The Overall Winning Artists Category consists of the 10 Best Entries received from the 3 media categories of the Painting & Other Category, Photography & Digital Category and the 3 Dimensional Art Category. 

The winning artists will now be featured on the Light Space & Time website for the month of May 2018 and thereafter, the artworks and links to the artist’s websites will remain online in the Light Space & Time Archives.

The overall winning artists’ category of the "Animals" Art Exhibition will receive extensive worldwide publicity by having their winning art presented on Artsy.net. The LST Artsy.net page will feature the artist’s art, an excerpt of their artist's statement and their website URL’s as part of the gallery’s overall prize package.

In addition, the overall winning artists will also receive extensive worldwide publicity in the form of email marketing, 550+ press release announcements, event announcement posts and social media marketing. 

Winning artists will also have their art exhibition results posted and promoted on ArtJobs/ArtWeek. Artweek/Artjobs produces 800,000-page impressions per month, 280,000 website visitors per month and has 30,000 newsletter subscribers.  

Congratulations to our artists who made our 8^th Annual “Animals” Art Exhibition so successful this month. At any time, we invite our winners and other interested visitors to link their websites to the Gallery’s Archive section for further ongoing promotion.

The Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery will have digital “Animals” Award Certificates, Event Postcard, and Press Releases sent to the winning artists within the next week or so. Thank you to all of the artists who participated and for being a part of the gallery. To return to the Animals Home Page here.

1^st Place - George Ann Johnson – “Two Pair”

George Ann Johnson is a nationally recognized wildlife artist. Her work has been published in various venues, including books, magazines, and catalogs and has been shown in numerous galleries. Professionally, George Ann has been an active artist for over 30 years. Having a strong natural talent, she initially began her art career painting professional racehorses to help support her own horse business. This eventually led her into starting her own commercial art company. Her Kansas City-based company was utilized by businesses throughout the Midwest, California, and Hawaii. After several years of commercial art, she began her career in fine art by studying at the Danforth Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Her training at the Danforth propelled her to study with numerous artists through short courses and workshops. Through this training, George Ann has continually refined her skill as an artist. In an effort to give back, George Ann has utilized this training to present various workshops and demonstrations and has taught at East Central University.

George Ann has been a member of numerous art guilds and organizations throughout the United States including the Colored Pencil Society of America (CPSA) and International Society of Scratchboard Artists (ISSA). She acted as President for the CPSA Oklahoma Chapter and CPSA District Chapter Developer for the Eastern United States. She currently is an active member of the Corpus Christi Art Center and Rockport Art Center.

George Ann is a realist artist. Although she has worked in watercolor and oils, George Ann’s principal media are scratchboard and colored pencil. It has been her recent exploration in the media of scratchboard that has allowed her to produce the high level of realism that is warranted by her talent and skill. As a result, her work has captured national attention. Her recent recognition in competitions by The Southwest Artist Magazine and The Artist Magazine as well as becoming Merit Finalist in the national Dimensions Art Show and prestigious Rockport Texas Art Center is clear evidence that her work is increasing in popularity and value.  George Ann’s work can be viewed online at www.gajart.com  

2nd Place – Lou Ann Goodrich – “Perfect Landing”

A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Lou Ann Goodrich currently resides in Oregon where she maintains forested acreage preserved for wildlife.

She is a proponent of a balanced environment and habitat conducive to maintaining diversity and sustainability for wildlife and the natural world. Animals have always been a large part of her life and after retiring from a career in medicine she pursued photography to record and express the beauty of nature.

Now a passionate nature and wildlife photographer, she particularly strives to portray species-specific behavior in her images. Recently she has diversified and added digital photo artistry to her skills which allows an additional creativity and artistic presentation of her images. Although new to the art world she is gaining recognition through published images and awards in photography and digital art.  http://louanngoodrich-photoartist.com  

3rd Place – Anne Palmer – “Forever Faithful”

Since my parents first handed me a pencil and a pad of drawing paper, art has been my passion. I have had many mentors since childhood and continue to learn. My focus has always been towards the natural world, primarily of animals and birds because they fascinate me and give me peace. My desire to portray their hearts and souls is reflected in every piece of my work, and my hope is that people who see my work will see the priceless gift we have in nature that surrounds us.

