Fine artists using graphite, charcoal or pastels in this black and white art show.

Artists:

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Artist Robin Cole Smith Laguna Beach, California Microcosm graphite on clayboard 800 Crowd Favorite, 2nd place Artist Statement I am a borderlander at heart. I live and work along the boundaries: visual, metaphorical, natural, and spiritual. As a species we build our world around definitions, classifications, and divisions. But these boundaries, though they form the very fabric of our society, are remarkably permeable; without constant vigilance they have a habit of softening, of becoming tangled and overgrown. It is within this softening—an oscillation between familiar constraints and inexplicable presences—that I situate myself as an artist. It is a liminal place where our human impulse to judge and hierarchize is quieted, where a natural way of seeing floats quietly to the surface of our hyper-stimulated minds. My work has always been an act of reverence for the natural world, a world where such transitional, liminal times and places abound. There is an element of science in it, in the desire to study and observe. But there is an element of spirit, too, in the continual reaching for something just beyond the visible. The natural world possesses a magic for me, one which I attempt to elicit by working within the bounds of realism as one might work within a poetic form, using the constraints to evoke something beyond the boundary of those very limitations. I strive to carve out a compelling space in which those peripheral presences can stand forth. My work is an attempt to distill, to reveal, and to allow. ___________________________________________