Big Medium’s East Austin Studio Tour (EAST) is a free, annual, city-wide, self‑guided art event spanning two weekends in November. EAST provides opportunities for the public to meet the artists of Austin in their creative spaces.
The Artists of Christ Church participated in EAST for the second time in 2019. We had 14 Christ Church artists showing their work. Read more about them below.
Matt Evans | Instagram
Matt Evans is an equine veterinarian, oil painter of pictures and occasional stand up comedian. He thinks the world is beautiful and often very funny. Hopefully his paintings convey that. If not, just tell him something passably nice – try “I like the colors” (that’s safe to say, usually – and come on, his colors are nice) and keep it moving.
Shaun Fox | Website
Shaun Fox has studied various art forms since childhood – some formally, some less-so. While he engages in many different mediums, like photography, woodworking, and printmaking, he has worked in digital illustration and lettering for various personal and client projects for the past 13 years. His work tends to be playful and bright, and maintains a similar voice, even across subtle illustration styles.
Jan Florence Garven | Website
Paul Klee helps me understand art a little bit by saying, “Art does not reproduce the visible – rather it makes it visible.” The mixture of various media has enabled me to make visible my understanding of life. I want to capture the ordinary and mundane as part of the larger view I am seeing. I go to my kitchen, garden or local hardware store for most of the elements of my work. These materials evoke an organic corporeality that mimics a familiarity of nature’s terrain. Texture, light and color help me explore the domain of perpetual change within my own body and the material world around me.
Bev Harstad
My paintings and my glass tends to be realistic and positive. I have tried to express a realistic leaning in my painting. If there is a negativity I will reach for the positive. Hopefully it goes from the negative to the positive. In my glass I love to also reach from the realistic to the positive, the relaxing, the peaceful. I’m very pragmatic. In my art I tend to go to the realistic, but I so want to express a positive realism. I want to be whimsical, but struggle. So this is my attempt to enjoy realism, but to reach for the whimsical.
Matthew Henry | Instagram
Along with Truth and Goodness, Beauty is one of the three transcendentals that characterize our Creator and his revelation to us. When I see the beauty of the world around me, I sense how this world still reflects his perfection, and am thankful that He gives us the opportunity to participate in His creativity. I paint to remind myself of the gift of life and of the world he has given.
Billy Hollis | Website
I am surrounded by hidden beauty lurking in the shadows of the ordinary and the mundane. My artwork is an attempt to capture the common things around me that evoke a sense of longing for something deeper. A shadow of a tree suddenly becomes a voice crying out against entropy. I record my children playing with things around the house or with nature’s small treasures: a stick, a leaf, a fallen birds nest. My intention is to awaken the viewer to a sense of mystery within the natural world that points to a world beyond.
Cheryl Kaufman | Instagram
Cheryl Kaufman is an artist and medieval historian who earned a Bachelor’s degree in fine arts and theology and a PhD in medieval history. She has been exploring intellectual and theological ideas through various visual media for over 40 years.Cheryl’s recent art is inspired by material objects and images created in the Middle Ages that reflect and explore invisible, immaterial truths. The detailed renderings she creates are the result of constant interplay between the symbols used in the medieval past and her desire to make these symbols relevant in the historically contingent present. She focuses on drawings in ink or glaze that work together and contribute to the final image. Each mark is an integral part of the whole, just as each particular minute in time is significant and every person makes a significant mark in history that leads to the present that we now inhabit.
Eric Kaufman | Instagram
The primary goal of my art is to create a resonance between the physical and the conceptual that allows the exploration of realities beyond those ordinarily seen. Starting from a belief that all art is found art, I explore the emergence of beauty and creativity from the mundane, and the transformation of objects by destructive natural processes, especially those instances where new order seems to arise out of chaos, as a metaphor for human resilience. I employ changes in context—the physical, spatial, environment in which these objects and images are viewed, the setting they have been taken out of—as a means of understanding how we see ourselves both as individuals and in community.
Amy McCullough Mosley | Website
As a reporter I wrote about political corruption and white collar crime. I paint pet portraits because animals are often nicer than people. In this toxic political climate in which we live, I find painting happy puppy faces to be good therapy.
I’m having a tough time with people in the media and politics who are showing a lack of compassion in the name of Christ. I grew up around people who regularly attended church and believed there was one “right” view on any and every political topic. I believe that having multiple perspectives on a political issue is helpful—and that there are people who sincerely love Jesus who have widely differing views and voting patterns. I am fed up with the hatred, vitriol, and double standards.
Mark Purcell
Mark studied photography throughout school and started painting later in life. He primarily uses a pallet knife with acrylics. This series of tulips was painted while living in the Pacific Northwest.
Cali Riffee
I’m a photographer first and a clay creator second. All clay jewelry is made by hand at home while the photography prints range from anywhere from Austin to London and other various places I’ve happened upon. I love imperfections in my clay work and minimally editing my photography while sipping coffee.
Through my photography, I hope to connect with those around me by showing my memories that I fondly look back on in hopes to get new stories and memories from others. Through my clay jewelry, I celebrate imperfections that still make the jewelry beautiful as a whole.
Suzanna Santostefano | Instagram
I make functional ceramic art and vessels for the home. After studying and spending years in the conceptual art world, I’ve turned to make functional forms. As an interior designer and sculptor, I’ve started making objects inspired and used in the home. My objective is not the perfection of form, but the beautiful simplicity of form with all the imperfection of the process showing.
Caleigh Taylor | Website
Caleigh Taylor is an artist living in Austin, Texas. She loves making art that tells a story in whatever medium she can. In “Here there be Dragons” the lore of the uncharted seas teeming with dragons is parallel to the unknowns of life. While western cultures have always viewed the dragon as a dangerous and greedy monster, eastern cultures tell dragons to be spirits of luck and good fortune. With this in mind and a bit of humor, the artist wishes to change how anxieties of life are viewed – not as the scary unknown, but as the adventures of fortune and change.
EAST 2018: artists who shared their work and photos from the event.