Jean Aserkoff
Hard work, energy and passion are represented by the athletes present and future.
Nancer Ballard
U.S. Olympic team Manager John Graham was inspired by the marathon at the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 to organize the Boston Marathon. Like the Olympics, the Boston Marathon is a vessel for thousands of individual, community, national, and international hopes, dreams, and stories. And, like the Olympics, it has been the site of breathtaking wonder and unfathomable sorrow. These works, drawn from my experience as a charity runner for the American Liver Foundation in the 2013 and 2014 Boston Marathons, were borne from my desire to document the complex range of human experience embodied by the athletes, spectators, volunteers, and cities and towns that welcome and support the Boston Marathon every year.
Tsun Ming Chmielinski
The posture and character of these animals project the essence of the Olympic Spirit. The fierce determination of the tiger, and the attitude of readiness of the rooster, prepare them for any challenges they face.
When I observe and capture in my paintings the power of these noble creatures, I am likewise inspired to face with determination life’s’ challenges.
Linda Clave
“Keeping the dream alive” requires determination, inspiration, passion, and perseverance in the arts, in Life and the Olympic Games. My work started with this theme as I painted to music improvised by Eric Zinman on piano and drums. The work then evolved into a dream of Life that needs renewal to keep the flame alive. I have an inner interpretation of this inspired state, which is now alive in paint.
Anita Helen Cohen
Thirty years ago my first painting teacher, my mentor, talked a lot about how much hard work, as well as creativity, goes into making art; how we use our brains our hearts and our hands to create a piece of work; the result is intuition combined with passion, skill and work.
Passion. Courage. Perseverance. Commitment. Words that pertain to doing your best and more. And not giving up.
I am an artist. I often ‘see’ my world in textures, colors, and shapes. Large forms and tiny details. How these all overlap and combine is Nature’s artistry. My passion is to paint that world.
Time and experience teaching me: keep going, don’t give up. The answer is embedded in the process and finally speaks. I love that process.
Phoebe Ann Erb
I persevere, using the remnants of my years as a textile designer in creating new collages. The turtle and the hare seemed a natural subject as I carry on, slow but steady!
Dianne Iyan Freeman
Each line is as a filament that when entwined create a lasting bond of courage and perseverance, the kind of bond that is the essence of the Olympic spirit. The strokes of pen with ink become affirmations of the passion of our existence and our ability to tenaciously adapt no matter the challenge. In particular I am honor bound to celebrate in these works, that which manifests a champion.
The endurance, resiliency, and dedication to excel to ones fullest potential is so inspiring. I call this body of work “Born is a Champion”.
Passions of Possibilities represents the collective effort to inspire ideas, ideals and conviction. In the lines we find bubbles of energy, color and thought — which evoke a sense of passion — a vital element of the “Olympic Spirit.”
Components of Courage speaks to the strength needed on a journey of the champion. The center fills a sense of sinew, muscle, and power to conjoin and create force. Its impact radiates throughout the piece lending to the elements that embrace, “I can.”
Francis Gardino
Note: The image is a sculpture of Hal Connolly, of Brighton, who won a gold medal at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne.
My artist father often took me to visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston during my childhood. There we studied a variety of work from around the world, including many Asian scroll paintings, all of which have had a lasting influence on my lifetime of work. He would also take me for short drives to the beach in Revere and Mystic Lakes where we would draw trees and ocean waves crashing to the shore.
Today, I shoot photos in many of the same and similar places. My panoramas, printed on large canvases, place the viewer in these scenes with multiple focal points. Although I shoot many non-panoramas as well, oftentimes I am no longer satisfied with the single shot. Lately I’ve been shooting a lot of high-resolution 360-degree panorama photos in a variety of Boston area locations and under a variety of conditions including daytime, under snow and at night.
I love to challenge my photography in both ancient and modernistic traditions. It’s no secret that the ancients inspire modernity. The trick is to “make it your own.” Panoramas give me opportunities to photograph the world and create “works of art” in new ways, due to the difficulties associated with finding “sweet spots” and the proper light in wide angles, especially so in 360-degree frames.
All photographic problems are magnified with this approach. One shot is not enough. Just think about the obstacles photographing one shot, and then add to that the idea of shooting 20+ multiple shots in sequence to ultimately accomplish a complete panorama scene with a full 360-degree framing, and then realize that it must be done with the camera “hand held”. My 360-degree panorama photos were the result of such a challenge.
Lynda Goldberg
Inspiration, Passion, Determination, Stick-to-it-ness,…..are some of the attributes of an Olympic Athlete and an artist.
This spring as I was doing the spring cleaning in my garden I cut a huge mass of last summer’s tangled, dried out clematis vines. I was intrigued by the positive and negative spaces created by their interwovenness, their texture, movement,…… These monotypes, one-of-a-kind works on paper and I use an etching press, are the result. It was exciting and challenging to print with these vines. They kept moving in the printing process and breaking. I was constantly trying different approaches/strategies to get the affects I wanted – running the pieces several times through the press, sometimes incorporating different mediums, starting over,…. – all to make the prints successful, to achieve my goal.
