November in the Bear Gallery: Alyssa Quintyne and Amy Reisland-Speer FIRST FRIDAY NOVEMBER 3rd!

Join Fairbanks Arts in the Bear Gallery for our November exhibitions: Please Take Care by Alyssa Quintyne and Fur, Feathers and Petals to the Metal by Amy Reisland-Speer. 

Please Take Care by Alyssa Quintyne
 

Alyssa Quintyne is a Bajan-American community organizer, musician, and artist based in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has over 17 years of experience exhibiting her work across the Interior in various First Friday shows, exhibitions, and collaborations. She has been published locally in 2020, in the Anchorage Museum ‘Artist-in-Residence’ initiative in 2021, and is the founding co-curator of the BAAM – Black Alaskan Art Matters project. She hopes to expand the local art community to be more inclusive of other marginalized creatives of color. She strives to share her knowledge and opportunities with other creatives looking to share their works with their communities.

Her work focuses on people, their identities, and relaying their ethereal characteristics. Flora, life cycles, the figure, and social justice are common themes in Alyssa's work that tie her subjects to the tangible and intangible. Her mediums include watercolor, ink, gold foil, and colored pencil. 
 

“Please Take Care is an exhibition about my recent journey through chronic illness and climate anxiety. I’ve dealt with medical issues all my life, but over the past year, I dealt with a developing heart condition that became debilitating. I often found that my feelings overlayed what was happening around me outside – the vetch boom seemed to feel just like the creepy anxiety of managing my new symptoms, the flooding out in Circle matched my powerlessness with a new diagnosis, and the butterflies seemed to come right at my 2 month-versary of no ER visits. Now that I’m on the mend, I decided the best way to process this new normal for me was to be cathartic and create another way to look at my condition, the climate crises, and the life ahead of me.”

- Alyssa Quintyne

Fur, Feathers and Petals to the Metal by Amy Reisland-Speer 

Amy Reisland-Speer was born in Fairbanks in March of 1966 and raised in the village of Tanana for the first fifteen years of her life. She was inspired to become an artist by her surrounding environment, strongly influenced by wildlife and the Athabaskan culture. Amy spent many summers in the Denali National Park area where her parents built a tourism business. In Denali, she became fascinated with reproducing the surrounding mountains with her paints. She continues to work at the familybusiness in the summers and immerses herself in her studio during the winter months.

Amy was encouraged by her parents and art teachers to continue growing and exploring her creative side with different mediums. Paint became her desired medium to visually express her love for the world around her. She incorporates oils, acrylics, egg tempera and mixed media into her work. 

Amy studied at UAF, graduating with a BA in Oil Painting in 2000. She is strongly influenced by Kessler Woodward, Ree Nancarrow, David Mollet, Koo Shadler, and Brian T. Keller, along with the classics such as Sidney Laurence and Vincent Van Gogh, with whom she shares a birthday! She continues to enjoy painting Orthodox icons, making her own egg tempera with locally sourced dirt and minerals, and painting the ravens and flowers she adores.

In 2013, Amy received the Fairbanks Arts Association and Interior Alaska Mayor's Youth Arts Award for working with children in the Denali Borough and the village of Tanana, where she and the students painted a mural for the school gym.

Amy has lectured at the UAF Extension Center and OLLI. She has hosted many paint nights in Healy and Anderson, and given many private painting lessons over the years. She has been featured in My Town in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as several other articles featuring her accomplishments with students, the community, and art shows. She has been accepted into and sold her work in the All Alaska Juried show and group shows at both the Bear Gallery and Well Street Art Company, as well as Bad Girls of the North. 

Amy has had many solo shows and participated in several group shows in Fairbanks over the last 30 years. Her first Russian Orthodox icon was purchased through a Rasmuson grant by the Kodiak History Museum.

Amy plans on retiring from the family business within the next couple of years to focus solely on her art and other interests such as cooking, weight-lifting and meditation. She aspires to experiment and immerse herself with botanical watercolor paintings and pursue egg tempera again in the near future.

“Alaska, its mountains, animals, birds, insects, and flowers have always inspired my creative side. My paintings and mixed media art help interpret how I perceive Alaska, and what I hold dear. I love embellishing my paintings with metal leaf, found objects, torn papers, vintage music paper, and stenciling.

I enjoy developing the process of how my mixed media evolves. After making several small sketches and settling on a basic plan, I then paint the background a mottled color, followed by applying stencils and then gluing torn papers and metal leaf in random areas. Finally, I paint the main subject followed by a thick layer of lacquer to seal the canvas.

Mixed media has made my paintings more diverse than just paint. It allows me the freedom to play and explore textures, colors and objects that I have collected over the years in hopes to utilize them in my art somehow.

After positive comments, sales, and successful art shows, along with this opportunity to show my mixed media art at the Bear Gallery, I decided to continue producing more of these pieces. I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I enjoy creating them. I hope my work successfully exhibits my feelings for my subjects and you, the viewer, have more understanding of how I view the world around me.”

-Amy Reisland-Speer