Hilary Sloan & Jennifer Bilek – Cover Art Exhibition – MyArtContest.com

2014 Cover Art Exhibition – MyArtContest.com

Hilary Sloan – Joshua Tree, CA

Take Heart is a website dedicated to living from my heart. It’s about creating with dignity, integrity and a higher purpose.  That purpose is to focus light in areas that both interest me and helps me grow and expand. I’m interested in areas of human relationships, portraits, animals, family, community and simply taking pictures of the world around me. If the piece I’m working on moves me and keeps me interested then I want to share it with others.

Photography for me is a doorway into life. I offer my photographs as my particular vision. It includes beauty, lifestyle, travel, and documentary photography. The documentary projects are ongoing and will be listed as such.

I have set up this website to expand out and reach others who are interested in seeing the world in a different way and sharing their perceptions. I’m open to feedback, open to others sharing what they know about a particular subject if the feedback is shared in a positive, uplifting way.

The heart is our key to higher perceptions. It’s the place we can go to get a view of the world we live in. We can live in our hearts and operate from there. Most of all we can create from that place. My work is dedicated to creating with heart and taking Heart.

Jennifer Bilek – Woodside, NE

Jennifer Bilek is a contemporary American portrait artist. Born and raised in New York City, Jennifer has honed her skills as a painter for over 35 years. Her talent for portraiture emerged early. At 5 years old, she would go through her coloring books and color all of the faces first, finding in that process an avenue to focus that created a balance and radiating joy within.

At 13 years old Jennifer painted her first oil portrait. By the age of 27, her skill culminated in the creation of a unique studio/gallery in the Hudson Valley, with many rotating exhibitions of her portraiture that welcomed spectator involvement.

Jennifer studied formally with Vladimir Bachinsky, after receiving a two year scholarship (1981-1983) to study fine oil portraiture at the Woodstock School of Art. She also studied with acclaimed portrait painter Daniel Greene in 1989. From 1984-91 she painted 17 portraits of nationally renowned performance artist, Linda Montano, in a collaborative project exploring the seven chakras of the human spine. Using colors relating to each chakra, Jennifer painted serial portraits of Linda each year of Linda’s seven year performance. This effort manifested a dual expression, one serializing Linda’s performance and another creating Jennifer’s own expression. Using repetitive portraits of one person, rendered consecutively within a specific time frame, Jennifer created a new performance piece. This performance changed the direction of her work. Jennifer’s portraits became fearless explorations of color and medium, as well as her subjects.

Jennifer’s unusual eclectic program of study over the years, aimed at honing her natural skills as a portrait artist, has provided her with a uniquely versatile style in rendering work for her clients. She is adept at producing portraits that are realistic, formal, and conventional as well as those that are more of a representative, symbolic, and illustrative nature.

To say that her portraits are a likeness of her subjects is understatement. Jennifer’s portraits are an explosion of perception rendered in physical form and color, intensely honest, and fiercely passionate. Most of her portraits are a part of private collections across the United States and Europe.