Art Hounds recommend portraits that seem to be 'peering into your soul'

Art collector Jeannie Hintz of Buffalo recommends the mixed-media paintings of Mary Catherine Solberg.

Hintz said the Fridley-based artist paints “eyes in her portraits so that you feel like they’re peering into your soul.”

Solberg creates portraits of people and animals in the style of religious icons or Renaissance painters. She uses metal leaf, beeswax, acrylic, plaster and more unusual materials that Hintz said she hasn’t seen other artists using right now. Solberg’s exhibition “Quarantine” at One Division Art, where Hintz is gallery director, has closed, but Solberg has a website of her work. Solberg’s studio/gallery is located in the Casket Arts Building in the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.

Poet Mary Jean Mulherin appreciates the work of St. Paul painter Rosemary Ruffenach. Her watercolor, oil, and pastel paintings vary widely in subject, from floral arrangements to people to landscapes near and far. Mulherin describes her work as “cozy” during the stressful times of a pandemic. She particularly recommends Ruffanch’s landscapes from her many travels abroad as a way to take a vicarious vacation.

Artist Geordin Crist is into the work of Trisha Spectacle, whose “draglesque” performance Crist calls “a bridge between drag and burlesque communities.”

Crist appreciates that “Trisha speaks to the drag community in a way that is very new.” They point out that Trisha Spectacle doesn’t wear pads or shave chest hair to create a man-dressing-as-woman drag character. Instead, their performance continues to challenge gender norms in a way that Crist calls “subversive for 2020.”

Find Trisha Spectacle on Instagram and as a cast member of Queerdo Mpls.

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