Ria Sharon

Carmen Reyes is an artist and makeup professional whose focus over ten years practicing has evolved from beauty and fashion makeup to prosthetics and practical effects.

She holds an art degree in Production Design and has taken a Film and Television Makeup certificate program at Cinema Makeup School in Los Angeles, California. Since then she has worked on several major theatre productions in Manila, television commercials, print ads, and last year worked as Key Makeup and Prosthetics Artist on her first full length feature film entitled HENERAL LUNA.

Currently, she provides the prosthetics and practical effects for the children’s television show, Lola Basyang, which airs weekly in Manila and heads the Character Makeup Course at Makeup Design Academy.

1. What’s your medium of choice and what do you love about it?
Sculpting is something I am constantly learning and loving. The best for that is plastilina, an oil based clay which I have gotten used to creating textures with. The clay was firm enough, but it softens up when heated with your fingers or if need be with a lamp. I also learned also how to thin it out to liquid so it’s become really useful. I love seeing what can be created with it.

I also create different textures or build up with liquid latex, a milk-like liquid that dries rubbery. Combined with cotton, paper or foam products, it reminds me of papier mache, but its flexible, so it will stretch and move with the body when used for a prosthetic appliance.

When coloring, I use alcohol activated paints for detailing: veins, scars, marks, freckles. I love it because it sits on top of any surface, unlike oil or water based paints. It brushes on as soft as watercolour, but can be adjusted. I also absolutely love its staying power on skin especially against sweat. It makes my job a lot easier during long, humid shoot days.

2. What are you working on right now? What’s on your camera/desk/easel or in your studio?
I’m at different stages of shooting three different movies right now: first one is a gritty horror story that revolves around a girl in high school that can communicate with spirits. My job is to recreate the dead spirits, and the brutally killed victims. It is up for Manila’s film festival at the end of the year, which is a pretty big deal for me.

Another is a spoof of the classic horror film, The Exorcist. Research for that project was kind of challenging because when I watched the director’s cut re-release in 2000, I was so creeped out that I couldn’t sleep by myself for months. It became fun to work on though because its a silly comedy and working on set was fun.

And another is about a socially awkward boy who relates most with dogs, especially with an abused pet Doberman, but gets bitten early on in the story. That’s where its my job to create a realistic bite wound, and how it should look as the timeline in the story progresses.

I am also part of a children’s fantasy series that airs on weekends. I love children’s stories and children’s shows in general so I love reading a new script each week and seeing how to translate it into something visual and practical. It’s fun because it tests my creativity but I’m given a lot of freedom with it at the same time.

My studio is a mess of things! There are severed heads and other body parts, face and body forms that I use to sculpt on. I store some raw materials too, just in case I all of a sudden get a project with a tight schedule, I can rummage through it and see what we can work with for the requirement.

3. What practices/activities are most valuable to your creative process?
I love learning from different artists and I take advantage of learning online. I do as much of that as I can, but something I learned to schedule in as well is some purposeful rest and exercise. Since my creative output is also my job, it can be stifling when I’m overworked and unrested.

4. What’s one thing you want to share with others about your art and/or process?
On a production set, everyone’s job takes part in telling a story. There are times when my output is called to shout out or capture the audience, like when the story requires the audience to get spooked by a certain image. There are also times when your work supports and blends in the background. Like a wound that happened a week into the story and how that would look like days and months after that, or how a realistic looking beard or moustache can create a character.

I love how my art can express itself that way: keeping the audience in that present time and place, with that specific emotion. In that way, when the work is unnoticed or didn’t distract the audience then I’ve succeeded.

5. What advice would you give to your young artist self?
I actually got this advice during a time I was overwhelmed with the requirements at work, faced with the responsibilities of adulthood for the first time. I didn’t feel creative or effective at all with the pressures, and I would focus on my mistakes a lot. I brushed myself off and got to work the day after someone simply said, “It gets better.” And it did.

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Catherine Just is an award winning photographer, artist and mentor. Her work has been published on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, and inside Photo District News Magazine, Oprah.com, Annapurna Living and other publications online and off. Her photographic career started in 1987 after she checked herself into drug treatment from a crystal meth addiction. In early sobriety she found that she could express visually what was so uncomfortable for her to express verbally. She studied Conceptual Photography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and began an exploration of self-portraiture and alternative processes. Catherine believes that photography can be used to gather up evidence of what’s living in between the words. She uses photography as a tool for transformation. She is the co-founder of the here co. with Henry Lohmeyer, a space that offers photography courses, workshops and photo sessions with an emphasis on time spent together, supporting each other’s unique creative expression. Catherine is the proud mama of her 6 year old son Max, who happens to have Down syndrome. She’s in the process of creating the Max Harrison Foundation, a hub to teach children with DS how to express themselves through photography.

