The Courthouse Gallery in Exeter offers this exhibition from January 8 through March 27, 2011. An opening reception with the artists is scheduled for Sunday, January 9, at 2 pm. The Gallery is open on Saturday and Sunday, from 10-4 pm. Call 730-9369 for more information.
Coming from two different backgrounds and opposite ends of the earth, this couple came together in a “marriage of art”. For most artists, it is a very private and intimate affair between he or she and their art, but Kevin Yee and Miriam Briks have not only learned to live and love together but as married artists, they sometimes work together on the same painting, rare indeed! Residing in Three Rivers, their artworks adorn walls throughout the world.
© Miriam Briks “Gypsy”
Miriam Briks was born in Wroclaw, Poland. Raised in New York, she graduated from the School of Art and Design and studied figurative painting and drawing extensively at the Art Students League of New York.For the next six years she worked as an illustrator and art teacher in Los Angeles and Florence, Italy. She also continued her studies at the Academy of Art in Siena. Originally trained in classical art, she began exhibiting her work in Paris, Italy and England.
Upon her return to the Untied States, she took up residence I the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Here she began the transition of her technique to include more varied use of color and strong gestural strokes, inspired greatly by the artists Sargent, Chase, Sorolla, and Zorn.
Portraying through rich colors and textures, her style of painting gently blends strong knowledge of the figure with classical impressionism. Briks strives to create paintings that evoke emotion and atmosphere, where the viewer is drawn into the beauty and mood of the moment.
Miriam, Briks’ work has been featured in American Art Review, Southwest Art, Architectural Digest, American Art Collector and California Homes magazines with exhibits and one-woman shows in Beverly Hills, La Jolla and Masterpiece Gallery, Carmel, California, Canyon Road Gallery, Santa Fe, Dassin Gallery, Los Angeles, Trees Place Gallery in Cape Cod and Galerie Gabrie, Pasadena Ca.. Her works are found in important and private collections with collectors such as Kim Bassinger, Hayley Mills, the late George Harrison and others throughout the United States and internationally.
Kevin Albert Yee was born in Maui, Hawaii. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art from California State University at Fullerton in 1974, Kevin began illustration work for an international publishing company. In 1980, he relocated with the company to Florence, Italy where he studied at the Academia de Sienna and the Academia de Arte Firenze. Here he learned such techniques as fresco and egg tempera. During his six years in Florence, he was promoted to head art director for the Italian division of the publishing company. Over the next twelve years. He paint3ed more than three hundred oils, many large and prominent paintings, which still hang in chateaus and villas in Italy, France, England, South Africa and India.
After years of classical training and illustration, Kevin has evolved to appreciate the spontaneity and mystical way of capturing the moment, then breathing life into his art. This has become the framework for his passion as a plein air painter.
Kevin’s greatest influence has been Edgar Payne, who understood that, “While nature furnishes the visual motive, art comes from the depicter.” Kevin feels this gives infinite meaning to the artists involvement in truthfully rendering the scene. Although his studies over the years have included artists from Constable to Sargent, this current direction of plein air took Kevin more than two decades to develope.
Today, Kevin travels extensively to paint on location, which present its own challenges. He must move quickly, as the light changes, to capture the mood and illumination of a particular moment. That is why Kevin’s paintings capture windows of time between storm clouds, before a sunset or just as rai begins to fall. His feeling for the rhythm of water, along with the movement of air, often understated, yet powerful in his paintings. Kevin’s paintings are real extensions of his direct experience with the subject, his inner eye seems to capture the mood and reality of the atmosphere with a sixth sense.
Three Rivers Arts 