UMVA Showcase – Fall 2025: Amy Bellezza, Kharris Brill, Don Peterson, Anna Dibble

Amy Bellezza

In my still-life photography with the bed coil, I find myself moving in rhythm between action and contemplation. There is a pulse to the process: moments of arranging, lighting, and framing, followed by pauses to reflect and simply look. The coil itself demands this oscillation—it is both a practical remnant of the body and a symbol of memory, time, and transformation. The act of making becomes inseparable from the act of thinking, as each gesture in the studio unfolds new layers of meaning.

Through the lens, my understanding evolves. The coil shifts in significance: it may appear as cage, skeleton, spiral, or vessel. At times. I place fruit or flowers upon it, letting organic forms rest against its industrial frame. These elements extend the dialogue of the work—introducing softness, vitality, and eventual decay to contrast with the coil’s rigidity and endurance. Fruit suggests nourishment and cycles of growth, while flowers embody beauty that fades with time. Together they evoke the tension between the fleeting and the lasting, the natural and the manufactured. None of these meanings are imposed; they surface through the act of making. My role is to hold a balance—shaping composition deliberately, yet allowing chance and the objects themselves to reveal unexpected truths.

This process often clarifies what lies beneath the surface. The bed coil, once holding weight and rest, becomes a meditation on fragility and endurance, on presence and absence. When paired with fruit and flowers, it becomes not only an object of support but also a stage for transformation—where life, death, and memory converge in a single frame. Artmaking, in this sense, is not about resolution, but revelation. It draws out hidden truths and suggests ways of seeing that reason alone cannot summon. Can the coil really hold a piece of fruit or a flower? How does that pair with the coil and its symbolism?

The practice extends beyond the studio. To “think through making” is to accept that meaning is not always preordained but arises in the interplay of intention and emergence. This philosophy shapes how I navigate uncertainty in life and in society: not by clinging to fixed answers, but by remaining open, adaptive, and responsive. Through this openness, new futures can be imagined—possibilities that emerge from paying attention, from transforming the overlooked, and from allowing the ordinary to become extraordinary.

 

Kharris Brill

When I step into my studio, I don’t arrive with a plan. I begin instead by looking around—at the piles of paper, wood, metal, paint, or ink that I’ve set in order the night before. Clearing my work surface at the end of each day is a ritual: it ensures that yesterday’s fragments don’t dictate what comes next. Each morning, the space feels new again. Sometimes I stand there quietly until something—an odd scrap, a gear, a worn edge of wood—catches my attention. That moment of recognition is enough to set me in motion, and usually my hands start working before I’ve had time to think through what I’m doing.

Making and reflecting move together in a kind of rhythm. There are days when I work almost without thinking, and others when I pause to tilt a piece, study its weight, or shift an element until it feels right. If a work resists me, I don’t force it. I’ll let it sit, half-finished, until the moment comes when I know it isn’t working. That realization frees me. I’ll cut into it, sand it down, or take it apart entirely, knowing that starting over is not failure but the beginning of a new direction.

Experimentation is where the work deepens. One of my favorite discoveries came from something as ordinary as tissue paper—the kind used to wrap fragile gifts. I crumple it, press it into glue, and once it dries, sand it lightly. The result is a surface alive with peaks and valleys, catching light in ways that suggest stone, cracked plaster, or even the faint outline of maps. What is fragile in one context becomes enduring in another. This transformation is what excites me: a simple material shifting into something unexpected and powerful.

That sense of surprise is constant. A different texture, an accidental placement, or the substitution of one object for another can change the direction of a piece entirely. These unplanned turns remind me to stay open, not only in art but in life. Much like the studio, daily life rarely follows a straight line. Plans unravel, accidents occur, and what first feels like disruption often becomes the heart of the work—or the day.

Through making, I often discover clarity, though it rarely arrives all at once. Instead, it builds slowly, like the layers of paper or materials I add and sand back. At first, the meaning may be hidden, but as the process continues, what needs to be seen begins to emerge. In those moments, I realize I am not only constructing an artwork, but also reshaping my own understanding.

This way of working has become a way of living. I try not to enter situations assuming I know the outcome. Like a piece in progress, each day is something unintroduced, to be met with curiosity and willingness to adjust. Exploration, dismantling, rebuilding—all are essential to both my studio practice and my life.

For me, making is inseparable from thinking. It is not the reflection that comes after but the reflection that happens in motion. Wrinkled tissue, the curve of a typewriter arm, the teeth of a discarded gear—these fragments lead me to new ways of seeing. In shaping materials, I shape ideas. And in staying open to change, I allow both the work and myself to become something I couldn’t have imagined at the start.

 

Don Peterson 

Upon reflection, I have always been a visual creative best exploring my world through photography, drawing, and painting. In retrospect, it’s no surprise as my informal creative education started at an early age from my father, CG Peterson, talented watercolorist, photographer, and commercial artist. Being a licensed architect and development professional for over five decades, I worked hard to be a studious observer, questioner, and problem solver. With pencil in hand, I believed “form follows function.”

But twenty years ago, my life and work were totally out of balance. Professional and life responsibilities were overwhelming, and as a sole practitioner, I worked long hours in isolation. Missing was the addictive creativity and camaraderie of the studio. To address this loss, in 2008, I enrolled in the Continuing Education Program at MECA. Starting with the familiar, life drawing, I began my artistic renewal.