Follow Catherine on Instagram and find out more about her upcoming class, RISE.

1. What’s your medium of choice and what do you love about it?
My medium of choice is photography. Photography, for me, is a tool for transformation. When I was 18 years old, photography was a doorway to heal after I got sober from an addiction to crystal meth. It was and continues to be a medium that helps me process through difficult emotions and experiences. It’s also helped me create evidence by marking moments in my life that really matter. It helps me shift my attention from my mind down into my heart.

I love Polaroid and the mystery that it provides as well as the immediacy. I love that it sees things differently than I do, so I never really know what to expect. I love that I can’t really control every aspect of it. I love using long exposures to investigate a world I sense, but can’t really hold onto. It’s a world that I cannot see with my eyes or capture at a 60th of a second. It’s a world that’s in between the words. I love using the camera to see the unseen places: the places within a relationship that are felt but not spoken, the places within my heart that are hidden and broken, the places where fear lives, the unspoken dreams and wishes. I love creating a visual language around subject matter that has been difficult for me to express verbally.

2. What are you working on right now? What’s on your camera/desk/easel or in your studio?
The Big news right now is that I’ve teamed up with Henry Lohmeyer to create the here co. We’re building the curriculum for several online photography courses, live photography workshops (Los Angeles and NYC are already on the schedule ) and teaming up during photo sessions for clients in the music, entertainment and entrepreneurial industries.

I’m also working on a fine art project called “Chasing the Fog::Learning how to Breathe” which has been a 2 year exploration of identity through self-portraiture, polaroids, long exposure, metaphor and symbology.

3. What practices/activities are most valuable to your creative process?
I love working with a mentor that I check in with monthly. It helps me do the work when my life can feel consuming. I also have a group of photographer friends I meet with monthly to go over our personal projects with and give really constructive feedback. Those are the external practices. I also give myself a lot of room to explore even when I think I know what I want an image to look like ahead of time. Once I start creating the images, I give up a lot of control and listen, watch, lean in and have a conversation with the work as I’m making it. I never really believe that a photo is “bad” because it gives me so much information about what needs to happen in the next photo. It’s all information. I have two very distinct ways of working…One is to journal in a very specific way with a mind map process at the end of the journaling session. I use that to then move into my art making process. The other is to throw all of that out the window and just start making work. Both are so valuable to me and offer personal freedom that I need in order to feel safe in the creative process. Having too rigid of a system or a personal dogma of how things need to go….would probably kill the flow for me.

4. What’s one thing you want to share with others about your art and/or process?
Photography has truly helped me to live. It’s helped me explore and express myself through the darkest of times and has helped me document incredibly meaningful moments I never thought I’d experience in my lifetime. When I’m devoted to myself and to my work a shift occurs that I could have never expected. A layer of pain is transformed or I become more deeply accepting of it and my work actually has something to say to me if I listen closely and try not to orchestrate an outcome.

5. What advice would you give to your young artist self?
I read this question several times and thought about where I was at in my life when I started out as an artist. I was newly sober and so insecure that I couldn’t look anyone in the eyes. I was smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day just to put something in between my very sensitive, raw crawling out of my own skin self and the world around me. Making my work was a bridge from my intense desire to “leave” to my fierce devotion to “stay.” I really don’t have any advice to give my younger self! I think it was a brave move to stand up for myself and for another shot at living. I’m grateful I used the art process to get acquainted with myself and the world around me.

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I love the creative process found everywhere in life. I am a prosperous artist. I am owner of DeMarco Studios where I have been featured in multiple exhibits across New York City, including East End Arts, Garrison Art Center, and Flinn Gallery in Greenwich. I love sharing my expertise, educating students from high school, to college level art courses, online workshops and beyond.

I deeply enjoy collaborating with public and private designers and stagers as a fine artist creating lush abstracts for their interiors. The natural born teacher in me loves educating through my own online studio art courses such as “Meditation Painting.” As an educator and business owner I am INSPIRED. I will create innovative courses and workshops that combine the healing ability of art creation with demonstrations of entrepreneurial skills.

1. What’s your medium of choice and what do you love about it?
I love acrylic paint. I love it because it dries fast. This works for me because inspiration and ideas come fast and are fickle, escaping me if I can’t capture them. The layering of strokes is like a (often heated) conversation for me. If I am interrupted by waiting time for the paint to dry then the flow is broken. When I am connected to inspiration there is a momentum that occurs in my action of painting. When I am in it, that miraculous outer body experience happens where I do not know what time it is or how long I have been painting. I live for that high.

