PAN-O-PLY STORY & ART MICHIANA

Midwest museum of american art

Leeper Park Art Fair

Heartland artists gallery

Featured artist gallery

Dorothy Graden 2019

Adventure and exploration are as important to Dorothy Graden’s art as brush, pigment, and paper. Her art is inspired by the petroglyphs she finds after scrambling over boulders at the end of a dusty trail. You will also find sea life she observes when scuba diving flowing in borders and backgrounds.

Dorothy Graden’s art canvases were found and repurposed growing up in Garry, Indiana. She walked the allies at ten years old looking for wood. She painted the wood black adding bright color on top. What she created was abstract. “I would use a lot of color and wild shapes,” says Graden. She loved color as a young woman making her art pop.

Once in a Blue Moon Tutu Emmerich Fall 2021

The gallery is like an antique shop, full of things.  She points at two paintings on the opposite wall. One depicts a round shape with a misty cone beneath – a spaceship lifting off. There is a small red body, prone, hanging in space beneath.  “Look at the progress!” She points at another. “A self-portrait!” This one depicts a head. Even with white eyes, the progress is unmistakable. Gracie suffers from mental illness. Tutu says, “I call her amazing Gracie. She was re-labeled and re-medicated.” What she means is: What does that tell you? Any triumph Tutu feels is tempered with relief that Gracie is better.

In her inimitable way, she asserts, “A self-portrait is a candle of hope. It conveys the inner message to the outside world. It tells YOU, in stages.” Her brown eyes hold mine steady.  In one long look she is both telling me and asking if I get it. Is she reading me in some psychic way?  I wonder just how intimately do I really want to be known? But it’s not a penetrating look; there are no demands here. On the contrary, she radiates the opposite of demands. She offers a safe place for artists, anybody, to express themselves through art: paint, fabric, wood, glass, paper and more.

Kei Constantinov Fall 2023

Kei Constantinov’s art transports the viewer back in time offering a glimpse of times past with updated style and modern twists. Her style is neo medieval, evoking the style of art that adorned Europe in transition.              

“I would say that people are more familiar with the Renaissance,” Constantinov says, “but it’s neo medieval which is a particular penchant of mine.”

This body of work has been in process since 2013, after Constantinov moved into her childhood home on Trail Creek in Michigan City after moving back to the area from Ann Arbor, Michigan.