Adam O'Day - http://adamoday.blogspot.com
Alston MA.
January - April 2008

Artist Statement

God gave me no choice.

The artwork that I make today isn’t much different than what it was when I was five. I work scribbly and violently much like a five year-old. I use outlined shapes and then color them in badly. I work on any materials that I find laying around; I draw on my walls. As far as I see it, I was meant to make visual art.

My parents have told me many times how, ever since I was able to walk, I would make little drawings. These little drawings turned into cartoons and a huge interest in comics took over. I remember loving MAD magazine, R. Crumb and Bill Waterson to name a few. My buddies and I would always make silly comic books and sell them for a dollar at the comics store downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan. This hobby turned into an everyday activity for me.

Throughout college, I started to admire more fine art. I looked to Schiele, Basqiat, Bosch, Steadman, Rauschenberg, Klee, Bacon and many of my fellow students and teachers for creative influence. I started to realize that I got more of a response when I just don’t try to be inside any stylistic boundaries. I just sit down on my floor in the middle of the night and start gluing things together. I guess it’s a slap-it-together method. I take the same approach to design much like the working methods of Carson. I enjoy getting criticism of any kind. I want my audience to either really disagree with my methods, or embrace it’s dirty real-ness.

biym_ajo@hotmail.com

Adam Fitch - www.myspace.com/ockham13
Salem MA.
January - April 2008

Adam has been a graphic artist since graduating with a BA in design in 1994 and has been creating digital portraits for about 6 years. Drawing people is something that started out as something he did for fun in his free time, as a chance to hone his illustration skills and to just work on something that was his own.  He has lived in Salem for 8 years and only recently started showcasing his fine art work. Adam works exclusively with digital media because he likes the precise, yet free nature of the software. He also can't afford art supplies. Adam can be reached at afitch@mail.com.

Gabriel Kent - www.gbk3.com
Boston, MA
January - March 2008

Like life, Gabriel believes art should be fun.  The pieces featured are inspired by vintage packs of 'bubble gum cards'.  Bold, colorful and fun - they are sure to add character to any space.  A lifelong artist, Gabriel currently lives in downtown Boston. He can be reached at gbkent@mac.com.

Judi Muscara-Orfanos
Beverly MA.
October - December 2007

Judi Muscara-Orfanos grew up in the deepest valley of Connecticut. She lived at the end of a Cul-De-Sack between a colony of wild raspberries and a hot air balloon launch pad. After receiving her degree in art Judi went off spelunking in the cavernous craters of the moon. Due to the lack of oxygen she decided to return and pursue her love of painting. Judi lives at home with her husband Greg, her son Mars, a smiling turtle and a cat that speaks no English.

Kurt Cole Eidsvig - www.KurtColeEidsvig.com
Boston, MA
October - December 2007

Kurt Cole Eidsvig is an artist and poet who lives and works in Boston.

Eidsvig’s visual art has been included in juried shows like Paint at LynnArts, 3-person exhibitions, as with Image for Sale at the FPAC Gallery in Boston, and benefits like DigArts for Artists for Humanity.

A resident of the Fort Point Arts Community and a participant in the South Boston Arts Association, Kurt is actively involved with local arts organizations. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana as a teaching fellow, and his B.A. in Art and English from UMASS/Boston. He has taught classes in art and writing for institutions like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the University of Montana.

Nicholas Demakes
Salem MA.
October - December 2007

What began with a fragmented drawing has evolved into a collection of limited prints, clocks and original paintings.

After graduating Montserrat College of Art in 1994, Nicholas Demakes was finally free to pursue art within the horror and fantasy genre which was discouraged during his college years. Since then the subject matter of his work has evolved into a fantastical collection of sculptural clocks and original paintings including "Hellequin", based on the Harlequin Folklore of the Demon Huntsman and a twisted rendering of Raphael's "Cupid".

The mediums used by Nicholas in his art are often as unusual as his subject matter. Over the years he has developed a process of blending the more traditional oils and acrylics with such varied materials as radiator patch, fruit juices and coffee grounds.

Bren Bataclan - www.bataclan.com
Cambridge, MA.
October - December 2007

In the summer of 2003, Bren Bataclan began his street art installation, “Smile Boston Project.” The project involves the artist leaving his cartoon inspired paintings for people to take for “free” all over Boston (park benches, trains, schools, malls, etc.). Attached to each painting is a note saying “This painting is yours if you promise to smile at random people more often.” Bren has since gone worldwide with his “Smile Boston Project” and has begun to exhibit his paintings across the country.

