ARTISTS OF THE MONTH FOR – March 2023
Joan Belmar, Chile
“Chords”, an interview with Joan Belmar
Joan Belmar was born in Santiago, Chile in 1970. He left Chile for Spain at the age of 24. He began painting professionally in Spain, using the Catalan name Joan for his first name John. He came to Washington, D.C. four years later in 1999, was granted permanent residency in the U.S. based on extraordinary artistic merit in 2003, and became a citizen in 2010. Joan Belmar is well known for his unique technique of 3-D paint. He combined his former painting and collage techniques with both painted and untreated Mylar/paper strips in circles and curvilinear shapes. This technique produces variations in transparency, as light and the viewer move in relation to the work. The sheer quality of these translucent materials captures and reflects light and encourages an up-close viewing of the work to reveal the different layers within.
He was a Mayor’s Art Award Finalist in 2007 as an outstanding emerging artist in Washington, DC. The DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities recognized him with an Artist Fellowship Program grant in 2009, and in 2011 he was awarded an Individual Artist Grant by the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, MD. He is a two-time recipient of the Maryland Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in Visual Arts: Painting, in 2010 and 2013. Belmar’s work is part of many private and public collections, including the University of Maine Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection. In 2016 he won first place, from among 2240 received artworks, for best Original Work in the prestigious Osten Biennial of Drawing in Macedonia, and in 2020 he was granted with the CSA grant by the Barret Art Center, Poughkeepsie, New York.
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Hassan Meer, Oman
Hassan Meer is an established Omani and international Artist, Designer, Art Curator and Gallerist, developing an original technique, with a unique particularity. He received acknowledgements through various art publications and specialized magazines reviewed by famous art critics and his artworks have been exhibited in may prestigious museums and foundations, contemporary and historical venues. In addition of working as an artist and a designer, he also conducted Art courses in Sultan Qaboos University and The Fine Art society.
Hassan Meer was born in Muscat the capital city of the Sultanate of Oman, where he continues to live and work. He received his Masters degree in Art with Media Art specialization in 1999 from Savannah College of art and design, Georgia, USA. During his study, he started using video and installation art as a new form to express his ideas, which have been inspired by personal experience and childhood memories with an impressionable sense of spirituality. In the year 2000 he organized the Circle Show, which, is taking the lead in encouraging this new form of art in Oman and the region. Hassan is very much inspired by the changes in culture identity and he studies individual identity, community correlates in relation to a collective experience and a globalized age through his installation works and artworks. His work is also a contemplation and search into the spiritual domain and the magic rituals bequeathed to us from ancient times which, has established itself profoundly in our society. It narrates his pondering and questioning of death, the mortality of man and examines others local prevalent rituals.
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Yuta Nishiura, Japan
Vgo Aguirre, Venezuela
Yuta Nishiura, Japan
Yuta Nishiura about himself:
A black dot drawn on a white sheet of paper, for instance, creates the white world around it. The empty white space is filled with the freedom, eternity and stories. It is my aim to create this white world called landscape by making a black dot called sculpture.
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Video / Film
Yorick Niess, Germany, screenwriter and film producer
https://www.instagram.com/der_weltensegler/?hl=de
New life Earth is the plane
-> B.A., Politics and Administration
Yorick Niess, Germany, screenwriter and film producer
Film-TV Producer Yorick Niess. Based in Freiburg i. Br. Germany. As a media producer Yorick started to produce movies at the age of 12. Since 1994 he professionally worked as a journalist, TV-producer and Editor on around 10.000 broadcast Features. In 2002 he became a Training Supervisor IHK for the profession digital media designer. He has worked on several international documentaries about the Middle East, Africa and Tibet. As a Master of International Negotiation and Policy-Making INP, Geneva 2010, he seeks to improve biodiversity and social matters on a daily basis.
-> Master INP, International Negotiation and Policy-making