2. What are you working on right now? What’s on your camera/desk/easel or in your studio?
I am working on new beginnings. Yes, you can apply the same creative state of productivity to digital work- to any work. I am remaking my website to feeeel more like who I am. I’ve changed dramatically in the past year and it’s a matter of style, perspective and goals. Visual aids online are extremely powerful and if they accurately can reflect you than that is the way it should be for me.

3. What practices/activities are most valuable to your creative process?
SOLITUDE and MUSIC I could say the music I play has an effect on how I perform but the truth is more the opposite. I choose the music based on the mood and energy I am already feeling about what needs to be created.

4. What’s one thing you want to share with others about your art and/or process?
It’s all on you. I used to love to share what each abstract work meant to me but I have moved past that point. I am happy to let the work go more in the sense and be used to represent and reflect whatever life experiences the view wants to attach to them. It becomes more of a trust between me and the audience, it becomes a sign of confidence that others’ perception have no relevance on who I am or how I should feel. It’s really symbolic for my new stage of life too.

5. What advice would you give to your young artist self?
Do not go to art school. My kids are 12 and 16 and I won’t pay for them to go for art school either. Gasping? Good. Let me explain how it is that I can preach such hypocritical blasphemy on the cult. Art school did not prepare me to support myself. The art world is a horrendous non idealic place of business that is more about marketing and branding than talent. If my children are creative and want to pursue the arts which means they and you are entrepreneurs. Artists are in business for themselves. My kids can major in business or entrepreneurship and learn the skills to be able to get their work in the world and support themselves. Art classes and mentorships can be found across the world by the best and it does not have to be at a university level. If you wanted the world’s best chocolate cake, would you deny yourself or it’s value because the baker did not go to culinary school rather spend his life perfecting his passion? If you are a writer, then write. If you are a painter, paint. This is what makes you great.

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Robin Mead is an independent, self -representing artist whose works include digital and altered art, acrylic and mixed media paintings and watercolor landscapes and gardens. She also creates wonderful vibrant colored crochet afghans and handmade art journals that infuse her love of color into joyful creations that can be used in the home or given as gifts.

Robin combines her background in the Social Work profession with her love of expressing joy by creating colorful depictions of nature, preferably the ocean, landscapes, flowers and birds. She relies on her intuitive skills and insight to capture the ‘joy’ that she feels, and translate it onto paper, canvas and the digital screen. After attending art school on Long Island, New York in 2003, she began sharing her work in local shows and on the internet by way of websites, blogs and online shops. Robins work can be found in homes around the world as well as album covers, books, and in tutorials for creating art.

Robin also loves to spend time at the ocean or in nature looking for inspiration. She always has a bag of art supplies ready in hand and is usually creating something wherever she goes. Robin lives with her husband of 25 years and spends hours with him and her 2 daughters and her friends, sipping wine and laughing for hours.

1. What’s your medium of choice and what do you love about it?
So my medium of choice is definitely watercolor. I don’t really use it in the traditional sense, but more of a mixed media style. Sometimes I use it very diluted and other times with a very dense hand. I love the versatility of watercolor and I also combine it with many other suppliies, for example liquid acrylic, ink, cut paper, using it in a spray bottle..dripping it or just splashing it on. My go-to watercolor is Winsor and Newton… but I just recieved Dr Ph Martens liquid concentrated watercolors… and they are just amazing. My new Favs for sure.

2. What are you working on right now? What’s on your camera/desk/easel or in your studio?
Today I was working on some collage pieces… I’m not really a collage artist but try to be sometimes… lolol. I use collage technique to ponder different things I would like to try.

3. What practices/activities are most valuable to your creative process?
The practice most important to me is to create everyday… no matter what. There is no other practice more important than that… there is no magic or secret on how to get better at art… or how to improve your skill… there is no class or instructor that is better than experimenting, exploring and trying out new ideas, techniques or supplies.

4. What’s one thing you want to share with others about your art and/or process?
The one thing I’d like to share about my art or process is to do what you love. I love color and line and that is what I use to create. There are many ways to integrate those things and that is how I develop new creations… there are of course other things I love about art… but most important is to do what you love… the rest will follow.

5. What advice would you give to your young artist self?
I so wish I did not have stipulations in my mind when I was young… about what art was. I thought you had to be able to create or copy a face from a person, like a sketch… that turned out like a masterpiece. I thought you had to already be great at art to be an artist. Those beliefs are what I would contradict to my younger artist self..and any other as well.

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