Prior to painting full time, Bren taught computer graphics and design at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at the Boston Museum School. He also worked in a design think tank lab in Boston and was involved in the computer animation industry in California.

Previous Shows: September - December 2006 | May - August 2005

Greg Orfanos - www.gregorfanos.com
Beverly MA.
October - December 2007

Greg Orfanos was born in a brick building and remained there for 3 or 5 days. He grew up in a horrible place on the East Coast. It was a miasma of wayward household appliances and tenacious packs of brook people. Greg spent most of the time drawing. So, throughout his adolescence he was given classes at Montserrat College of Art. Greg’s only saving grace was the ability to render the world around him, using mostly pencil stubs. At the ripe old age of 18 Greg escaped. He headed south, where he would attend Ringling School of Art and Design for only one semester. From there it was the untamed wilderness of the North West to the mysterious shores of the Caribbean. Many years later he would finish his undergraduate degree from Montserrat College of Art and then teach at the very same program in which he first started as a child.

Greg has been published in several magazines and has been commissioned to do many large paintings. He now resides in a house on a street with his beautiful wife, best friend and muse Judi, their very vocal son Mars and a menagerie of animals.

Previous Shows: April - June 2007 | January - April 2006

Anna Slade - www.annacslade.com
Boston, MA
October - December 2007

Anna is wicked cool. She lives in Fort Point Channel and makes art. She also illustrates comics. Comics are wicked cool too! Almost as cool as Anna. Almost. :)

Previous Shows: July - Sept 2007

Lauren Minco - www.laurenminco.com
Providence, RI.
July - December 2007

Lauren Minco graduated from the Illustration Department at Rhode Island School of Design. She likes to describe her work as whimsically awkward, or perhaps awkwardly whimsical. Her life right now is split between being a teacher, freelance artist, and gallery artist in the New England area.

Corey Corcoran - www.coreycorcoran.com
Boston MA.
July - September 2007

Corey Corcoran is a recent graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art where he studied painting and film/video. He is also a graduate of Lynn's RAW Arts.

Corey's paintings and drawings have always been linked to his love for stories. He likes listening to stories, he likes telling stories, and he likes discovering when he is suddenly part of one.

Many of his paintings and drawings take place at points of irresolution. The figures feel caught unexpectedly, and the moment is full of potential. Things could go sour or they might end up all right. Corey hopes that the viewer takes in this moment and decides on his/ her own role in the painting. They can decide to be invisible witnesses to the story or participating characters and in this way help to determine the outcome.

Previous Show: September 2005 - April 2006

Rose Sargent - http://www.rosesargent.com
Allston, MA.
July - September 2007

Rose Sargent was born in Boston in 1975. She is a student at MassArt, and founder of FartBoston. It is her hope that she can support herself doing what she loves. That is the plan.

Michael Crockett - www.myspace.com/hazeleyesstudio
Cambridge, MA.
April - June 2007

Michael is a painter of the human experience. An alumnus of the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Michael works as a freelance illustrator and loves to take on projects for bands such as posters and CD layouts.

Michael Hammecker - www.ultraflatcolor.4t.com
Boston, MA.
April - June 2007

Michael's recent paintings and drawings juxtapose ready-made, recycled aspects of visual culture, such as color swatches, postcards, origami paper and maps. His subjects are not only the faces and figures that he paints, but the way that their forms and the colors that represent them, interact with the existing design of the piece that they are painted on. He wants the relationship between the acrylic figures and images and the piece that they are painted upon, to be complex and meaningful, as well as aesthetically pleasing.

Barbra Lena
Stoneham, MA
April - June 2007

Barbra is a self-taught artist that was born in Revere, MA. She enjoys using whimsical color combinations. “Getting colors that should not work well together to blend and pop on the canvas is my goal.” She enjoys working in Acrylic but has recently discovered oil. “I enjoy the texture that oil allows you.” Besides painting these days, she is busy raising her two year old twins.

Jennifer Lewis - www.mio.8k.com
Boston, MA.
January - March 2007

Jennifer Lewis was born in Germany but grew up mostly on the East Coast. She spent the majority of her childhood in Maine where she spent endless days playing with the small animals in the woods and drawing on her walls. She was often reprimanded for the doodles in the corners of papers, walls or desks at school, but allowed to draw little mice and cat families in church. 