After a few classes and needing to nourish my reawakened creative self, I knew I had to paint again. These first art classes since college were with Dianne Dahlke, an amazing representational painter. But when I told her I had no interest in painting bowls of fruit, she laughed and said, “paint what you want and we’ll just work together.” In retrospect, it was Dianne who helped me discover my real interest was in abstraction which led me to take multiple MECA classes with painter Michel Droge.

Also in 2008, while traveling in New Mexico, I serendipitously met Alvaro Cardona-Hine, a truly amazing person: abstract painter, poet, and composer. Through his unlimited warmth and generosity, Alvaro became a dear friend and my creative mentor, inviting me, sometimes twice annually, to his studio to paint, photograph, and just spend weeks together. With his passing in 2016, Alvaro became a gift I can only pay forward.

Since I have no specific fine art degree, it was these people and experiences that fed my creativity and helped define my artistic self. From dad, it was “Look closely, what do you see?” From my architecture training, learning how to successfully integrate program, composition, materials and function. From Dianne, paint what you want, to Michel, there are no limits. And Alvaro, nothing is sacred, take chances, “be courageous.”

Thus, my creative process or Thinking Through Making is built on these foundational art and life experiences. My painting and photography increasingly act as a foil for the other. One medium informs the other; most often in a subconscious manner. In both disciplines, I typically work quickly, letting the moment define itself, then following its thread. Often, however, paintings stored for months are rediscovered and used as fodder for a “paint-over” with clarity and perspective gained from time and loss.

More recently, I have gravitated to photography. Like my journey into abstract painting, my photography has increasingly moved toward abstract image making. The photographs presented here are abstractions created using an in-camera multiple exposure (ICME) process for which I employ no AI or Photoshop in the creation of the original image.

This work strives to capture an intriguing visual story or image. I aspire to capture the elusive “decisive moment.” But with this process there is almost always a surprise undetectable in the viewfinder; enter nuance and the energy of abstraction. ICME is infinitely fascinating, allowing the opportunity to often enrich or reinterpret the reality of the moment by layering multiple images, scale, and tone all in the same frame. For me, the successful image unfolds slowly, perhaps taking multiple viewings and enticing the observer to question and/or create their own story. When this occurs, I have achieved my artistic goal.

 

Anna Dibble — Landscape

On the process of painting fictional landscape.

Landscape

a portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place.

—Merriam-Webster

The distinctive features of a particular situation or intellectual activity.

—Oxford English Dictionary 

Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition.

—Wikipedia 

When I was nine or ten years old and probably about the size of a large beaver, I was riding shotgun with my father in his VW bug around back dirt roads in Vermont where we lived. It must have been during a drought in summer or fall, because we passed a large beaver house that sat in a dried-up river bed. I said I’d always wanted to find out what it was like inside a beaver house so he pulled over and parked. Within the crisscrossed gnawed sticks, I found an opening that normally would have been underwater and crawled in. I could just about fit my head and shoulders inside. There was a central dimly lit passageway, hard-packed with sandy dirt that rose like a little hill with a flattish top, and then headed down to another entrance or exit on the back of the house. On each side of this passage, there were four carved-out round cave rooms, also of hard-packed sand in which the family of beavers must have slept. I remember it smelled like wet sand and sapling, and I could imagine how cozy it must have been in there with cold river water slapping on the exterior sticks and a winter Nor’easter wailing away outside.

I don’t work directly from an actual landscape en plein air. My paintings are all made in the studio. The landscape paintings I make, with the help of experience, imagination, curiosity, luck, paint, brushes, tools, and a mysterious connection to my unique unconscious or maybe some sort of helpful angelic muse, grow from a lifelong congruence with the land and water and what we call the “natural world.” To me, human beings are part of the natural world on an equal footing with ants, squid, moths, whales, or coccolithophores. Humans are not separate from “nature,” no matter how much they like to emphasize that detachment. We’re all in this together.

My overall approach to the work—“the work” being an exciting but almost alien entity outside me—is guided by the wild, driven by how separated and alienated from the natural world humans have become, and the terrible disaster that has occurred because of this alienation.

My landscape painting is also rooted in my childhood. All our family trips were local camping adventures. My father took us to places only a few people knew about—special spots next to rivers or lakes where we made fireplaces and hung tarps for roofs, kept caches of pots and pans, fished for trout or bass, swam, carved designs in Moose Maple sticks, made tiny water mills, and collected plenty of firewood for cooking pancakes and fish, beans and hotdogs, and for telling stories by at night. What we did in a place wasn’t as important as the ritual of going there and being there.

We grew up in an old house in a tiny village near the woods which we shared with a long series of cats, dogs, mice, raccoons, birds, turtles, skunks, and salamanders, and additionally visiting relatives, visual artists, writers, musicians, teachers, and philosophers.

In the studio, the landscapes I paint come directly out of my imagination. I transform real-life memories of my childhood, islands, the sea, fields, woods, rivers, trees, clouds, and stars into unreal landscapes often populated with imaginary animals, including people. This process only works well if the balance of focusing on an intellectual or emotional “idea” and letting the hand, eyes, materials, and tools be guided by intuition, is overloaded on the intuitive side.

My landscape, and all that word encompasses from my past and present, lives inside me. When I paint, some version of it emerges. In a way, at my age, early 70s, my childhood has become like a fantastic dream that I transfer to and relive through my landscapes.