The Gallery

at Firstlight

Meet the Artists

Dennas Davis

Artistic Statement

Art is communicating what is important to an artist, and offering an experience to the viewer as a gift. The gift is returned to the artist, by knowing there is connection with the viewers.

My artwork is most often simply about the excruciating beauty in the world around us.

A painting can invoke new thinking, or it can be a respite from the stressful thoughts of life. I mainly want to pursue joy in my work, but sometimes highlight other ideas.

Art is adventure. The goal is seldom more than to experiment, express, and play, with the things that for me, are full of joy: color, shape, line, and light. Sometimes animals or objects show up. Sometimes there are light-hearted cartoon-like images. Sometimes there is only an echo of a subject, with the color and the paint consuming the canvas. The best artwork comes from within. It calls out to be painted, which to me is a far more important than style or consistency, is what is currently calling out to be painted.

“God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.”
Martin Luther

“God is in the details.”
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

“An artist is an explorer.”
Henri Matisse

“Art should be like a holiday. Something to give a [person] the opportunity to see things differently, and to change [their] point of view.”
Paul Klee

Jennie Schut

Artistic Statement

“Warmth.  Light.  Peace. Stillness.  Love….it seemed to me that wherever these things are found in the world, they should not be a cause for guilt but treasured, nurtured, sheltered from the darkness that threatens them.”

– Frederick Buechner

In a season where our culture seems to be exaggerating the grotesque, where our political process more resembles entertainment for the masses rather than a democratic process where we carefully choose our leaders, we need to be reminded that there is an abundance of goodness in the world.  There is goodness, truth, and beauty, even if it is elusive and just beneath the surface of things. Beauty doesn’t need me to see it, but I need to see beauty.  It is my desire to seek beauty and in so doing, reveal the hidden profoundness of life.

I believe that there is a sacred depth to the ordinary things we encounter in mundane daily life. The creative process assists me to bear witness and perceive areas of energy lurking, waiting around corners and under shadows. Often, these intuitively perceived things are not obvious, but, If found and seen, these moments have the power to astonish. I’m often drawn to paint a solitary figure in a private moment, where the viewer is invited to drop in on a moment of deep contemplation, an unfiltered belly laugh or some emotionally charged moment where we can close in and observe the beautiful in those commonplace moments, from a different angle or in a different light.

As I close in and observe, I perceive that there are many relationships active in a good piece of work, such as light and dark, smooth and rough, colorful and dull, space and illusion of space, abstract and concrete. These relationships exist to portray contrasts and diversity, without which, artwork would be boring and flat. This could be said of life as well. And it is in these relationships perhaps, that we find those transitory, beautiful spaces in which the dichotomy of contentious opposites are found flourishing peacefully, inhabiting a minute corner of the world for a transient instant.