Interests and influences: The iconography of the skateboard, tattoo culture, fairytales, children’s literature in relation to every day life, duality, design, fonts, text, the circus, movies, film noir, found objects, rusty bits, pealing paint, comics, dreams and weathered surfaces. 

The majority of Jennifer’s pieces focus strongly on narrative, derived from childhood stories. "A story usually develops in my mind while I am working and reemerges when other people see it… I'm really interested in the process of reading the image, interpretations and symbolism.  My work is a mix across whimsical and playful with darker undertones and a dry sense of humor.”

Dan Nolan - www.DanNolan.com
Cambridge, MA.
January - March 2007

Dan Nolan is a self-taught artist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He began painting ten years ago, after completing his undergraduate studies in Psychology and Philosophy at UMass Amherst.  While he has dabbled in several mediums and styles, he has always returned to oil paints and has been most interested in portraiture for the past 4 or 5 years.  Dan’s time is currently divided between portrait commissions and a completely different endeavor:  the completion of a graphic novel, which he wrote and illustrated, based on the painting, Business Casual Stag Devil Death Boy.  He expects to complete this surrealist satire and to begin the search for a publisher in early April.

Dan’s artistic influences are many and varied both within the visual art world and without.  Music, film, travel, politics, cuisine, and reality tv have influenced his art as much as Tiepolo, Boccioni, Kandinsky, Dali, Rockwell, and Pearlstein. 

Miss Lyn Cardinal
Somerville, MA.
January - March 2007

For many years Miss Lyn Cardinal divided her time between two bodies of work: large, non-traditional pastel paintings featuring mysterious, organic shapes resting in their own private environments and evocative collage and assemblages.

Lyn finds her true story-telling voice through her collage & assemblage work. She is inspired not only by the beauty in a single found-object but by the magic created when it is combined with the grace of the written word.

Beginning in 2006 Lyn reached a new point in her work and combined her pastel shapes with her collages. The 2006 “Sepia Series” that began her new combinations is featured in this January’s Gulu Gulu Show. 

Dan Robertson - www.barkhaus.com/art
Eaton, Ohio
September 2006 - March 2007

Born in Montpelier, Vermont, Dan Robertson is a third generation painter following in the footsteps of his grandfather Lloyd Hulbert and mother Babs Robertson. It is also from them that he has acquired his passion for art, antiques and family wisdom.

He shows nationally in six galleries across Massachusetts, Vermont and South Carolina where his work has been purchased in galleries and commissioned by collectors.

He currently works out of his studio in an old smokehouse in Eaton, Ohio while participating in artist’s groups such as the Cambridge Art Association and the Artists Group of Charlestown.

About the art:

"Read the lives between the lines" is a triptych that was originally part of a 10 person show. Each artist used 1 out of 10 Britannica Books of the Year that where found on the curb in Cambridge, MA. The books ranged from 1938-1948. Each artist was asked to "respond" to their book by creating a piece of art.

Dan's book was for the year 1944 and it became a wonderful conversation piece for himself and his grandfather who served in Navy at that time and his mother who was an infant being raised soley by his grandmother while his father was away at sea.

Greg DuBois

Greg DuBois, a recent transplant to Massachusetts, was born in Tucson, Arizona and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration from the University of Arizona. His work is the visual poetic equivalent of hip-hop music. It tells the story of finding an identity in the urban landscape of Tucson. It is about making sense, and searching for beauty, in the hardships and ugly realities of life, as it reflects his attitudes and experiences formed in Tucson's drug culture.

Greg puts pill-abusing elephants and other zonked out urban characters on three-dimensional surfaces constructed out of found objects and other building materials. He guides the eye through these witty compositions with a lyrical use of color, applied with acrylic and aerosol paints in combination with cardboard and paper collage.

Oneil P. Junior - www.oneiljunior.com
Boston, MA.
September - December 2006

Oneil P. Junior was born in Brazil. He graduated from “Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo”, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in E.S.L. teaching. Oneil currently lives in Boston, where he spends most of his time working, studying and painting.

Recently Oneil was chosen to participate in Boston's 2006 Cow Parade.

