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 August 2017 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 "Botanicals" 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 winning artists will also receive extensive worldwide publicity in the form of email marketing, 1000+ press release announcements, event announcement posts and social media marketing. 

Congratulations to our artists who made our 7^th Annual “Botanicals” 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 “Botanicals” 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 Botanicals Home Page here.

1^st Place – Marti White – “Mums”

Marti White is a mixed media artist working in Tucson, Arizona. She works in both abstract and representational subject matter. Marti is mostly self-taught with the help of many artist mentors and workshops. She has always been interested in creative outlets, whether in the home or the studio or the classroom. Her work is eclectic and covers a broad spectrum of media and subject matter. Marti enjoys working without a lot of preplanning, beginning with color and medium and letting her tools take her where they want to go. The result is a spontaneous expression of her inner self. Marti works in watercolor, acrylic, mixed media, and collage. Her work has evolved over the years and she tends to find working abstractly or at least less literally as time goes by.

Recently Marti has worked in series. Her series of Apertures has reached her goal of twenty pieces. These are intended to draw the viewer into the painting or collage so that they can find their own story beneath the surface of the work. Her other works include a series of Scarab Beetles and another of Dragonflies. Marti is easily bored with one approach to her work and loves to experiment with a variety of "what ifs." She is open to using new techniques to play with. These may include papers she has never used before, media that is new and interesting, new methods of preparing papers for collage work, experimenting with various types of transfer methods, acrylic inks, metallic and acrylic polymers.

Marti teaches classes in collage in the community. She also volunteers her time in various arts-oriented organizations. Marti is a signature member of the Southern Arizona Watercolor Guild. She is a signature member of the Contemporary Artists of Southern Arizona which she served as president for two three-year terms. She is a signature member of The International Society of Acrylic Painters and a member of The Contemporary Art Society, an arm of The Tucson Museum of Art. She is a member of the Arizona Watercolor Association, an associate of The Drawing Studio in Tucson and a member of PaperWorks: The Sonoran Collective for Paper and Book Artists. Marti's work is shown locally and nationally in juried exhibitions.

To Marti art is an expression of the soul. Her website URL is www.artbymartiwhite.com

2^nd Place – Cindy Vondron – “Fuchsia Fling”

Cindy Vondron lives and creates in Rockton, Illinois and Cindy began her photography career using a manual film camera.

She received her BFA degree in studio art in 2013 and in 2015 she began to take her photography to the next level by exploring digital art.

Cindy loves how there are no limits to what can be created digitally. This year she has begun to explore mixing digital art with traditional methods.

Cindy’s work is a never-ending evolution. She is consistently reaching higher by always learning more and exploring deeper.  runwaywizard@gmail.com

3^rd Place - Garth Palanuk – “Garden Melody”

Garth has drawn and painted most of his life.  Both work and travel took him away from his art for a few years but he never lost sight of his dream to pursue art in a fashion he could only imagine.

Garth pursued his art interests using regular pencils and colored pencils, ink, pastels, oils, acrylics and watercolor, the latter being his passion. His art subjects include landscapes, structures, people (posed and non-posed), animals and abstracts, each with its own unique challenge. People are his passion and he has been commissioned to do portraits as well as other subjects.

Garth spent two years in Mbarara, Uganda, teaching school at which time he kept his art alive by drawing or painting the people, places, and animals he encountered.

His works have sold in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, the U.K., Ireland, Scotland, the United States and Canada. An electronic reproduction of Garth’s works was juried and accepted in the Gaudemater Gallery, Czestochowa, Poland and the Avisen-avk Art Gallery, Denmark.

Garth is Past President of the Local Colour Art Group, he is a past member of the Board of Directors for the Eastern Manitoba Artists Co-op and the Selkirk Community Art Centre of Selkirk, Manitoba. He is a past board member of the Manitoba Society of Artists. He is a co-founder of “Art Rocks”, a non-profit organization established for the purpose of providing an exhibition and outlet for amateur artists.  Garth’s art can be seen at his website www.garthpalanuk.com.  

4^th Place – Judi Lapsley Miller – “In a Bind”

Judi Lapsley Miller’s floral still-life art is inspired by the beauty of death, decay, and darkness. Her images are dark and moody, heavily textured, and although they evoke feelings of anxiety they also channel hope and perseverance in the face of the inevitable.

