About the Artist: As a local artist I love to draw inspiration from nature and landscapes around me. I find beauty in bright colors and unique color combinations. When I create work I hope the viewer first notices my color palette and then images secondary. I enjoy finding balance using different colors and patterns to keep the viewers eyes flowing throughout my paintings. 

About the Artist: Ray Zovar has always been drawn to three-dimensional art. His creative journey began in grade school with sculpting, drawing, and painting—early passions inspired by the dioramas at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Over the next three decades, he created free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures, along with oil and acrylic paintings characterized by heavy impasto and multimedia elements.

For thirteen years, Ray explored the intricate world of mosaics—designing water fountains, sculptures, furniture, and architectural pieces that united the textures, colors, and forms of fused glass, metals, marble, stone, and exotic woods.

About the Artist: I am a South Asian American, Madison based visual artist and graphic designer. Receiving a B.A. in Studio Arts from Alverno College and a B.F.A. in Communication Design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. I have worked in the arts field as a graphic designer, workshop and class art teacher and artist. I have shown my art at the Overture Galleries, the Art Literature Laboratory and the Madison Public Libraries. My artwork is part of the permanent collection at UW Health Madison Hospital and Clinics, the Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s Water Street Health Center in Milwaukee, WI and also the City of Madison’s permanent collection. Continue reading...

About the Artist: Over the last 4 decades, my work has spanned from theater scenic design, community-engaged murals to custom oil portraits and fabric collages. Each project tells its own story or a collection of stories, creating meaningful experiences for all involved. I am inspired both by the opportunity to learn alongside others and the opportunity to forge connections through art. The process of creating together can build relationships, foster healing, and inspire confidence in everyone who participates. 

The image selected is of Dr Fabu Carter, former Dane County Poet Laureate and most beloved treasure of this community. The portrait was completed in 2024 for the Memory Collectors Storytelling Project -Fighting Alzheimer’s with Art.

About the Artist: My career in art began with calligraphy and lettering. For 15 years I created professional greeting card designs using calligraphy combined with illustration. Later, during graduate school in 2015, my interests shifted to painting, and discovering how to incorporate lettering into abstract art. My process is to include hidden, hand-lettered text in my paintings. My style can range from completely abstract to loosely representational. 

The pursuit of excellence and curiosity are the focus of my work. Exploration of different techniques, tools and materials is central to my approach to painting. I am originally from New Orleans, where the colorful architecture and plant life gave me a love of color and nature. I continue to explore abstract painting, new color combinations and techniques to create rich surface textures. 

About the Artist: Jessica M. Gutiérrez is a self-taught Nicaraguan-American Visual Artist residing in Madison, WI. The daughter of a Nicaraguan immigrant and born in Central Wisconsin, she works as a psychotherapist who integrates her visual and creative nature into her practice and her healing focus into her art practice. Gutierrez’s colorful watercolors and collaged mixed media images are emotional, enchanting, magical and vibrant. Jessica has shown her work throughout the Midwest for the past 15 years. Jessica was a finalist for the 2023 Women Artists Forward Fund Art Prize and a 2023-25 Art Lit Lab Bridgework Program Artist in Madison, WI. 

About the Artist: Central Madison Public Library is from a collection of paintings that are a part of my experience and imagination in Madison, Wisconsin in 2026.  Each of these paintings represents a unique treasure for me in Dane County. I love Dane County and the paintings are inspired by views from the bike path as I bike all around Madison and its surrounding areas. The medium I have used in my recent work is fluorescent acrylic paint. I love how vibrant the colors are and how they interact with the forms in my paintings.  

About the Artist: 
As a local artist I love to draw inspiration from nature and landscapes around me. I find beauty in bright colors and unique color combinations. When I create work I hope the viewer first notices my color palette and then images secondary. I enjoy finding balance using different colors and patterns to keep the viewers eyes flowing throughout my paintings. 

August: Linda Massey

About the Artist: 
Born and raised in Dane County, Wisconsin, I have spent a lifetime finding inspiration in the people, landscapes, and traditions that make this community unique. Living on a farm with horses gives me a deep appreciation for our agricultural heritage, while the energy, diversity, and culture of Madison continually draw me into the city to paint. I am especially inspired by the connection between rural and urban life that defines Dane County. Whether painting in the countryside or setting up my easel at a local farmers market, I am drawn to the everyday moments that bring people together and create a sense of community. I have been fortunate to travel and paint on four continents, yet Dane County continues to call me home. Its blend of natural beauty, agriculture, creativity, and community spirit provides endless inspiration and reminds me why this place remains one of my greatest treasures.

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About the Artist: 
As a Wisconsin transplant from Virginia, there are so many reasons I’m thankful to call Wisco home. From the people to the weather, the nature to the market culture, my love of Madison has seeped into many of my oil paintings. Whether painting ‘en plein air’ in one of our dozens of parks or dedicating a series of still lifes to the bounty of vegetables, I’m driven to make my experience of and love for this state tangible through my work. 
I attempt to encapsulate the growing season through my farmers market series, picking a new vegetable each week of the 2024 season and contrasting the produce with bright color and contemporary composition. And to capture the joy effect of the outdoors, I use plein air to freeze these moments in time, whether a hot afternoon or a chilly fall morning, forever cementing these spaces and memories in paint.

About the Artist: 
Living in Madison, I appreciate traveling throughout county roads in Wisconsin farm communities. They hold great interest a robust sense of place and unique atmosphere. I enjoy painting and learning with others in our Hillcrest Studio in Middleton on a weekly basis.

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About the Artist:
Christopher Sweet is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist and an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, with ancestry from the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota. Born and raised in Wisconsin, he lives in the Wisconsin Dells area. Sweet has been making art since childhood and briefly studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After a solo exhibition opportunity in 2016, he committed to art as a career. Since then, his work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, juried shows, murals, site responsive installations, public and private collections. Guided by intentions of unity and healing, Sweet explores reflection, identity, and resilience through layered textures and recurring motifs. Drawing on regalia, dance, family, storytelling, and spiritual connection, his work brings together traditional and contemporary Native American experience in ways that are both personal and widely resonant.

About the Artist:
My love for nature is reflected in my art. My pictures are not painted with watercolor but with pressed flowers, grasses, and leaves, as well as with things that, at first glance, might not symbolize beauty: peels from fruits or vegetables, bark, fluff, straw, weeds, moss, or roots. I choose them to best represent what I want. In a way, I give them a new life as part of a beautiful picture, in which they can achieve perfect harmony. These are the paints I use, these are nature's paints, and no two are alike. Using these miracles of nature I can artistically express my feelings, and create paintings that represent my ideas. Pressed flower art is not well known in the United States and I am now focusing on showcasing my art in Dane County, my home for the past few years.