Olive Ayhens

www.oliveayhens.com

spent a year at American University, while one of the painting professors was on leave for a year.
AU has evolved into an odd mix of both conceptual/intellectual faculty and those who put physical mark-making first. I fell into the latter group and needed to find more people who were similar. Having not had a class with Tim Dowd, and with Don Kimes only spending spring semesters on campus, I needed a visual mentor. Olive Ayhens' drawing class fullfilled that need, and encouraged me to keep working at a time when others were trying to take me away from my work-first based center of creating art.

Look at her website. Her paintings are both dense and light, concerned and comical, whimsical and serious. They ask questions about people, human space, city scapes, nature, and how they all are butted up against each other in an ever shrinking world.