Photography is just the first step in her 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 often more painting than a photograph. In her images, she 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 engenders empathy with other living things.

Judi enjoys augmenting her wildlife photo artistry, which is her passion, with still-life photo artistry because it gives her a welcome counterpoint. In the studio, there is time to contemplate and consider each shot rather than waiting on the vagaries of temperamental birds then snapping into action so as to not miss the shot - a different type of patience and a different approach to photography is needed.  http://www.artbyjlm.com

5^th Place – Judith Clark – “Opal Peony I”

Judith Freeman Clark learned to paint by watching her maternal grandmother, an artist, and Judith's primary mentor. After graduating high school Judith, who intended to become a children's book illustrator, entered the Vesper George School of Art in Boston. There, she was introduced to the medium of transparent watercolor. Judith maintained a commitment to painting while raising a family, pursuing a 20-year career as an editor and an author, and following her ordination in 1999 as an Episcopal priest. She has studied with several nationally known watercolorists, including Robert J. O'Brien (Vermont), Tony van Hasselt (Maine), Richard Stephens (Arkansas), and Jo Ellen Reinhardt (Massachusetts).

During the past 25 years, Judith's award-winning paintings have been shown in local and regional juried shows, in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and she has had two solo exhibits of her watercolors. Her work is done in a contemporary realistic style, and her preferred subjects are florals and landscapes, with occasional forays into figurative work. Judith notes that "Watercolor can be unpredictable, which makes it an exhilarating -- and sometimes daunting -- medium. As an artist, I enjoy being pushed out of my comfort zone into the uncertainty of a riskier, yet often more fruitful, ‘creative zone.’ For me, painting in watercolor is a challenge that rarely disappoints."  - www.judithfreemanclark.net

6^th Place – Nicole Wilde – “Psychodelia”

Nicole Wilde was born in Brooklyn, New York, but she always felt California’s siren call of freedom and creativity. In 1987 she moved to Los Angeles. From an early age Nicole had written poetry and short stories, followed by song lyrics, some of which were put to music for bands in which she played bass guitar. And yet, she still longed for a way to express her creativity in a visual form. Possessing a “good eye” but lacking a good camera, she finally purchased her first DSLR in 2012. Knowing nothing about the craft—“I didn’t know an F-stop from a bus stop!”—she began a driving, all-encompassing attempt at learning photography through books, online videos, and workshops. She expanded her knowledge of Photoshop in the same way and eventually combined the two disciplines, thereby finally finding her creative outlet in digital art.

Nicole’s other lifelong passion has been animals, particularly dogs and wolves. She co-ran a rescue sanctuary for wolves, and three of the residents ended up living with her for ten years. She became a professional dog trainer, wrote ten books on dog behavior, and taught seminars worldwide. It was inevitable that her love of animals would find its way into her digital art. Nicole’s images begin with one or more of her photographs taken in nature, zoos, or sanctuaries, and are then transformed through equal parts Photoshop and imagination. Whether focusing on the emotional life of animals or our connection to the Universe, her work centers around the unseen magic that surrounds us all.

Nicole and her husband live in southern California with their two rescued northern breed dogs and boatloads of dog hair. To explore Nicole’s galleries of online work, visit www.photomagicalart.com.

7^th Place – Rosemarie Meis – “Oregon Rhododendron”

Since she was a child, Rosemarie enjoyed art and loved going to museums and exhibitions. When she became an adult, rather than to pursue her favorite pastime, she had to get a "regular" job in order to earn a living. Years later, after raising a family and after a career in education, she rediscovered her love of creating art.

Her inspirations for painting arise from her frequent travels, both domestic and foreign. One of her favorite subjects to paint are flowers, but she also paints landscapes and figures, mainly children and animals. She is primarily self-taught and works in oil and pastel.

In her search for flowers to paint, she usually finds them in her garden, on her walks, or during her travels. She is always looking for beauty, emotions, and mood when she is looking for a new project. In her paintings, she strives for a combination of shapes and colors that are the most pleasing. Special attention is given to the way the sunlight illuminates the flowers. She tries to paint the light and the reflection of light along with dramatic shadows and likes to use a vibrant color palette.

