Featured Artists Celebrating Woman in Art Maria Simeonova & Anne Kauff Meet & Greet Saturday, July 27, 12-4pm During the Geneva Arts Fair https://genevachamber.com/events/arts-fair Artist Maria Simeonova I've always been enamored with beauty. Beauty in all different forms has always been important. From paintings and photographs to jewelry, beautiful knitwear, minimalist design, hand crafted ceramics and so much more. Beauty is my link to the Divine. I strive to put all of myself and my love for the Divine into every piece I create. My love for art started at a very early age and I was lucky enough to have two parents who are both artists themselves. I was classically trained in painting and printmaking in Boston. I loved classical figure drawing and all things figurative. Like many artists, that is where my inspiration and art love-affair started, the human form. Eventually, I became more and more interested in the simplicity of form. I began taking gesture, shape and line down to my most minimal understanding of it, stripping away the human form and any representation of reality altogether. My interest in abstraction evolved over time from my preoccupation with three things: the relationships between colors, the interaction of shapes and the emotional quality of line. I begin each of my canvases with layers of color and line that are intuitive and completely unplanned. Through a process of editing color and shape relationships, I bring each painting closer to my personal sensibilities. I hope that the amount of love I put into every single piece is available for each viewer to draw upon. Green Eyes 24”x30” oil Anne Kauff Anne Kauff I have a childhood love of barns. I did not grow up on a farm, or spend summers visiting relatives in the country, and yet I find there is something both lonely and mysterious about the way a barn occupies the landscape. I am drawn to their simple iconic shapes and have collected hundreds of barn images, photographing them across the country. They suggest to me ideas about time, friendship, stillness, connection, and these ideas play out in my paintings. Each one is a struggle to uncover the essential, strip away what is not needed and present a clarity of vision. When a painting succeeds (and of course not all of them do) it goes deeper than description - a story, an emotion, something true emerges. Anne Kauff is a visual artist working in the Chicago area. She is a selftaught painter who has acquired her skill set painting en plein air. She works in oils and has focused for the last 10 years on a series of quiet, meditative paintings called “Barnscapes”. Her one person show, “Chasing the Light; Barnscapes of the Rural Midwest” was chosen as pick of the week in the arts section of the Chicago Tribune. She has been selected to participate in several artist residency programs, including The Fields Project, GAAC Artist-in-Residence program, and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts residency. She is a popular oil painting and workshop instructor. Her work can be found in many public and private collections.