Artist Statement
Lori Zaknich Bala
To belong everywhere is the opposite of how I often feel in the world. Belonging is about connection, relating, and it’s about how we survive in a fragmented world. Sometimes it’s like we are shattered pieces scattered across the universe, lost, alone, sinking into an abyss, never seen. Maybe we are shattered pieces. But pieces belong to a whole. What if that whole, is everything everywhere? My work asks questions and tries to find connection through conceptual imagery. It's something that allows for visualizing what is difficult to express out loud.
Carly Ganley
I grew up photographing on and around the Appalachian Mountains in rural Pennsylvania and developing black and white photos. After 20 years as a court reporter, I moved to the Monterey Peninsula where I embraced the artists' life expanding my painting skills and making connections along the way. I enjoyed Chalk the Block in Pacific Grove and was among of the last artists who shared space at The American Tin Cannery. Trying to create more opportunities for local artists, photographers and musicians, working with The Facebook group The Crowd and coordinating artist events for the Carmel International Film Festival.
Through the lens of my camera or as my pen sketches,
With paints trying to capture
The songs in my heart
The joy that I feel when my heart sees the Sea
Or when small birds fly by to greet me
We are energy
Music is energy
Creatures great and small
Every blade of grass and drop of water that falls
I try to capture the energy of a place or time with the colors I feel
Make art with others!
Collaborate with and support other artists along their journey!
Share the joy of creating and encourage one another!
This is the artist's life for me
Namaste!
Shagufta Khan
A Channeling Artist
I have always believed that art is not made — it is released. From my earliest days studying as a realist painter in high school, I found deep joy in painting plein air, still-life, and portraits, mostly in oil or charcoal on canvas. Those years trained my eye and steadied my hand, but they only told part of my story.
Life, as it does, pulled me away from painting for a time. When I returned, something had shifted within me. I came back not with a sketch or a plan, but with a feeling — an urgency to spill my artistic energies onto canvas. Working now in acrylics, sometimes layered with mixed media elements, I found I could no longer start from a preconceived place. Instead, I began channeling emotions directly from my inner self: a raw, intuitive process that became the heartbeat of everything I create.
That practice led me, naturally and inevitably, to abstract impressionism — and to understanding it not merely as a style, but as a meditative and therapeutic process. My work explores what I hold most sacred: nature as a healer, the universal connectedness of relationships, family as lifeline, and community as a vital support system. Through the uniqueness and sameness of human experience, my art insists on a quiet truth — that beneath everything, we all share the same feelings, the same hopes, the same desires.
More recently, I have been drawn into the dreamlike space of multimedia surrealist collage — serene, layered works that juxtapose portrait, nature, and landscape to reflect the multidimensional, amalgamating nature of our lives. They feel, to me, like the natural meeting point of everything I have explored: the meditative, the emotional, the deeply personal.
Paying it forward has become as essential to me as making the work itself. After a series of formal coursework in therapeutic art, I began inviting others to take this dive with me — into abstractionism as a path to unveiling complex emotions, releasing blockages built up through difficult life experiences. As a therapeutic art practitioner, I guide others in exploring the multifaceted layers of their own existence: the intertwining of conscious and subconscious mind, the shadow-work that lays the foundation for genuine healing and a return to inner happiness.
I do not paint pictures. I channel truths — my own, and perhaps yours too.
Nate Stapleton
Nate Stapleton has been artistically expressing himself since his childhood days, in one form or another. He was often found reading comic books, or fantasy and science fiction novels, which fueled his young imagination. Along with professional wrestling, they provided a great escape from the turbulence of his early years, and he still has an appreciation for them to this day. The art that graced the covers of the paperbacks, as well as that within the comics, inspired him to first take up drawing as a child, then painting as a teenager. It was within painting that he found the ability to freely express himself and grew an appreciation for abstract and impressionist art. Artists like Munch, Monet, and Pollock became new inspirations for him, propelling him forward in his newfound medium. As a young adult, his abstract charcoal pieces were featured in art shows, but he soon abandoned drawing altogether and painted only sporadically. After falling into alcoholism in the years to come, he spent most of his creative energy performing and recording music for various projects. Now older, and sober, he's returned to painting as his preferred medium of self-expression. Blending the abstract and fantastic, he creates unique and mysterious pieces, using a variety of painting techniques. He expresses his feelings of hope, hurt, alienation, and wonder, as he explores the boundaries of creativity.