Previous Show: September 2005 - January 2006

Hilary Emerson Lay - www.hilaryemersonlay.com
Marblehead, MA.
January - August 2006

Hilary Emerson Lay is a mixed-media artist who has exhibited her work at various cafes and galleries throughout Boston’s North Shore. She earned her B.F.A. in Children’s Writing and Illustration from Emerson College in Boston, MA and minored in illustration by taking classes at the Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Hilary’s whimsical colleges often incorporate newspaper, acrylic, and found objects, and tend to reflect her love of children’s stories.

In addition to making art, Hilary also greatly enjoys yard sales, taking self-portraits, drinking excessive amounts of coffee, Saturday mornings, olives, writing letters, vacuuming, autumn, spontaneous road trips, designing tattoos, perfecting her incredible fake sneezes, glittery accessories, and changing her hair color.

She does not like popcorn, pancakes, telemarketers, or the material that lines the inside of a car’s ceiling.

Nika Nikitina -

Since age 12, Nika has been photographing a wide variety of subject matter including coastal landscapes, portraits, and band photography. Her show at the Gulu features her two newest collections – “Dreams from Italy” and “Visions of Lynn”.

Her work often refers to the intricate elements and detail found in daily life and the landscapes that surround us. Her passions include finding the right shot off the beat and path and personally mounting each of her pieces. Nika's photos often captured in black and white and have rich tonal quality and a high degree of contrast. Color photos have a sepia-tone quality and are rich in warmth and light quality.

Nika was trained by her father Valeriy Mavlo, who is an internationally known artist in his own right.

Emily Driscoll

Lynn native Emily Driscoll graduated from Williams College, in Williamstown, MA, with a majors in Studio Art and American Studies. She is the art teacher at Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Lynn. She is also a member of LynnArts, Inc. (where she rents her art studio) and a volunteer board member of RawArts, Inc.

Her drawings have been shown in Pittsfield, North Adams, Lynn, and Malden, MA, Providence, RI, as well as in Brooklyn and Manhattan, NY.

The work on view at the Gulu-Gulu Café are from a series called "Trunk Drawings," named in part for the elephant-esque masks the figures are wearing. The drawings are about people negotiating relationships with each other as well as with their surrounding environments. They are "mixed media" on paper - composed of pencil, carbon, glue sizing mixed with whiting, cut yellow architect's paper, string, tape and wax.

Jacob Higginbottom - www.jacobhigginbottom.com
Boston MA.
January - April 2006

Jacob Higginbottom is an artist that creates wonderful cityscapes, landscapes and abstracts from mixed wet media; watercolor, gouache, ink and gesso resulting in dramatic and intriguing images. Most of his work is painted on location “plein air” while traveling. Jacob is drawn to the rustic textures and colors of old Europe; Italy France and Greece. His quick strokes and frenetic execution result in a unique and evocative sense of place. Jacob relies on his classic training to set the stage for what becomes playful swatches of color representing decay, aging and renewal. Jacob is passionate about the sensuous nature of a fresh piece of cold pressed paper or the richness of burnt sienna hues and French ultramarine blues, the love of the color and the act of painting shows through in his work.

Jacob is showing work at the Gulu Gulu including the first viewing of 5 pieces of very recent work from a series done in France called Paris under Winter Skies.

Angela Santora
Lynn, MA.
September 2005 - January 2006

Angela Santora is a native of Lynn and current freshman at Massachusetts College of Art.

Throughout high school, Angela was involved with programs at Raw Art Works, including Adventures in Fine Arts and Reel to Real Digital Film School. Angela was also one of the students who recently traveled to Paris with the film school through a grant given by the Cloud Foundation.

Currently studying at Mass Art, Angela plans to major in either glass or metals (or both) and hopes to continue learning and seeing the world.

Angela loves big, inexpensive jewelry, cruising on her bicycle, and Taylor guitars.

Eric Galvin
Lynn, MA.
July - August 2005

This young Lynn art phenomenon is being shown at the Gulu-Gulu Café through the summer. Come on down and check out his amazing graffiti inspired work.

Sean Lobdell
Lynn, MA.
May - July 2005

Sean is a classically trained artist who broke out on his own with a very unique style. He produces intensely rich canvasses that are full of both color and surface tension. Sean’s work has often been described as abstract representationalism. Seeing the work in person is to experience wild textures (as in lots of paint) and bright colors that seriously evoke strong emotion.

Sean studied under Robert Wells and Renee' LeWinter in the 80's and 90's at Boston's Museum School (Museum of Fine arts), Northeastern University, and the Mass College of Art.