Sensei Toru Shimoji is a five time US and repeated international champion in Traditional Karate, trained by esteemed Hidetaka Nishiyama. Shaped by his Okinawan youth and the discipline of Japanese Calligraphy, Toru explores the expressive potentials of wood and iron.

"My works are abstract, interpretative and figurative, adhering to compositional form I learned in Japanese Calligraphy. My aim is to inspire an interaction between the sculpture and the viewer, who can freely interpret and explore its evocations."

Ever since I can remember, I loved art. I used to make up imaginative stories about the lives of the farmers portrayed in a small faded print my mother had hung in our house. It was Millet's The Gleaners. I remembered being captivated by this masterpiece, used to lie on the floor and stare at it for hours. Connection wasn't too hard since my mother's family were all farmers from Miyako Island, one of many in the Okinawan chain.

I was introduced to art early through the Japanese education system (K to 4). Even then, I gravitated towards sculpture, predictably making clay monsters and wooden robots. By the time our family immigrated to the U.S. in 1970, I was familiar with various mediums and their basic techniques.

In 1996, I settled in Atlanta, GA and opened a karate school. As a hobby, I made a few wooden sculptures, but in the summer of 2002 something finally exploded within me. It felt like a cosmic order-create or die! So I took a deep breath and jumped. I enrolled in the Welding Technology Program at Gwinnett Technical College and began making metal sculptures.

Seeds of inspirations are constantly germinating in my psyche. As one sprouts I like to sculpt it in my mind before making a few preliminary sketches or clay models. Sometime I skip this process altogether. Visualization is dynamic and often vague, leaving me in a mixed state of excitement and anxiety. The piece will finally materialize in the shop, after struggling with multitudes of adjustments in texture, composition and angles. It usually flows well, but the real challenge is trying to manage all the seeds at different stages, not to mention the limitation of space-time continuum.

I like my work to be abstract, interpretive and figurative, adhering to compositional form I learned in Japanese calligraphy, and influenced by past masters like Musashi (17th century Japanese swordsman/artist), Michelangelo, and Julio Gonzalez. A moment's inspiration might come from a variation in my student's karate movement or in my own examination of intricate detail in the skeletal remains of a coyote's skull, but my aim is to inspire an interaction between the sculpture and viewer, who can freely interpret and explore its evocations.

I believe in the muses. Mine are never subtle, they perpetually scream in my head.. I can always count on troubling fellowship from at least three, rarely fewer. My only solitude is in training and teaching karate, which keeps me in sanity.

As a sculptor, he is self-taught, concentrating mostly on wood and metal. He is most influenced by three masters, Michelangelo, Julio Gonzalez, and Miyamoto Musashi. He found his unique artistic "voice" when he finally figured out the link between self-expression and spatial composition.

Exhibitor's Website

Vintage Images from 1880 to 1925
by Cicero C. Simmons
March 1, 2011 - April 30, 2011

About these prints: These prints are a unique, high-quality enlargement made from the original glass plate negatives which have been cleaned and restored to their original condition. The negative produces an image with extraordinary sharpness, detail, and beauty. Glass plate negatives are very rare. Few have survived. Most are lost to the ravages of time. Each print is a continuous tone image on archive art paper, designed to provide a lifetime of enjoyment. Each print is signed by the restorer, Richard Stone, and the date of the picture, i.e., Circa 1885, as well as the title. Both are handwritten in pencil.

Vintage Images prints can be purchased from
retrocollection.stores.yahoo.net/ . 11x14 prints are $35 plus shipping and 13X19 prints are $45 plus shipping You can contact Retro Collection at 770-435-4351 or at retrocollection@bellsouth.net

I've been an artist as long as I can remember. It probably started at the young age of five, when I decided to paint my dad's car with the exterior
house paint. Needless to say, that didn't go over real well and I experienced my first art critic.

My artistic journey has been painting with acrylics, oil, pastels - whether portraits of people, pets, or landscapes, and then found I could mix mediums with surprising results.

Piano art: These unique works of art began with my own childhood piano which was beyond reasonable repair but held such sentimental value for the entire family that it broke my heart to simply toss it out like trash. I took all the keys and the hammers (little oval felt pieces that hit the strings) and made several unique pieces of art for family members. To personalize each piece, I added their favorite sheet music, special embellishments, names from Scrabble tiles, and other sentimental objects to make the family piano their own lasting piece of art.

Box art: these small sturdy brick size boxes were perfect to create a unique canvas and "shadow box" for art. Glued together, applied paper mache' and gesso for a painting surface, turning one the opposite way for special objects and box art was born. Again, recycled art.

I love creating art from precious objects buried in drawers or boxes in the attic, but which need to be seen and enjoyed - through recycled-to-art.

Marvelousjunque.com
Go GREEN! Buy recycled-to-art!

Handmade Books
by Ruth Kramedjian
July 1, 2011 - August 31, 2011

In the current work, she has moved to a more intimate output with the art of the handmade book. She incorporates her own art forms and collage in the books that she makes. She is exploring not only book forms, but also the art of handmade paper.

In her artist’s statement, Ruth says:

Rhythmic cycles chart the course of our days. Both mundane and magnificent, they present themselves in the powerful circle of community life, the changing of the seasons, the movement from dawn to dusk and back again to light. Ethereal, concrete, and universal, they frame our lives and they give direction to my spiritual quest to find meaning in my world through art making. The grid and its counterpart, the circle, often serve as a frame for these cycles, and my emotional response to the inherent rhythms finds expression in my mark making. The short view, the long view, the universal view – from these, I examine my world.

Ruth can be contacted at 404.210.9790 or rrpk2@yahoo.com.