Pauline Lim
As the wife of a one-time professional triathlete, I have spent the past couple of decades surrounded by athletes training, sweating, suffering, triumphing. I was raised as a “non-jock”, so it was a big discovery for me. I gamely participated in countless triathlons, as well as running and swim races, and while it was rewarding, I had a very ambivalent time with my own competitive nature. I gravitated toward art as an escape from my competitive, Korean, “Tiger-Mother” upbringing, so to plunge into an arena where you were blatantly judged and ranked in a hierarchy for all the world to see, was dreadful (unless I did well, of course!). I also have seen firsthand how many successful athletes are driven by dark forces– not usually because they are happy-go-lucky, but more often than not to compensate for perceived inadequacies or to overcome psychological demons. Some people only achieve neurochemical balance by putting themselves through grueling physical experiences– I’m one of them, and as my body has grown more fragile with age, I’ve had to learn other ways to find that inner peace.
In the midst of all that turmoil, there is the sweet spot of finding what is referred to as “the zone”, in which all distractions fall away and you find your target. It is pure joy.
Nhung Mackey
The brilliant colorful autumn leaves signifying the change of season, the street lights glowing on a snowy street, the children laughing in the field of flowers…beauties are all around us if we only notice.
I’m taking my love of nature and people, trying to bring them to life on canvas, papers, wood with Watercolor, Oil, Acrylics, Enamel, Ink.
I studied at several art schools including the Prestige College of Arts in Vietnam.
I have also received many awards for my works there with the support and encouragement of many friends and coworkers.
No matter where I go, what I do, painting always is my most interesting work to enjoy. It helps me to see life better, even overcome some difficult periods in my life.
Like Zen practicing, when I’m painting, I almost forget everything around me including sorrow, happiness, worry… or even myself.
David Matcham
In times of duress, we hold on. Sometimes we are surprised by what carries us.
Eric Mauro
[my] Artworks are about the struggle to be manipulate matter in order to sacrifice and win. For what? To be leader and king
Monica McAlpine
These three “Olympic” abstracts reflect a romance with line that I often carry over from drawing into painting. Straight and curved; vertical, horizontal, and diagonal; angled and intertwined: how many things can lines say? To support the assertiveness and optimism of my lines in these works, I have chosen a palette in which black replaces blue in the making of greens and greys, and yellow is used generously.
Ideally, these three works would be viewed as essentially one work–a trilogy–but they can also be appreciated as individual works or in various pairings.
Ruth Rieffanaugh
Olympic spirit is about determination and perseverance. To achieve results requires both mental and physical well-being. While practice and training are often the first things we consider when thinking of Olympians, diet and food also had a meaningful place. The diet of early athletes differed radically from today, but the need for protein to build muscle and carbohydrate for energy remains the same as the first recorded Olympics in 776 BC. The diet of most Greeks and Romans was basically vegetarian and consisted of cereals, fruit, vegetables and legumes, and wine diluted with water. It is said to have shifted to a heavy meat-based diet after an Olympian won all of his races while on a meat-based diet. There is also evidence that during the earliest Olympics, that garlic was fed to the athletes before they competed, conceivably functioning as one of the first of the so-called “performance enhancing” agents used in competitive athletics. The body of work depicts food of past and present, be it a legumes and beans, a veggie burger or meat burger, the healthy fat of an avocado, garlic, or a bowl full of fruits and vegetables.
Katha Seidman
In each of my pieces I unzip the surface, revealing an unexpectedly open and calm interior space, achieving comfort by travelling beyond the wall of daily living.
Diane Sheridan
“Summer Kids” is a loosely based interpretation of Olympic Spirit. Yet, with my young niece and nephew leaping into summer with such joy and my own love of the season, I imagine the happiness we feel under the spell of the sun and an ocean breeze can be compared to how an Olympian must feel after achieving an accomplishment toward mastering a talent.
Nohelia Vargas
Olympic games are times of glomp,
family time,
familiar memory,
gymnastic girls with gracious costumes
all color patterns,
already for victory
and we dress in fresh clothing,
with all content
we ran to granny’s all full of joy
to rest the Sunday to watch the Olympics..
Christine Winship
Equestrian competition has been in the Olympic Games since 1912. My personal favorite is the Dressage as I too, ride horses and use many of the same movements in my practice. Dressage was formulated on war horses in battle; such moves as a “flying change”, where the horse changes leads every stride at the canter and the “piaffe” a calm, composed elevated trot are perfect examples of what a horse was expected to do on the battlefield.
Now, in competition, its fundamental purpose is to develop, through standardized progressive training methods, a horse’s natural athletic ability and willingness to perform. At the peak of a dressage horse’s gymnastic development, the horse will respond smoothly to a skilled rider’s minimal aids. The rider will be
relaxed and appear effort-free while the horse willingly performs the requested movement. Dressage is occasionally referred to as “Horse Ballet.
Being around horses, I can only imagine what level of dedication and passion it takes to perform Dressage on an Olympic Game level.