

Danna lives in Pittsburgh and has an extensive history with the arts scene in the region. She has worked for the Carnegie Museum, Society for Contemporary Craft, and Gallerie Chiz.  Danna achieved her BFA from Edinboro University and attended Carlow University for her degree in Art Education.  Danna currently works at the Father Ryan Art Center in McKees Rocks, teaching pottery to youths.

You can see Danna’s art at the Three Rivers Arts Festival starting Wednesday this week, where she is one of this year’s exciting Emerging Artists.

Danna Eve Rzecznik
June 8-12
Plaza Booth 95

Dan Sullivan creates unique glass art in many forms. At his studio in Mt. Washington, he diligently crafts glass jewelry in a variety of shapes and colors. Curling spirals for your ears and thick glass pendants compliment perfectly round glass beads. From the jewelry he moves onto making glass sculptures; an elephant made of frosted glass, a chessboard with all of its pieces, a tree made of rare red glass with twisted branches and roots.

When he is not working at his flame shop on Mt. Washington, Sullivan blows glass at Vessel Studio in the South Side on the weekends. I went to Vessel to see Dan work and photograph the experience. The studio is easy to overlook, a garage door opens in the middle of a residential area off of 16^th street. The heat is intense inside and the door stays open to let in the cool air and any curious eyes that may be passing by.

In the hot shop, Sullivan creates glass cups and bowls. These seemingly standard items have his creative twist to them. The cups have faces, grinning and leering with indented eyes and mouths. These pieces are quirky and have a whimsical air to the, but Sullivan is intensely serious about his work. A self-proclaimed perfectionist, he speaks about the difficulty and the beauty of the work. “Glassblowing is both art and craft,” he tells me. “It’s all about learning to control both heat and gravity, in order to achieve perfection.”

Dan Sullivan will be at the Three Rivers Arts Festival selling his glassware and sculptures, as well as his glass jewelry. Other weekends you can find him selling his work in the Strip District at 20^th and Penn on Saturday afternoons. Stop by his booth next week and check out his unique visions for yourself.

Dan Sullivan
Plaza Booth 78
June 8-12

Meghan Olson’s screen-prints are natural and intangible, much like her subject matter. The artist is influenced by botanical drawings and translates these natural shapes and textures into her work. Over 200 layers of ink and pigment build up on the surface of her prints, mixed with many other ephemeral materials. Olson utilizes the standard ink of screen-printing, as well as unconventional materials. Pigment mingles with dirt and marmalade, natural organic substances that create a unique texture and quality to the print.

Olson formerly worked in etching, but switched over to screen-printing when she had children. Working from home, her basement studio doubles as a playroom for her two young children. The kids like to try to their hand at screen-printing, and the less toxic materials make it easy to allow their creativity to run free. Olson also teaches art to other people’s children at the Carnegie Museum.

An artist with business savvy, Olson also runs a letterpress business out of her studio where she makes wedding invitations and screen printed cards. Her abstract work is her personal artwork, with diligently crafted layers of ink forming a delicately traced image. Olson’s work is minimalist and beautiful, and must be seen to truly be appreciated.

Jim Studeny started painting for a simple reason; he wanted to decorate the Bloomfield home that he shares with his wife Judy. He never went to art school, and has never formally trained, but you wouldn’t know it to look at elegant style of his painting.

Ancient Japanese woodblocks inspire his work, and the detail that goes into each piece is impeccable. Jim speaks of the old Japanese artists whose work he translates onto canvas with a respect bordering on reverence. He has translated reliefs made by well-known artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige. With each painting, he adds his own touch, using gold enamel instead of flat yellow to create a metallic sheen or subtly altering details to create a more dynamic composition. His work remains largely faithful to the originals however, and each painting still retains the master seal of the original artist, as well as Jim’s own signature.

A draftsman by trade, the technical skill of Jim’s paintings is a marvel to behold. Clean, simple lines and brilliant colors dominate these paintings and each frame has even been hand painted by the artist to match the image. He also produces smaller paintings, like a series of 4×12 panels that depict symbols and patterns that appear in the various reliefs. These panels can stand on their own as beautiful pieces of art, but when connected to the series as a whole they form a comprehensive theme that is a wonder to behold.

Jim Studeny
Plaza Booth 56
June 8-12

Jessica Somers works within the shadow realm between fine art and illustration. Screen-printing is her chosen medium. Inspired by spiritual stories and popular literature, Jess explores the mysteries of life through the layers of her art.

Screen-printing can be a laborious process, with the artist layering segments of pictures on top of one another to create a comprehensive image. These images can be taken apart piece-by-piece until only minimalist shapes remain. However, when these shapes are put together into a screen-print, they form a whole picture that tells a story.

Jessica’s earlier work is clean and spare, simple, narrative-driven images. As she grew as an artist, she turned to pattern making within her art. Creating these patterns is a meditation for the artist, and the contrast between her positive and negative spaces relate to the duality of the human experience, and the artistic process.

