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Drawn Together
featuring Ashley Holt + Melissa Earley, Christopher Koelle + Annie Koelle, Darlene Fuhst + JJ Ohlinger
September 3rd - October 2nd, 2009

Ashley Holt

My portrait work is an attempt to purge the pop culture-infiltrated environment of my generation.  Growing up in the 1970's, I don't recall inviting Vic Tayback or the Brady Bunch into my home, much less to brand themselves permanently into my subconscious.  But, being a product of a commercial television culture, I'm forced to wrestle with Fonzie, Sugar Bear and GI Joe if I'm ever going to make sense of this world.  When piecing together our cultural history, the insidious poster kids of Madison Avenue cannot be avoided, much as I'd often like to.  As a lifelong caricaturist, I'm interested in seeing the artform move beyond its traditionally lowbrow status and taking its rightful place beside conventional portraiture.  I've been encouraged by the fine art world's recent embrace of commercial illustration, as well as the caricature-based works of the Pop Surrealist movement, to experiment with new applications of caricature beyond my freelance illustration work.

Ashley Holt has been trying to retire from his commercial illustration career since it began twenty-five years ago.  But, like a mafia hitman, he finds escape from his past life nearly impossible. Offers from the likes of Business Week, No Depression, Texaco and The Progressive keep pulling him back into the freelance realm.  But the good news for Ashley is that print is finally dying and his former employers in the magazine trade all seem to be closing up shop.  Now his work is free to appear where it belongs: nailed to a gallery wall, where it can receive sneers of disapproval from art patrons enjoying free drinks.

Holt was born in Charleston, SC, where everyone and everything is named Ashley.  He graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1996, having studied Illustration and, subsequently, starvation.  His lifelong penchant for ridicule led naturally to caricature, as well as a morbid fascination with celebrity culture.  Ashley’s portraits have appeared internationally as print illustrations, as private commissions, and as filler for UPS shipments.  He lives in Spartanburg on his grandparents’ former farmland with his artist wife, Melissa Earley.  Together they grow steadily insane in the seclusion of their rural home/studio, creating art compulsively and writing about themselves in the third person.

To see more of Ashley's work, please visit www.ashleyholt.com.

Melissa Earley

I enjoy sketching and the process of taking a drawing and transforming it into a painting, a woodcut, and a beaded piece.  Watching the piece evolve as it changes formats is often a learning experience as it forces me to re-examine the image and gradually understand its significance.  Through line and color I discover long-forgotten memories from my childhood or come to recognize aspects of my current psychological state.  In many ways it is similar to determining the meaning of a dream.  What does this line, this image say about me?  About my relationships?  About my present or my future?

It is only after recognizing such information that I can begin to understand myself and my relationships with others.  It is through this emotional and thoughtful process that epiphanies can emerge, and common threads become clear.  The issues and events depicted in my work are fundamentally human: love and hate, joy and sorrow, grief and healing.  Thus it is my hope that the works are not as subjective as they at first seem, but that each viewer will recognize something of themselves and our shared human experiences within them. .

Melissa was born in a small town in Kansas and had lived in six states by the time her family settled in Charleston, South Carolina when she was nine years old.  The experience of moving so frequently, of repeatedly leaving behind family and friends, adjusting to new schools and curriculums was difficult, and it was drawing and music that were powerful and much-needed constants throughout her unstable childhood.  Drawing became my most authentic means of expression, and to this day it is her primary source of therapy and the best way for her to examine the events of her life.

She attended the College of Charleston, where she developed her skills and learned new techniques in drawing and printmaking.  After college she began designing jewelry, working with beads and experimenting with traditional Native American weaving techniques.  She also worked in several fine craft galleries in Savannah and Charleston and learned that the world of art and innovation was much broader than the world of academics.  Soon I was incorporating my own prints and paintings into beaded pieces, merging fine art images with traditional craft skills to create work that satisfies my duel tendencies for both spontaneity and order.  
I currently work and live in Spartanburg with my husband, artist/musician/rabble rouser Ashley Holt.

To see more of Melissa's work, please visit www.melissaearley.com.

Christopher Koelle

Much of my personal work is usually figurative, often using symbolism and text layered with decorative elements. But I am excited by so many different media, stylistic approaches and processes that I tend to make many different kinds of imagery at any given time. The past few years I've found myself working within a range of subject matter, from contemplative spiritual themes to botanicals to bicycles to silly drawings poking fun at the internet and the people who live on it.

Over the years, I’ve realized that taking chances and surprising myself is extremely important to my process of making a picture. If I don't get a little random and messy with process and materials, I usually end up bored with the predictability of the picture.

The Sweet Ride series, a collection of drawings of people with their bicycles based on old photographs, has sparked an ongoing fascination with the history of travel and roads, from the Good Roads Movement of Horatio Earle to the epic, sprawling interstate highways we love and hate today. Sweet Ride is now just the beginning of a progressively larger ongoing body of work about these histories.

Christopher Koelle was born and raised in Chicago suburbia. Making pictures with colored pencils, markers, and crayons from a very early age, he was continually encouraged by his parents to draw.  Now, a husband and father, his life consists mostly of doing illustration for books, personal art (when he can), listening to music, and spending time with his wife Annie (also an artist) and their boy Marshall.  Koelle has received his MA in Studio Art from Bob Jones University and has done illustration for many clients, including PBS, Crossway Books, and Chronicle Books. Koelle created the illustrations for the “Men in Black” segment (written by Colby Buzzell) in the Oscar-nominated documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. His latest project is illustrating a top-secret graphic novel.

