A Handbuilt City
A Handbuilt City features artwork by sculptor Judy Desimone and painter Jeff Feeny. Both artists overlay techniques, materials, and imagery to fuse ideas of primitive and modern human impulse. Feeny’s mixed media paintings create a vivid visual dialogue, where energetic acrylics clash with sharp lines and geometric forms. His use of layered collage and dynamic brushwork evoke a sense of boundless exploration. Inspired by the textures of the urban environment, Feeny’s work offers a visual commentary on contemporary life—where seemingly opposing forces can coexist to create balance and harmony.
Desimone’s sculptural work draws from a profoundly primal, instinctual approach, channeling the essence of ancient art to capture a moment of emotional depth. Working with mid-fire stoneware and hand-building techniques, she uses simple, everyday materials—such as screws, nails, and wire— to construct her pieces. Her art offers a playful and whimsical twist, with unexpected adornments that elevate the ordinary. Like Feeny, Desimone seeks to balance the tension between the organic and the constructed. Through her exploration of human connection, primitive instincts, and the mundane, she invites a deeper contemplation of how we relate to our ancient past and modern reality. Together, their works weave a rich narrative of form, texture, and balance, prompting the viewer to consider the harmony found in life's contradictions.
Judy Desimone:
Artist Statement:
I am interested in recording a more primitive and primal emotion. Ancient primitive art strikes a hidden chord each time I see it. To me ancient primitive art is a visual that transports all of us to a time when our surface instincts were foremost in our existence. Mid-fire stoneware painted with underglazes, gloss glaze and oxides are my medium of choice. The technique of hand building enables this expression. I feel it is important to incorporate a human base level and an acknowledgment of a modern reality mingled with an element of whimsy, a quirk, and an unexpected left turn. Simple elements such as screws, nails, wire, construction staples, and adornments are curiosities to me. Hardware literally holds structural society together. Adornments add beauty to the ordinary. Taken out of context, they make for interesting details.
Pushing further I asked how can I relay and incorporate my inner drawings that are colorfully naïve with organic ceramic pieces and capture a moment?
Artist Biography:
Judy DeSimone was born in Havertown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. As a child, Judy was fascinated by her father’s carpentry tools, sawing, hammering, filing and sanding scrap wood. Weekend trips to the local hardware store were such enjoyment, as she dug through the bins of nails and screws. Her mother was a sharp dresser, accessorizing outfits with necklaces, bracelets, broaches, and pins. To dig through her jewelry boxes was great amusement. However, like most children of her generation the outdoors was where kids spent their time, roaming. These categories helped lay the foundation for the hardware, baubles and textures which would later be used in her ceramics.
Judy’s Catholic school educational curriculum lacked the subject of art, leaving her to her own devices to experiment with crayons, watercolors and clay, she would scrape from the banks of the local creek. Other artistic mediums were unknown. At 16, she enrolled in her first art class on Saturday mornings at Moore College of Art and Design’s Young Peoples Workshop. Moore would be her college of choice, where she studied art education. The college’s art history and English classes expanded her knowledge and imagination to inspire and ponder well beyond her previous dreams. In her junior year of college, a detour to a southern California art college introduced her to the world of craft as fine art. This artistic genre was quietly emerging on the East Coast during her college years.
With a bachelor of science in art education, Judy pursued a career and vocation as a middle school art educator at the public schools in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. As a young adult, this career path relocated her to West Chester, Pennsylvania. It was in this middle school classroom where she taught herself various ceramic hand building techniques, leading to a love of the medium. This enthusiasm was shared yearly with her middle school students. For thirty years, Judy’s personal ceramic work comprised of tedious personal diary scenes, animals, flowers and leaves done in bas relief. The expression of realism was the predominant goal.
With public school retirement came a shedding of the old and a blossoming of the new to the quick, spontaneous, “why not art” that she has pursued for several years. The “why not” view was reinforced in her retirement job, teaching art to kindergarten through eighth graders at her local Catholic school. The inhibitions of the younger students’ ideas and techniques reinforces Judy’s personal philosophy of, why not, which she applies to her ceramics. What luck to have had three-hundred-part time muses at one’s disposal.
Judy’s artistic goal is to strive for a quirkiness in shape, texture, color and a feeling of the primitive that will bend to her whims of the present moment.
Jeff Feeny
Artist Statement:
My mixed media artwork is a fusion of textures and techniques, where energetic acrylic paint collides with structured straight lines and shapes. Underneath the interplay of vivid colors and dynamic brushwork is collage that builds the groundwork and begins the narrative of the duality between organic fluidity and structured precision. Large circles, extending beyond the confines of the edges, evoke a sense of boundless exploration. The juxtaposition of sharp lines and soft edges creates a dance between chaos and order, echoing the complexities of contemporary life.
I am influenced by the texture all around us and how it can coexist with flat straight lines and shapes. Walk down any city street and you can see a tactile textured wall harmonized with the sharp geometric lines of the surrounding buildings.
In a world full of constant stimuli and opposing views I want my paintings to project a sense of order and balance. Proving that there is a way to make sense and feel good about our world.
Artist Biography:
Jeff Feeny was born in Oxford, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1963, and currently resides in Marlton, New Jersey, USA. He is a contemporary mixed media abstract painter renowned for his innovative use of materials and unique artistic vision. He specializes in mixed media, employing collage techniques alongside acrylic paint and 3D objects to create visually captivating artworks. He is best known for his abstract designs characterized by rich texture juxtaposed with flat graphic lines and shapes. His pieces often exude a modern urban ambiance, evoking a sense of sophistication and spaciousness that resonates with viewers.
His artistic inspiration stems from the interplay between texture and structure in urban environments. Influenced by the tactile qualities of city streets, he explores the harmonious coexistence of textured surfaces with sharp geometric forms. His artworks reflect a quest for order and balance amidst the cacophony of stimuli and divergent perspectives prevalent in contemporary society. One of his new series, "AI Self Portraits," pushes the boundaries of traditional portraiture by integrating artificial intelligence-generated configurations with elements from his paintings. These compositions, derived from his iPhone selfies and digitally manipulated, are further embellished with paint, pencil marks, and 3D objects, resulting in visually intriguing and conceptually rich artworks.
Jeff Feeny's distinctive artistic style and thematic depth have garnered him recognition in the art world. His works have been featured in notable exhibitions showcasing his talent and creative ingenuity. Through his participation in various artistic endeavors, he continues to push the boundaries of mixed media abstraction, inviting viewers to explore the intersection of technology, urban aesthetics, and human expression in his captivating artworks