Jessica also has connections to the local music scene, one of several artists who has designed artwork for Pittsburgh-based band The Armadillos. A young artist with a promising vision, Jess Somers will display her work at the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Stop by and check out her screen-printing techniques for yourself!

Jessica Somers
Plaza Booth 38
June 3-7

The complexity of human nature has been explored through art for thousands of years. Ryan Woodring is a young artist who was raised in a generation that saw war and strife every day on television and the Internet. The conflict spills over into his art, he paints a series of images that depict the last moments of a soldier’s life. These paintings are snippets of war that stretch back through history, each one has a specific date of a battle or moment in time. Ryan’s work explores the ‘improbability of being alive.’ His soldiers are overwhelmed by an immense landscape that surrounds their small figures. Ryan says he is attached to landscapes and understanding how one human being interacts with the world around them.

Ryan also works in mixed media and collage work that becomes incorporated into the painting process. His series called ‘Self Mapping Lands’ are akin to topographical maps in earthly colors, created with wax and paint. These large-scale images command attention as the viewer feels they could step into this landscape that reaches out to meet them.

Ryan works primarily as an animator, having graduated from Carnegie Mellon University last year with a degree in Electronic and Time-Based art. A fresh face on the Pittsburgh art scene, Ryan brings his many talents to the Three Rivers Arts Festival in June.

Ryan Woodring
Plaza Booth 84
June 3-7

The surrealist nature of Alexis Covato’s work makes me feel like I am in a brightly colored dream. Playful images have an odd twist to them, making the viewer slightly uneasy when they see an image like clowns in a car, holding knives and chains, or the mug shot of Alice after she has left Wonderland. However it is hard to look away from these images, and the longer I look, the more I can appreciate the skill put into them.

Covato says that ever since she was little she has been interested in fitting together pieces of the world around her. This jigsaw quality is evident in the fragmentation of her work. Her abstractions are like mosaics, with transparent layers of paint fitting together to convey otherworldly images. Inspired by oddity and iconography, many of her paintings have a theatrical quality.

The artist, who goes by the name Lex, says that she is primarily interested in “the emotional quality of what the body can convey.” She is currently working on a series of tattooed deities, in a convergence of spiritual and psychological exploration.

Pop culture itself is Lex’s medium and she explores the many facets of society through the canvas upon which she paints. Constantly at work on upwards of six paintings at a time, she has worked as an artist for eight years. Having displayed in several local galleries and arts shows, she is excited to display her work at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in June. Stop by her booth and see for yourself the oddity and wonder of Lex Covato.

Lex Covato
Plaza Booth 84
June 3-7

In the basement of his home in Forest Hills, mixed-media artist Mark Stein diligently crafts his wire sculptures. Seated at a worktable, he focuses his attention on soldering thin pieces of metal into an elaborate structure. Above his head, hundreds of pieces glint in shades of copper and bronze.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Stein has been making his wire sculptures for many years. Art was a hobby for him until he was injured on the job several years ago, and turned back to his art as therapy. He started out making jewelry for his beloved wife, Joan. His wire sculptures, he says, are his true passion.

Mark turns materials that would otherwise be discarded into art, an practice known in artistic and environmental circles as “upcycling.” With a delicate precision, he crafts elaborate 3-dimensional sculptures on a wire frame. Working with local Pittsburgh landscapes, he has crafted metal bridges and homes, as well as the familiar incline going up the mountain. Currently he is working on a representation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, which will be ready in time for the Festival in June.

Stein’s work is both beautiful and functional: wire hangings that can be used as coat racks, metal trees that can be used to hang jewelry or keys. His largest works are metal trees that stand three feet high. He views these with a touch of respect, calling them his ‘Trees of Life.’ This reverence for life is well earned, after his years of health issues and struggle. Stein has started his career as an artist late in life, but his craftsmanship is impeccable and the level of detail in his work is astonishing, as evidenced in my slideshow below.

Mark Stein
Plaza Booth 29
June 3-7

The jurors for the 2011 Juried Visual Art Exhibition are:

• Murray Horne, Curator, The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
• Jason Busch, The Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts, Carnegie Museum of Art
• Kate Lydon, Director of Exhibitions, Society of Contemporary Craft

The jurors for the 2011 Artists Market are:

• Laura Domencic, Director, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
• Barbara Jones, Chief Curator, Westmoreland Museum of American Art
• Keith Belles, Designer, Wax Jewelry Design Studio

Artists Market
New deadline: 11:59 pm, Friday, February 18, 2011
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Emerging Artist Scholarship
New deadline: 5:00 pm, Friday, February 18, 2011
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Juried Visual Art Exhibition
New deadline: 11:59 pm, Friday, March 11, 2011
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Showcase Noir
Deadline: 11:59 pm, Thursday, March 31, 2011
Note: Artists applying to Showcase Noir can apply to the Artists Market at no additional charge, but you must apply to Showcase Noir first, and both applications must be received by 11:59 on February 18.
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