August 2014: Mary Moore & William Hernandez

William Hernandez, a Pervuian painter who trained at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Arte, moved to Portland in 2009. His paintings are vibrant and colorful. To quote William, “Art is a journey full of creative and expressive possibilities with one single objective: to be sincere in all that one does. My life is full of color, and I feel the necessity to express that chromatic gamut on the canvas, reinventing and designing my hopes and desires through the figures that I create. My artwork is heavily influenced by urban life; I mix playful, dreamlike figures with vibrant cityscapes. The process involves different graphic techniques and a distinctive line in every figure and urban landscape.” William’s art portrays delicacy and serenity in figurative pieces, soul and color in abstracts. This blending of styles encompasses the feeling of the dreamlike, representational world of my works. His characters are drawn from collections in his imaginary world, and they emerged between a playful atmosphere and a sense sometimes festive, sometimes melancholic and mostly unannounced.

Mary Moore- is an artist working with Stoneware. Each piece is made from a single sheet of clay, then individually formed and fired. The faces and hands are individually sculpted and stained with acrylic paints. The garments are painted with underglazes, giving each a soft matte surface into which patterns are carved using a small needle-like tool. This technique is known as Sgraffito. The combination of these methods serve to compliment and contrast each other in the final form. The artist takes inspiration for her figures from her spiritual upbringing and the religious idols of the Southwest. Her goal for each one is to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary, guided by the assumption that all humans are special and constantly moving towards an augmented awareness of themselves.