The Overall Winning Artists Category consists of the 10 Best Entries received from the 2 media categories of the Painting & Other Category and the Photography & Digital Category.

The winning artists will now be featured on the Light Space & Time website for the month of April 2016 and thereafter, the artworks and links to the artist’s websites will remain online in the Light Space & Time Archives.

Congratulations to our artists who made our 6^th Annual “Landscapes” 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 “Landscapes” 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 Landscapes Home Page here.

1st Place – Murray Ince - "Toward Bourton on the Water"

I was born in Newport in 1957, on the whole, I enjoyed school and of course, my favorite subject was always art. I became a furniture maker and gradually moved into designing and manufacturing so I was always drawing and painting furniture designs. I took up painting seriously, though not full time in the early 1990’s, in 1996 I decided to do an A level Art and Design at the local college to get a taste of structured art learning and in 1997 did a teaching qualification. I love to teach people to draw and paint and have tutored classes at the Isle of Wight College. I take students for private tuition in my home studio, demonstrate for art groups and have run painting experiences for Warner Leisure and currently tutor The 5 Bells Art Group that meets in Brighstone on a Tuesday afternoon. I am a ‘Leader’ for HF Holidays, running painting and drawing holidays all over Britain as well as other painting holidays in Britain, France, Italy and Greece.

My first love is Landscape painting and Winsor and Newton’s ‘Artisan’ oils; I have written a book titled ‘Landscape Painting In ‘Artisan’ Water-Mixable Oils’ and am a featured artist and product ambassador for Winsor and Newton. I received a Highly Commended award in the 2012 Patchings competition in ‘The Artist’ professional category for which I was delighted and in 2015 had a painting accepted for the final exhibition at The Patchings. I am a regular entrant to the Light, Space and Time art competitions and have been lucky enough to have had a degree of success.

I exhibit on the Island regularly and have always got a painting on the go, I get a buzz every time I pick up a pencil or my brushes, I am never stuck for ideas or inspiration and always have at least a dozen paintings waiting to be done, the next painting is always just around the corner and who knows, maybe one day a masterpiece! Most of all though I enjoy teaching and showing students that painting can be a lot less daunting than they imagine, to witness the enthusiasm in creating a piece of art that they are proud of is simply magical!  www.murrayince.com

2nd Place - William Nourse - "Tunnel View Sunset"

Will purchased his first digital SLR back in 2002 (a Canon D60) and used that until about 2011, sporadically taking images that might be considered artistic, but mostly taking family photos. Several years ago, he became much more intentional about photography, learning about post-processing and focusing on composition, light, and color to create images and to share them with others.

In terms of style, he draws a lot of the Impressionist movement and the Hudson River School, trying to capture the emotion of a scene, best expressed through the emphasis on color and light, rather than photo-realism.  www.willnourse.photography

3rd Place - Ann Lawtey - "Evening Inlet"

Approaching my art with a sense of discovery, I move from figurative, landscape and still life subjects. I enjoy experimenting and exploring different media and techniques. My personal expression is to interpret form and movement.

My goal is to blend realism with the underpinnings of abstract form. Starting out with loosely painted areas, I add paint in layers, scraping away to redefine a sense of movement and energy. I'm looking to increasingly deconstruct my subjects to incorporate more abstract qualities in my paintings.  http://annlawteyfineart.com

4th Place - Peter Alessandria - "Bear Mountain Bridges"

Peter was born and raised in New York City and Long Island. After attending law school, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an attorney in the entertainment industry. Today he is an award-winning commercial, portrait and fine art photographer based in New Jersey.

Photography is a second career for Peter. He spent the first part of his work life as an entertainment and intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles. Working in the film and television industries sparked his own interest in creativity and in the early 2000’s he began experimenting with digital video and became an amateur filmmaker. But it wasn't until he picked up a still camera for the first time in 2004 that his full creative passion for image-making came into being.

The first couple of years he took almost 200,000 photos. And when he wasn't taking pictures he was connecting other people online about photography. Completely self-taught, he spent hours, days, weeks and months learning the basics of photography, mostly through trial and error. He also decided to tackle Photoshop and it quickly became his photo editing software of choice. He has become quite proficient in using the software in both his fine art and commercial work.

Like many people, things changed dramatically for Peter in 2008. That year, as a result of the Global Financial Crisis, he lost his law practice. In the days and weeks that followed he struggled with the question of what to do with the rest of his life. It was only after much deliberation that he decided to follow his passion for photography, and in 2009, he began pursuing photography full-time.

That’s not to say it has been easy. Turns out there’s a lot more to running a successful business than passion and creativity. But it is that passion that has carried him through the lean times and today he continues to build his businesses and reach his optimum potential as both an artist and business person.