A good reference is the key and she uses her own photos only. She takes several shots of the same subject and picks one that best evokes the emotion and mood she is trying to convey. She is a realist painter that combines the techniques of the Old Masters with a more modern, contemporary style. After roughly sketching the flowers on canvas, she applies oil paint, first thinly, then thicker at subsequent applications. Details are added at later stages. She finishes by applying several glazes, if necessary. She exhibits mostly in local shows, and much of her work is in private collections.  diroseme@yahoo.com

8^th Place - Simmy Ahluwalia - “Oriental Lily”

Simmy Ahluwalia has a passion for art and a dedication to personal growth. Born and raised in India, Simmy earned her BSc—majoring in Chemistry—and then earned her accounting accreditation (C.P.A.) after moving to Ottawa, Canada in 1983. While she enjoyed a successful career in the federal public service, Simmy yearned for the simple pleasure that came from framing the perfect shot, something for which she always had a passion. In 2008, her husband bought her a DSLR camera and like a fly to honey she took up photography. Since then, she earned her certification in Photography Techniques from Algonquin College and has continued enrolling in fine art courses to further hone her craft.

Now retired from her daytime job, she is pursuing her passion for photography full-time. Simmy loves to experiment with different types and styles of photography. Her quest is to document and capture the beauty and true essence of people, places, animals and things. She is an inveterate traveler and her lens has captured exotic and remote locations in six of the seven continents, including Antarctica.

Simmy truly believes in “Make sure your lens cap is off because there’s a whole world to discover”.  simmy.photography@rogers.com

9^th Place - Rohini Mathur – “Dancing Daisies with Pink Hydrangeas”

For as long as Rohini can remember, painting has been her hobby and passion. Even though she doesn’t have a formal education in fine arts, Rohini was always keen to paint from very early on. As a kid, the only homework in school she loved doing was for art class. She was always fascinated by how a blank canvas would get transformed into something so magical with different strokes and colors. For Rohini, painting is a meditative and rewarding experience providing a sense of accomplishment and pure happiness.

Color enchants her, surprises her, it excites her!  Rohini draws inspiration from a myriad of colors and how with a combination of light and shadows, it can create a beautiful harmony of shapes and compositions. Through her paintings, she wishes to express her awe, gratitude, and happiness towards the immense beauty of Mother Nature who inspires Rohini to paint colorful florals and landscapes; and play with compositions to capture the “magnifique” subjects she offers. Rohini enjoys painting in a loose, impressionistic style and bright, vibrant colors are her go-to palette.

As an artist, she strives hard to create each artwork that captivatesthe audience's eyes and make them experience the glorious beauty that surrounds us each moment.  www.rohiniartworld.com

10^th Place – F. M. Kearney – “Colorful Past”

F.M. Kearney’s interest in photography began many years ago when his mother bought him his first camera – a Kodak Keystone 126 Instamatic (which he still owns today). Early subject matter included everything from his pet cat Dexter to various buildings and street scenes around his hometown of New York City. As he got older and his equipment got better, his interests shifted to photographing nature. He took great pleasure in capturing the colorful, natural world through his lens and enhancing it with special effect filters. His professional career began as a freelance photojournalist for a number of local newspapers, but he eventually reverted back to nature, reasoning, “You can only get so creative when shooting the news.”

His creativity – as well as his passion for bright, vivid colors – is clearly evident in much of his floral work. Some of these photographs are the products of a compilation of as many as six or seven different techniques he’s learned over the years. These techniques range from using a simple black cloth in order to help the subject stand out better; to a complex, double or triple exposure to produce soft, romantic glows around the image. He’s recently created a new collection of images that are truly unique. Through software, and a considerable amount of artistic flair, these images straddle the line between photography and Impressionist painting. The final touch is the dew drops, which take on an almost 3-D appearance.

Although the natural world may always take precedence, his interest in urban landscapes never wavered. Living in a city with some of the most iconic subjects in the world has given him virtually unlimited opportunity to capture amazing cityscapes under the best possible lighting conditions. Just as his natural subjects, most of these images are also enhanced through a variety of special effects – usually digital in nature.

His work has been exhibited in galleries in Montreal and New York, as well as a fine art museum in Florida. He’s been published in numerous books and magazines, and is currently a member of NANPA (The North American Nature Photography Association) and the columnist of their Field Techniques feature in their monthly eNEWS publication.  www.starlitecollection.com