About the Show

"Us Humans often assume what you see is what you get, but really there might be more than what meets the eye. Perhaps there are many layers happening in everything we see. Matter makes up everything and everything vibrates. Also, being a person, we make decisions based on our own past experience and knowledge base. What if there was more? What if we are selling ourselves short? What if animals feel what we do? What if you could taste and or be aware that you are constantly surrounded by beautiful matter? Exploring realistic, abstract and surreal themes, Amy utilizes vibrant color that fills the space, to look at what might lie under what we think we know and see."

About Amy Dawn Kotel

Amy Dawn Kotel is an artist, dancer, personal trainer, puppeteer, and community friend. Amy attended Syocett’s High School for the Arts on Long Island and started as an art education major at SUNY New Paltz. Mid-schooling she changed majors and graduated with a BA in Women Studies and Minor in dance. Since becoming a parent she has found her way back to fine art and since the pandemic, she has become prolific. Her art is vibrant and moves your eye around the page. She often utilizes small shapes to create larger images. Her subject volleys between the beauty she wants to see and feel and the emotions she needs to express. Using color pencil, water color, collage, fabric and upcycled found objects, she creates figures, landscapes, abstracts and surreal images and combinations of the before mentioned.

A Word From the Artist

"This world is such a mix of beauty, and weirdness, and balance and imbalance, don't you think? My art is an outer expression of what my internal world feels like and how I take in and digest the outside world. I have a fascination with the matter that makes up our natural world and what we see in our everyday lives. I love birds, animals and creatures real and imagined, and I feel this need to demonstrate and celebrate their sentience and to right the thinking that us humans are better than or more important than any other creature on our planet. I often utilize small shapes to make a larger image. I choose vibrant colors to express my gratitude for my own vibrance and aliveness and how it connects to the world I am privileged to see. My work vollies between realistic, cartoonish, abstract and surreal, but the common thread between it all is my desire to fill the space with color and movement, joy, and in my own way, expose the truth of what I believe is underneath."

Opening recepetion will be held on Friday, Match 7th from 6-8PM. The event will be catered with free coffee and cookies, artist Amy Dawn Kotel will be speaking, and there will be live music!