"Between the Lines" at the MATV Gallery

Emerging Malden Artists Display Their Work at MATV

Mystic Arts Program encourages emerging artists to explore ways of working and gain recognition.

Art can be an experiment as well as an experience. This is what five Malden artists discovered through participation in the Mystic Arts Program, a series of workshops funded by the Malden Cultural Council and hosted by Outside the Lines Studio. Transformed inkblots, expressive self-portraits, and altered correspondence are some of the inspirations for the work that will be displayed at Malden Access Television in June. Peter Byrne, Caren Perlmutter, John Painter, Veronica Marino Tulk, and James Waters are all emerging artists who reside in Malden. Their work will be on display from May 31st - June 22, 2012 at Malden Access Television. A public reception will be held on Thursday, June 21, from 3:00 - 6:00pm.

The goal of the Mystic Arts Program was to play with different materials and explore new ways of making imagery. Here are some of our experiments:
We did two sets of still lives.  One was put together with objects that we each selected from our studio space.  We experimented in drawing it with toothbrushes dipped in India ink.  Most of the drawings were done with our non-preferred hand. In the other set of still lives, we collaboratively staged a “landscape” of still life materials, each considering it from our own vantage point.  During the course of the afternoon, we switched seats and drew the other artists’ perspectives.
We did a few one-line self portraits with our non-preferred, and alternately, preferred hands, assessed our work, and chose one color that described the aspect of our personality that seemed to emanate from a given image.  We used a combination of these expressive colors to color in our self portraits.

To further experiment with abstraction and mixed media we wrote letters, wrote responses to these letters, drew on and colored them, and deconstructed them. We made collages out of the snippets of words, colors, and images that led us to explore new avenues of meaning-making.

The Mystic Arts Program is the collaborative effort of local community organizations to provide free art workshops and exposure to emerging artists from the Malden, Medford, and Somerville communities at Outside the Lines Studio. The Mystic Arts Program is supported in part by a grant from the Malden Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. For more information about this program, please contact us at outsidethelinesemail@gmail.com.

Many thanks to the Malden Cultural Council and Malden Access Television for making this possible!