Over the years, I have worked in graphite, colored pencil, pastel, and pen and ink. However, scratchboard is my favorite medium because I find that it captures fur and feathers so well. I love the way the light and shadows, so much a part of the art of scratchboard, enhance the emotional side of each piece. My subject matter is often influenced by the part of the county in which I live, but not always. I prefer having the ability to watch my subject birds and animals move, interact with their kind, and to understand their habits.

I want each piece of my work to offer a positive story and better yet, that the story might be different for anyone who views it. We have taken so much habitat. I want to help bring the act of sharing the planet we live on back into balance by helping the world see why through my art. My website URL is www.desertmorningstudios.com    

4th Place – Judi Lapsley Miller – “Over the Moon”

Judi Lapsley Miller’s art is inspired by the wildlife and land of Aotearoa-New Zealand, the awesome forces that went into making them (and continue to make them), and the tensions between the pre-human and modern world. She strives through her art to advocate for endangered species and spaces by exploring themes like the tenacity of life in the face of environmental destruction, what it means to be endangered, and the post-human world. Many of her images are inspired from her experiences with volunteering in wildlife conservation projects, especially with her beloved endangered kākā parrots. More recently she has widened her scope to include birds she has met in her travels, including to Australia and Ecuador.

Most of her recent works are in her "Birds of a feather" series, where the striking and subtle colors and personalities of birds are celebrated in a series of painterly portraits, where each bird is already a work of art and considered as a unique soul. But her passion lies in her "Flights of fancy" series where imagination takes over and roles are reversed - what would the curious and intelligent kākā parrots do in a post-human or post-apocalyptic world? “It’s about time” is the latest in this series. For all her works, if the bird is endangered or she has gained access through the hard work of a non-profit conservation project, a percentage of her proceeds goes back to those organizations to help ensure their vital work can continue. Thus, the art buyer is also participating in supporting conservation.

Photography is just the first step in Judi’s creative process – she digitally blends and masks layers of photographs, graphics, scanned ephemera and textures, lighting and color adjustments, and digital brushstrokes to form an image that is more painting than a photograph. Photo artistry and digital compositing do give her the freedom to expand her viewpoint and delve deep into her imagination. She came to photo artistry by chance, having become frustrated with the limits and rigid rules of wildlife photography that precluded her from telling the intimate stories she could see unfolding around her. After attending a compositing workshop by Shona Jaray, she stumbled upon Sebastian Michael’s online photo-artistic training courses, and completed the year-long professional photo artistry training course “AWAKE” in 2016, and was a member of the advanced “KAIZEN” group in 2017. She is an active member of the Artists Down Under – Australia & New Zealand group and is a member artist of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. She is inspired by (and has done many online courses with) the imaginative and surrealist photo artists Julieanne Kost and Brooke Shaden.

Judi’s motivations for taking wildlife photography to the extreme, somewhat surprisingly stems from her training as a professional scientist. From her background in experimental psychology and her volunteer conservation work, Judi reacts strongly to the long history of treating animals as soulless automata – an approach that has hindered our understanding of consciousness and cognition, and has led to widescale animal cruelty over millennia. She considers the careful application of anthropomorphizing to be vital to our understanding of animals as thinking, feeling, creatures. Animals may not think or emote exactly like humans, but anyone who has spent any time with an animal knows that they are conscious beings, worthy of our respect and understanding. Recent studies into animal cognition are showing no bounds in the depth of animal intelligence and awareness – the limitations of our understanding coming more from our own failings in connecting with an intelligence unlike our own. In her images, Judi exposes her interpretation of the inner world of others – their thoughts and feelings, their hopes and desires – in a form tangible to the human viewer that she hopes engenders empathy and understanding with other living creatures.

