SPROUT COWORKING
Partnering with the DEM – Fish and Wildlife, Save the Bay and the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council who will be providing educational activities in the gallery all month long. We are pleased to highlight these 3 local artists who all depict fish and eels.
Mi Ok Song Bruining is Korean. She was born in Seoul, South Korea and adopted to the U.S. when she was five years old after living in an orphanage. She was adopted into a NJ Dutch American family and has lived in NJ, RI, MA, NY and South Korea. She is an award-winning poet with over 30 poems published since 1990. Mi Ok has also conducted over 80 speaking engagements on international adoption issues since 1984.
Mi Ok earned her BA at Vermont College in Poetry Writing, & holds an MSW in Clinical Social Work from Smith College School for Social Work. She currently lives in Providence, RI, practicing clinical social work full time as a LCSW and participates in up to four weekly figure & portrait groups in Tiverton, Providence, & Newport, RI. Her recent medium of choice is black pen, white gel pen, colored pens (both gel & neon) & sharpie markers. She utilizes both gray paper & black paper. Mi Ok’s specializes in human hands, feet & faces as she believes these body parts are the most challenging to draw. She focuses on composition, line, negative space, the edges of the paper, & incorporating imaginary elements for a more dynamic, dramatic drawing. In this case, fish.
Barry Martasian was born in Providence, Rhode Island. After serving four years in the U.S. Navy he attended Rhode Island College where he studied photography while immersing himself in the studio art program. In 2006 he became interested in water issues that face Rhode Islanders. He was a co-founder and president of the now defunct environmental group Friends of the Hunt River Watershed. At the same time he began volunteering for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) collecting data on migrating river herring and eventually American eels.
In 2008 he started a project photographing a single location along the Hunt River in North Kingstown every day for one year to create a visual record of stream flow and the passing of the seasons at the Old Forge Road dam. During this time he noticed many changes in nature, but more importantly he noticed many changes within himself that brought him to a new understanding of nature and spiritualism that can only be found in the natural world. This exhibition is an attempt to bring his many years of art experience and environmental interest together in a unique way so that the viewer may have a better understanding of the world that is endangered by the human foot print.
James Tetreault is a painter who is trying to paint better than he did yesterday. James is inspired by the natural world around him and has an insatiable desire to create. He explores the wildest places of his own backyard and records them in the mediums of acrylics, watercolor, ink, charcoal and graphite. Whether drawing ants or painting fish, James continually strives to capture the spirit of a moment in the lives of his subjects, with the hope that his viewer will also feel that moment, and gain a new found appreciation for the flora and fauna around them.
James is in the process of painting a Rhode Island field guide to freshwater fishing.
The Sprout CoWorking Community Gallery is committed to showing high school and college student work.