These contemporary-organic, 3 inch deep, mixed media panels feature carved niches and channels that literally create stages for lake stones and glass. The panels are top-coated with light cement and painted, giving the impression of clay, but without the weight.

David Gilbertsen

Education:

Painting has been a constant in David’s studio since college, but fine craft ceramics, very literally a more hands-on experience, was his medium of choice for 25 years. He was a frequent award winner at nationally renowned art festivals such as ones in Winter Park, FL and Ann Arbor, MI. He was invited to exhibit at other prominent shows such as Old Town in Chicago, Milwaukee’s Lakefront Festival of Art, Madison’s Fair on the Square, the Kansas City Plaza art fair, the Festival of Arts in Oklahoma City.

As a ceramicist, David wanted to make bigger pieces that didn’t need to be fired. That ultimately led him to mixed media and eventually to constructing the lightweight panels that he uses now. The mixed media has been way to continue to explore textures and three dimensional forms, something he enjoyed as a ceramicist, and to also express emotions with color, something he found very satisfying as a painter.

Joy and David begin working collaboratively on the mixed media pieces in 2015. They have taken their collective creativity and careful craftsmanship, developed over a lifetime, to develop these one-of-a-kind, mixed media pieces. Their most recent art festivals have taken them to Texas for the Ft. Worth Main Street and the Southlake shows, Chicago’s Old Town and Madison’s Fair on the Square, Atlanta’s Dogwood festival, Colorado shows in Boulder and Denver, Kansas City, Bethesda, MD, Reston, VA, State College, PA, Iowa shows in Des Moines, Marion, and Iowa City. 

Joy Wallace

Education:

Joy spent decades creating and selling her delicately detailed etchings, each individually hand tinted with watercolors. The images were always of quiet, magical places that invited the viewer to take a small step from reality into fantasy. In printmaking, there is the art of the drawn image and also the exacting craft of using metal, tools and chemicals to make the printing plate itself. Joy’s images were drawn with dots on zinc plates, then etched into the plates with acid, and finally inked and printed as an edition. She traveled the US showing at art festivals such as Chicago’s Old Town and 57th Street, Ann Arbor, MI, Kansas City’s Plaza and the Brookside show, Oklahoma City’s Festival of the Arts, Milwaukee’s Lakefront, and the Madison Fair on the Square, winning many awards over her 30 year career as a printmaker.

Still the storyteller, only now in mixed media rather than printmaking, Joy has a great eye (and the patience) for choosing, and then thoughtful staging, the common, natural, and found objects in a way that amplifies the viewer’s fondness for them. She creates places to quietly linger in these Zen-like visual poems.

Using simplicity and balance, these Zen-like compositions re-create peaceful places for the viewer to connect with tactile, organic, found objects…and with themselves. We are inspired by the weathering effect of wind and water upon the shoreline of Lake Michigan, near our Wisconsin studio, and upon the simple, natural materials that can be discovered there. We begin by constructing 3 inch deep panels, and then sandblasting or carving niches, crevices, and channels. Acrylic cement offers a clay-like texture. The physical depth literally sets a stage, paying homage to the objects’ intrinsic, quiet, natural beauty. Sometimes a painting is added as a backdrop to further narrate a sense of place. 

We break/tumble old glass vases to create fragile, gestural, curved glass pieces to juxtapose with water-worn stones and weather bleached branches. Old fish aquariums are among our finds, up-cycled and sandblasted for thick, light-catching glass slabs. In each case, the elements that we have chosen have a past, a story to tell. Up-cycling these is a way to let them re-invent themselves and, in combination with others, tell yet another story, one that honors their past life experiences and celebrates their unique contribution to a sense of art and balance.