Judi and her photo artistic work have appeared in the Australian Photography magazine, the Independent Herald newspaper, Somerset Digital, Living the PhotoArtistic Life magazine (multiple issues), and Artists Down Under magazine (multiple issues). She has exhibited in nine group exhibitions and is about to embark on her second solo exhibition in New Zealand. In the international arena, she was awarded a Solo Exhibition and has twice placed 2nd in the photography and digital media category and 4th and 5th in the overall category in Light Space & Time online gallery exhibitions. Her straight photography work is used widely for advocacy and education purposes, including for Zealandia EcoSanctuary, Forest & Bird, NZ Birds Online, Wellington City Council, the Ornithological Society of NZ, and other wildlife and conservation organizations.

Her prints are available from The Mandarin Tree Art & Concept Store, Kotare Art Studio, Edges Art+Framing Gallery, Zealandia EcoSanctuary, and The NZ Academy of Fine Arts store, and online at www.artbyjlm.com   

5th Place - Sagina V. Gonia – “Seeds of Life”

S.V. Gonia is a self-taught visionary artist, writer, and poet. who has spent a lifetime perfecting her unique technique and voice. Without any of the usual instruction or training, she has created intricate and beautiful works that flow directly from the heart.

Gonia was born by the sandy shores of Lake Michigan in the state of Indiana. Her father was a Dutch immigrant come to America after the war, her mother a country girl from the quaint, rural hills of western North Carolina. Her parents moved to East Tennessee when Gonia was still a baby and raised their daughter along with her four siblings amid a menagerie of critters on a small farm set at the edge of town. It was in the freedom of this rural landscape of forest, field, and nature that Gonia first began to explore her passion for both the inner and outer worlds of creative expression.

Since those early days, Gonia has lived in many locations of great natural beauty and small town atmosphere. She has never tired of the country life or the demands of "chopping wood and carrying water". Always, it is the out of the way places and timeless rhythms of nature and rural living that captivate Gonia's mind and heart and inspire her creativity.

Over the years the artist has shown in fine galleries around the country and hardly a day goes by that she isn't working on the next idea, vision or project. She currently resides on a small farm where besides a life dedicated to the creative process, she also enjoys gardening, hiking, exploring, music, cooking, and especially, all things wild and beautiful.  http://mythicfirecreations.com  

6th Place – Barbara Mierau-Klein – “Crane Journey”

Barbara Mierau-Klein’s fine art images reflect her fascination with the beauty of color and light. Her artwork covers a wide variety of subjects, sometimes with whimsical elements, at times with a hint of the fantastical, often with elements of nature, always with intriguing color and light effects.

A native of Germany, Barbara lives in the Washington, D.C. area. As a passionate landscape and nature photographer since her teenage years, Barbara is often traveling the world to capture photos of beautiful landscapes and nature.

Barbara discovered the world of digital photo compositing a few years ago and has been completely hooked ever since. Layering multiple images, textures, and effects magically help to open up whole new worlds of endless creative possibilities.

Barbara’s digital art images have won numerous awards, have been published in “Living the Artistic Life” and “Fine EYE Magazine”, and are on display in select art galleries in the US. You can see more of her work on her website www.BarbaraMierauKlein.com  

7th Place - Manal Yaziji – “Promising”

Manal Yaziji was born in Damascus city, Syria in 1984.  Manal graduated from the worldwide known French university Esmod, L'École Supérieure Des Arts et Techniques de la mode. She was acknowledged with a recipient award for Best Designer of the University in 2008.

Her artistic journey began as a child. Manal inherited her talent from her family with an artistic background. Originally, her journey as an artist started after graduating. She began her journey as a fashion teacher at Esmod, teaching subjects like Introduction to the fashion world, Colors Understating, and Fashion Trend Analyzing. Meanwhile, she worked with high fashion house creating beautiful clothing, lingerie and designing high-quality wedding and evening dresses.

Manal moved to the United States in 2012. Moving to the United States broadened her opportunities.  Her passion for all kind of art sparked an interest to be involved in jewelry designing as well. As a jewelry designer, she was involved in the unique world of jewelry design and manufacturing.

Manal's innate passion for art has fueled her career. Her dream and goal in life are not only to make a career of her art, but also to express and to share her innermost intimate feelings and passion with the world through her art.

Throughout her journey, her experiences, her emotions, and feelings are expressed through her paintings. Using materials like brushes, acrylic, oil colors and different techniques to create new and unique one of a kind painting with each creation.