As a fine art photographer, Peter has created numerous collections of landscape, seascape, cityscape and still life images. His work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions. His photos have garnered popular and critical acclaim - he has won twenty-five (25) awards for his fine art photos in the past three years. His work has been the subject of several newspaper, radio and television features and interviews.

Peter finds inspiration mostly in the work of other photographers. And not necessarily the famous ones. Rather, it is his peers - most who he connects with on social media - that inspire Peter to go out and try new things or shoot in new locations. This connecting with others has helped fuel his creativity greatly over the last several years.

As both a photographer and filmmaker Peter’s intent is simple: create compelling images that appeal to his own sense of beauty and aesthetics. If others appreciate his work, that’s great. But he has learned to create primarily for himself and allow the work to attract those who are in alignment with it.

Today Peter identifies as an artist. His photos are his own unique interpretation of reality. He starts with traditional photographic techniques in the camera to create his art. A fan of long exposures and filters on the lens while he is shooting, he then takes the digital file from his camera into the computer and creates his own unique take on the world.

Peter’s intention going forward is to continue to hone his skills as a photographer while being of service to his clients in the commercial and fine art arenas. He also hopes to inspire and educate others interested in photography through his classes and workshops.  www.peteralessandriaphotography.com

5th Place - Jen Walls - "Abstract Landscape VI"

Jen Walls is a mark-maker and mixed media artist who is often inspired by the traditions and stories of indigenous peoples.

Jen is a self-taught artist.  Her art is the result of disciplined studio time, a regimen of exploratory and experimental projects and a good dose of magic.

Jen is an advocate for doodling in the classroom, the waiting room, and the boardroom, she lives in Plantation, Florida, with her husband and one grouchy dog.  www.jenwalls.weebly.com

6th Place - Gregory Van Dugteren - "Pastel Light on Lake Wanaka"

After spending much of his life as a businessman Greg decided to change his direction in life after the death of his Father in 2011.  Greg now spends much of his time traveling in New Zealand with his caravan and camera's capturing landscape, nature and fine art scenes to sell to those that appreciate his unique view of the world.

Essentially self-taught, Greg has won several photographic competitions and he does some commercial photography work.  He now is focusing on developing a website and marketing his work to a broader market.

Greg is very much an old-school photographer, shooting 99% of the time in manual mode and using a range of GND and other filters. "I try to do the best I can "in camera" and use as little software enhancement as possible unless I am creating abstract graphic type images," says Greg: “I am also passionate to the point of obsession with the art of photography".  gregvande@hotmail.co.nz

7th Place - Dimitrina Kutriansky - "A Wintery Day"

Dimitrina Stamboldjiev Kutriansky was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. The daughter of an Eastern Orthodox Priest, Dimitrina immigrated to the United States as a child, when her father was sent by the Holy Synod to serve as a parish priest in Youngstown, Ohio. Recognizing that Dimitrina possessed innate artistic talent at a young age, her parents invested what little they could in purchasing art supplies to encourage her artistic ambition, despite the financial strain of struggling to support a family of four on a priest's meager salary.

Eventually, Dimitrina attended the Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville on a full-tuition scholarship, receiving her bachelors of arts in fine arts. She then obtained her masters of arts, specializing in printmaking, from the University of Iowa's nationally renowned program, where she studied under Mauricio Lasansky, one of the "Fathers of 20th Century American Printmaking."

Dimitrina’s artwork is collected internationally, and she has won numerous awards in juried exhibitions and competitions. Over the past decade, Dimitrina has had seven solo gallery exhibitions and her artwork has been featured in multiple publications, websites, and art blogs. Notable features include being selected as one of the Newest Emerging Artists in Painting by ArtSlant, being profiled on the popular blog Empty Easel, and being chosen for inclusion in Fordham University’s publication Cura: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action. Dimitrina is also a juried member of several professional organizations, including the prestigious International Guild of Realism, the Oil Painters of America, and the American Artists Professional League. Recently, Dimitrina was selected as one of the winners of North Light Book’s national competition Strokes of Genius 7: Depth, Dimension, and Space and is featured in their publication.

Dimitrina is represented by Compônere Gallery of Art in St. Louis, MO and Studio b. Gallery in Three Oaks, MI. Her work has also been accepted for exhibition in galleries, organizations, and museums in states throughout the country, including New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, West Virginia, and Washington. Dimitrina lives with her husband and daughter in the Metro St. Louis, MO area.  www.dimitrinakutriansky.com

8th Place - Danielle Austen - "Emerald's Journey"

Danielle Austen is an award-winning fine art photographer specializing in intimate portraits of the environment. She was trained in the traditional fine arts of painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography where she received her BFA from Cornell University. She worked as a graphic designer before attending the master’s program at the Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, in photojournalism.

Working for newspapers and magazines, her editorial work has been published locally, regionally and nationally, including “Life’s, The Year in Pictures.” Returning to her fine art roots, she has combined her skills and training and has participated in over three dozen national and international juried exhibits, two group shows and now three solo exhibits, as she is presently exhibiting at the Monmouth Museum in Lincroft, NJ.

