Mixed Media Artist to Demonstrate at Gallery 54

From Potsdam, NY to Point Loma in San Diego, to Skaneateles. From the Tree of Life, to Between Heaven and Earth, to the Japan Bird Project it's hard to pigeon hole (pun intended) Warner Varno and her art. The word “beautiful” might suffice, yet somehow it even comes up short.

Warner Varno

Warner and her art, mixed media on canvas, are featured at Gallery 54 throughout the month of January and into mid-February. On January 27 besides the impressive pieces on exhibit and available for purchase, Warner will demonstrate the techniques that resonate in her work between 12 and 3 pm.

She began creating her art during study halls and her lunch period while still a high school student at Jordan-Elbridge High School. However, she says it wasn't until she was studying fine art and anthropology at SUNY Potsdam that she became truly engaged in learning. “ I was learning so many different things at such a rapid pace as a double major; I really needed to process all the thinking through my art, all my questions and feelings about what I was learning as well,” she says.

Her attraction to art was found, in her words “. . . in a pull to process the world around me and what I was learning through making the work. I ask questions as well as record events and information and ‘write’ stories through my artwork. Making art for me is how I process my internal and external world, it is how I ask questions, analyze and record new information, and sometimes to gain a level of 'understanding' I would not have access to otherwise.”

“Most recently,” she notes, “I have found 'play' to be a highly attractive quality of my art making process as well as the element of surprise. I surprise myself now more than ever, letting go of some control and allowing the work to puzzle itself out to a feeling of completion.”

Warner describes her work, especially the larger pieces, “as ‘bone gardens’ of a sort,” adding “but I am also a storyteller. I am interested in layering both the media and the subject matter, almost weaving these elements together, sometimes literally and sometimes using transparency. I paint about life cycles and like to envelop all of that inside something I feel is beautiful in its own peculiar way and also celebratory of the lived experience of being human.”

Some of her work exhibited at Gallery 54 originated in a show titled Bright Wings, held at Point Loma in San Diego. Another element, The Japan Birds Project, is a fund raising project for Time for Art class scholarships. Warner has 50 Western Bird Designs currently available and 50 Eastern designs are in the works.

During the demonstration, Syracuse Salt Company will also provide tastings of their variety of culinary salts.

Gallery 54 is an upscale venue for Central New York artists that showcases and sells unique, inspired, and timeless art in a diversity of mediums.