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Artists on Coping: John Descarfino

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

A picture containing room, white, kitchen, many

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Current drawings in progress.

John Descarfino is a Brooklyn based artist whose painting and drawings are informed by places in ways both literal and metaphorical, while exploring the complexities of perception and image structure. He has exhibited at the McNay Art Museum; Galeria Espacio 48, Spain; Centotto, Brooklyn; Lucas Schoormans Gallery; Blum and Poe; The Berkshire Museum; and The Edward Hopper House among other venues, His paintings are included in several collections including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; JP Morgan Chase; and Capital Group Companies. Descarfino received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and recently, from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation.

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Artists on Coping: Diane Englander

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Gatherings I (2019), 21 x 24 x 2 inches, mixed media

With color, composition, line, texture, Diane Englander is aiming for a place between discord and tranquility, a zone with a charged harmony that energizes as it also provides refuge. Her inspiration to work on a specific piece comes from curiosity about the materials. She’s always thinking (though not necessarily in a conscious way), What would happen if I did this? What would this other thing do? But always bending back to the goal of creating a place of calm energized by tension.

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Artists on Coping: Paul Behnke

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Paul Behnke and Gulley in his studio in Lambertville, NJ. Photo courtesy of Robin Stout.

Paul Behnke’s painting comingles references from pop culture, religion, and imagery associated with mysticism and the occult with an abstracted interplay of pure color and open and closed spaces and forms that become further complicated by realistic collaged references. His works ultimately relate to the intersection of pop culture and spirituality and how sacred beliefs become co-opted in a disconnected, consumptive society. Behnke’s work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally. He has edited Structure and Imagery art blog since 2011 and was the co-director of Stout Projects in Brooklyn. Behnke currently lives and works in Lambertville, NJ.

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Artists on Coping: Leslie Kerby

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Candyland, 2016, Mixed media collage: paper litho transfer, pen and ink, oil, 30 x 22 inches

Leslie Kerby works in a variety of media to create thematically interlinked bodies of work. Motivated by social networks at moments of change, she examines the shipping container and medical industries, cemeteries and financial inequality. Represented in collections at Columbia University and Bradbury Art Museum, Arkansas State University, Kerby has received commissions from Norte Maar, BRIC Arts | Media and Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and was awarded residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (Virginia and France), and the School of Visual Arts. Her work has also appeared at Verge, Spring Break and AQUA Miami, and has been reviewed by Hyperallergic and Two Coats of Paint.

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Artists on Coping: Angelica Bergamini

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Angelica Bergamini in her studio

Angelica Bergamini is an Italian born New York-based artist. Interested in the relationship between the personal and collective unconscious, her creation manifests through painting and paper-cuts assemblages, video, and sculptural installations. She has shown in collective and solo shows in New York (C24 Gallery; Tanja Grunert; Ground Floor Gallery; Ivy Brown; White Box; BRIC Arts Media; Photo New York), Los Angeles (Torrance Art Museum), London (Chelsea Space), Paris (Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre), Stockholm (Färgfabriken), Milan (Pari&Dispari), Hong Kong (Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery), Addis Ababa (Addis Video Art Festival). Her latest video was presented at the 55th Pesaro International Film Festival in Italy, in the selection “Best in Short – Contemporary Italian Animation.”

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Artists on Coping: Lasse Antonsen

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Lasse Antonsen in Assens, Denmark, during a residency in 2018, talking about his early years as an art student at the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen

Lasse Antonsen is an artist, art historian, and curator. He was born in Copenhagen in 1947, and attended the Experimental Art School as a teenager. After living in Spain and Morocco, Antonsen studied art history at Copenhagen University. Moving to the US in 1978, he continued his studies at Tufts University. He received an MA in art history in 1985. Antonsen was a researcher at the ICA in Boston, and for 25 years director of the University Art Gallery at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he, among others, presented the work of Ana Mendieta, Frank Stella, Ilya Kabakov, and Nancy Spero.

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Artists on Coping: Jeanne Brasile

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Jeanne Brasile is an artist, curator, art educator and writer and is also the Director of Seton Hall University’s Walsh Gallery.

Jeanne Brasile is interested in repurposed paper as a medium, especially when its original function is outmoded, and structured to communicate information that is currently transmitted in a digital format. Most recently she has been working with library card catalogues, Braille newspaper pages, vintage dictionaries and newsprint to make wall sculptures on canvas or board. She shreds, cuts, folds, weaves, sews and curls paper – reassembling the pieces to alter the data it once conveyed. Her work has been shown most recently at the Montclair Art Museum, The Pascal Gallery at Ramapo College of New Jersey and the Mattatuck Art Museum.

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Artists on Coping: Pauline Galiana

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Working space view with Tears of Fire, drawing series in progress. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Pauline Galiana’s work, from collages to paintings, ephemeral installations to small sculptures, addresses the broad themes of deconstruction versus reconstruction, mixing intuitive states of mind with free hand, formal associations, and meditative processes with rigorous grids. Galiana was born in Algeria and grew up in France.  She received her MFA at ESAG, Paris. Her work is included in the collections of UBS, New York University, the National Museum of Romanian Literature, where she won the 2018 Bibliophile Object-Book Biennale award, and private collections in New York, Washington, Houston, Paris, Riyadh, London, and Sydney. She lives and works in New York City.

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Artists on Coping: Sonomi Kobayashi

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Beauty of Chaos #1, 2018, Alcohol ink on Synthetic vellum paper cutouts, and collaged, 14 1/4” x 11 1/2”, © Sonomi Kobayashi All rights reserved

Born and raised in Japan, Sonomi Kobayashi, is a New York based artist who is interested in science, physics, stars, nature, and spirituality. Most of her work is symbolic and abstract.  They are based on images that she sees during her meditation.  She also paints symbolic shapes that she finds attractive in nature.

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Artists on Coping: Christina Massey

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Christina Massey, Crafty Collusion 4, Acrylic and enamel paint on canvas, paper, fabric, repurposed aluminum and wire, 82” H x 68” W x 13” D, image courtesy of the Artist

Christina Massey’s work is somewhere between that of painting and sculpture, craft and fine art, process based and conceptual. She has exhibited extensively in the NY Metropolitan region having completed over a dozen solo shows. Her work has awarded her an FST StudioProject Fund Grant, Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant, SIP Fellowship at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Puffin Foundation Grant and Mayer Foundation Grant. Massey’s work is in the collections of the Janent Turner Museum, Art Bank Collection in DC, Credit Suisse and multiple private collections. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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