This year she will be an Artist-in-Residence at the Rocky Mountain National Park. She previously did other residencies at the Great Smoky Mountains NP, twice in Acadia NP, the Everglades NP and the Vermont Studio Center where she received a full fellowship.

Danielle has won many awards, both in her photojournalism and fine artwork. In 2013, Danielle was a national winner of Canon’s “Project Imaginat10n” photo competition with Director Ron Howard. Celebrity director, Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, chose her winning image to help inspire his short film, “Evermore” which premiered October 2013 in NYC.

“As a documentary fine artist trained both in photojournalism and in the fine arts, I am bound to seek honesty in my subjects and to communicate the spirituality of the moment. My work focuses on unexpected views of the landscape… and to tell their story. I search for what many may see as ordinary and discover the extraordinary.”  www.danielleausten.com

9th Place - David Johnson - Cadair Idris"

Dj is an emerging talent whose methods and techniques are largely self-taught. He has been drawing and painting for as long as he can remember, and creating artwork has always been a driving force and passion in his life.

Being outside in nature is a huge source of inspiration, and he loves to spend long periods of time wandering through autumn forests or following misty mountain ridges. Dj says - "If you are patient enough, and can look with the right eyes, there is so much to see", a philosophy that also reflects in Dj's paintings.

His style has developed through many years of experience working in professional fine art studios - designing and producing artwork for hotels, restaurants, commercial spaces, public areas and private estates worldwide.

He is now an independent freelance artist who enjoys spending some of his time teaching art classes and running mural-painting workshops throughout the UK & Europe. His work frequently stops viewers in their tracks, as it so effectively captures the magic of the natural world that surrounds us.  www.combydj.co.uk

10th Place - James Gilbreath - "The Texas Hill Country"

Uniqueness should be important to every artist. Nobody wants to dress, or look, like everyone else, so artwork should be no different. The viewer should be able to look at one artist’s work and tell it apart from another artist’s work. When one looks at James Gilbreath’s unique canvases there is no doubt in anybody’s mind who is the artist.

James’ love of art began in elementary school. When other children were drawing stick figures with a blue sky and yellow sun, James was trying to flesh out their stick bodies in an, albeit, crude style. But in the fourth grade, he had a teacher who used a nine-year-old’s manila paper and crayons to show the class how to show action with their drawing. This unknowing mentor did a simple drawing of a man in a suit with his tie flapping and his hat blowing in the air with the fall leaves from the trees. Young James was in awe and knew from that day, that was what he wanted to do.

Every art class he had in the duration of elementary school, then jr. high and high school, he excelled and won ribbons. At the age of 15, James was introduced to oil painting and his love of art grew to a whole new level. His high school art teacher was an English instructor, who knew how to paint, so they gave her an art class. Under her instruction, James learned the basics of art; the color wheel, perspective, lines, shapes, space, focal points, etc. It was a good foundation, but she painted realism and that was what she wanted her students to paint. She would stifle the use of imagination by giving out C’s to the students who used theirs in her class.

So James painted realism and he discovered that he was good at painting what he saw. Family members began to inundate him with photographs to paint for them. He began to crank out painting after painting and his work began to show his ennui. He began to realize he wasn’t being creative. “I wasn’t painting ‘paintings.’ I was painting pictures of pictures.”

After he graduated from high school, James stopped painting. He didn’t enjoy it and he didn’t want to do it anymore. If a family member brought him a photo wanting a painting, he would quickly throw together “a tripe, flat piece of useless junk.”

When he was twenty years old he went back to school and took art classes with instructors who actually encouraged the students to use their imaginations. He began to enjoy what he had come to hate. His work was very stiff and his teachers tried very hard to get him to loosen up. When he got into watercolor classes, he began to finally loosen up, but he would eventually fall back into old habits.

Despite that, he began to enjoy the process and knew that painting was what he was always going to do and an artist is what he would always be. His love for this elusive vocation would grow over the years and decades. He always carried a camera and took photo after photo to find that perfect scene to paint. His main topics would be Southwest landscapes, gnarly trees, and cityscapes.

Then, after fifty years of painting, James met Willis Davis, a successful abstract artist. That day became an Epiphany. “My love for painting moved to a whole new level. I finally found that elusive thing I had been unknowingly searching for; Abstract Art. Instead of painting a picture of something, I was now painting something on canvas that did not exist before I created it. I was using that imagination that had been stifled so many years before.”

James’ paintings adorn walls from Houston to San Antonio to Fredericksburg, Texas and, of course, all around the DFW area where he lives. Each of his paintings tells its own story, which, as is the nature of abstract, is different for every individual set of eyes that behold it.  www.jamesgilbreathartist.com