Her expression of feelings and communication are from the inside out and are derived from her art.  Manal's sources of inspiration come from diverse subject matters commencing from nature and people. Her work is characterized by deep vibrate colors and illustration. Her passion for art is demonstrated with a highly developed sense of color composition and with keen attention to detail.

Manal always states: "People see themselves using a mirror made of glass, I use art to see my soul." - http://www.manalyaziji.com  

8th Place – Kathy Russell – “Four Faces”

I started photography back in the early 80's. Living in Washington DC, taking photos of hardcore punk bands Pretty much everyone I knew was in a band in those days. I moved to Virginia and then moved to the mountains once I retired. I loved drawing and painting but was never very good at it. I then decided to really focus more on my photography. Always loving animals, I focused on my horses and the wildlife around me.

I wanted to take my photos further. I learned how to work with textures and layering, turning my images into more than just a straight shot. They keep evolving with the more I learn. Having fun is the most important part of any type of artwork expression and I truly enjoy this.  http://kathyrussell.zenfolio.com  

9th Place - Nicola Reif  - “Huntress”

Nicola is a wildlife and pet portrait artist specializing in realistic Pastel pencil work. While she was born and raised in Nelson, New Zealand she has spent part of her adult life in Australia.

Her formal background is science based with a Masters in Geology, specifically paleontology. But a large portion of her education also involved a lot of Biology. She is a member of the PANZ-Pastel artist’s of New Zealand and the WASA–Wildlife artists of Australasia groups. 

She is a self-taught artist who has a lifelong love of animals and a passion for animal conservation. Her art attempts to inject a real depth of character and emotion to each animal, something we can all connect too.

Her website is http://www.nicolareif.com    

10th Place - Fiona Groom – “Looook Into My Eyesss”

Fiona Groom’s painting journey has been an evolutionary process because the opportunity to really paint did not present itself until the early 2000’s. It was at this time she enrolled in a local Tafe course and from there a succession of completed studies ensued including Certificate II Visual Arts and Diploma of Visual Arts (Fine Arts) at Cooloola Sunshine Institute of Tafe, following that 2015 saw her finish a Fine Arts Degree with Curtin University Western Australia.

During this time she also had the opportunity to exhibit her work in a variety of arts festivals and group exhibitions such as the International Nature in Art which saw her awarded a highly commended certificate, and she was also invited to exhibit her work in an International Art Exhibition at Gallera360 in Florence. 

Fiona has exhibited her work in some small Solo exhibitions throughout the Sunshine Coast and is represented by several local galleries. Her work is in private collections throughout the world, here in Australia as well as the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore and the US. Some recent publications have seen her work featured on the cover of Creative Artist Magazine Issue 11 2016 and Artist Palette Magazine No 155, these included a 10-page spread of her work and a workshop showing her painting process. She was also featured in a coffee table book titled Amazing Australian Artists…Professionally Fiona’s activities have included a TV episode on Put Some Colour in Your Life and also several Artist residencies during a variety of exhibitions.

Ms. Groom has also held the position of Gallery Curator at Yandina Historic House for the past 11 years which has given her plenty of opportunities to work with other Artists, organize and present artwork and become involved in an assortment of local community events. Additionally, Fiona has organized and run several children’s art workshops, art projects, and some community-based Artisan Markets. It is all these artistic opportunities that have helped her gain a better understanding of art making and in doing so has given her the direction and inspiration that she needed.

Fiona has said that as long as she can remember she has had a keen interest in animals and art, for her drawing, tracing and cutting out pictures was an important pastime when she was young, and as the years past her interest grew and finally evolved into an art practice that she has today. Fiona said “Describing my work is easy it’s always been traditional realism and the natural world.” Using acrylics as her medium of choice Fiona finds that blending the colors of nature a simple process due to her methods of layering and applying paint using a dry brush.

For her the animal kingdom is the driving force behind her art as she loves to delve into the diversity of animal life Fiona feels it’s important to capture the subject’s character and expression and incorporating their humor, their majesty and wonder, resulting in the painting telling its own story. Fiona's website: www.fmgfionagroomvisualartist.com