To see more of Christopher's work, please visit www.christopherkoelle.com

Annie Koelle

I am compelled to create, I almost can't help myself. . . my mind is constantly arranging,
drawing, painting and designing. Every painting is a discovery and I always feel like a student.  I am honestly inspired by everything in life, though mainly by nature. . .what an amazing
Creator we have.

Annie grew up in Buffalo, NY where her parents dipped her in art lessons every week of her childhood and teenage years. She met her awesome husband, Christopher Koelle, while in college in Greenville and is thrilled everyday to make art alongside him and have fun with their crazy little boy, Marshall.

To see more of Annie’s work, please visit www.anniekoelle.com.

JJ Ohlinger

My work is about maintaining authenticity and accuracy to my subject. Though the image presents a feeling of intimacy with the subject, I try to remain discreet and keep the viewer at a respectful distance; protecting the subject’s full identity. Showing a portion of the subject in a grand way gives the viewer insight into something that would normally be inaccessible – the fascinating details we seldom get close enough to see in person. The only clue of the identity of the individual is revealed through my titles, which are always the name by which I was introduced to the person. My work examines how we as viewers still seek recognition of the subject even when given only a limited view of the person’s appearance and identity.

For the past several years my work has been an examination of the ideas and concepts of what “Identity” means and how I, as a contemporary artist, challenge the conventions of traditional portrait painting.  Historically, we are all familiar with the grand portraits of world
leaders, nobility and the great patrons of society.  But in today’s age, they don’t serve much more of a purpose to us than decoration for currency.  We are so inundated with imagery that it becomes difficult to recount something we may have seen only minutes earlier.  We
encounter so many people on a daily basis, that we rarely notice the individual sitting at the table next to us in a restaurant.  My work is about taking notice and hopefully discovering the unique identity of the individual depicted not only in the image but also the people you will encounter today.

JJ Ohlinger was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1970.  JJ became interested in art at an early age, had a painting featured in the Omaha newspaper when he was just seven years old, and began painting with oils by the time he was twelve.
 
After being offered several art scholarships his family persuaded him to seriously consider art as a career.  He went on to receive a BFA in Scientific Illustration from the University of Georgia. During college JJ worked as an intern at the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois. There he used his illustration skills to visually document archeological findings including the skeletal remains of Midland Woman and the first domesticated dog in North America.
 
After college JJ moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a designer and illustrator for the legendary Grateful Dead. While in San Francisco, JJ also worked on projects with Nobel Laureate Dr. Paul Boyer.JJ’s work is included in several public collections around the country such as the Smithsonian in Washington DC, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Georgia Natural History Museum, Clemson University, the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC, and the Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, TN.  It also hangs on the backs of Deadheads around the world and in private collections across the United States and in Europe, including a painting in Sir Elton John’s personal collection.  
 
JJ was recognized by the Fayetteville Museum of Art with first place in the 35th Annual Discovering Contemporary Art in the Carolinas juried competition, and was awarded best in show at the 2007 Art in the Park juried exhibition in Greenville, SC.  The State Museum of South Carolina recognized JJ’s work by including two of his pieces in the 20th Anniversary Juried Show in 2008 and this past Spring he had his first museum exhibition in Fayetteville.

JJ currently resides in Greenville, SC with his fiancé and fellow artist Darlene Fuhst and their pets Maggie, Kitty and Norm.  JJ and Darlene and founding members of CAFfeine, contemporary art forum.

To see more of JJ's work, please visit www.ohlinger.com

Darlene Fuhst

Most of my work depicts vintage neon signs. Viewed purely as objects, they provide an

interesting variety of shapes, reflective surfaces, rust, peeling paint, glowing light and deep shadows that are both a challenge and a joy to paint. All my life I’ve felt a strange attraction to these signs and the time period in which most of them were created. It was the era of classic roadside “attractions” such as pink dinosaurs, Tee Pee motels, and coffee shops featuring space-age Googie architecture. Though the signs served a functional purpose as eye-catching advertisements for the businesses they adorned (the visual equivalent of screaming, “Look at me!”) they are also works of art in their own right.

I am unsure why I am so fascinated with this era. I am nostalgic for a time period in which I never lived – after all, neon’s “golden years” peaked and were already in decline before I was even born. These signs are remnants of an America that no longer exists, and most likely never did exist – at least not in the way I imagine it. Though many buildings have been

demolished and most old signs end up in junkyards, some still pepper our landscape, fossilized remains of the post-war age.

Darlene Fuhst was born in 1969 and grew up in a small town outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a child she exhibited artistic leanings at an early age, and loved to entertain her relatives and friends by drawing pictures of flowers, butterflies, Bugs Bunny and Fred Flintstone.

In 1992 Darlene graduated from Central Michigan University with a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Interior Design. Though she minored in fine art, she did not receive any formal training in painting until 2001 when she enrolled in an oil painting class and discovered her true passion.

Describing her favorite themes as “contemporary nostalgia,” Darlene’s work most often depicts vintage neon signs in various stages of decay or kitschy toys such as bobble head dolls. Unifying characteristics of her work are a vibrant color palette, a slightly off-kilter perspective, and a photorealistic painting style that makes the images seem to pop off the canvas.

Darlene has participated in numerous shows in Charleston and Greenville, SC and has had work featured in local publications in both cities. In 2008 her work was included in the SC State Museum’s 20th Anniversary Exhibit in Columbia, SC, and her painting “Chief” won Best in Show at the 2008 Art in the Park juried art show. She is one of the founders of CAFfeine: Contemporary Art Forum, an organization dedicated to promoting contemporary art and artists.

Darlene lives and works in Greenville, SC with her fiancé, JJ Ohlinger, who is also an artist.

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