Who are the AAF 12? They are the dozen artists joining us at the Affordable Art Fair 2012.

On the eleventh day leading up to AAF, my UGal gave to me: Alaina Sullivan

1. How long have you been in New York City? Just over a year. 

2. Have you been in an art show before? I’ve been several smaller shows, but nothing of this magnitude nor in NYC, so I’m pretty pumped. 

3. Have you shown at AAF in previous years? Nope, but I worked at it last year so it will be very cool to experience it from the other side. 

4. Do you plan on attending AAF? Definitely — it’s a great way for a young artist to get inspired and see the other work being produced by fellow contemporaries. 

5. How many pieces do you have going to the fair? Three sizable oil paintings — still have to figure out how to get them to Midtown!

6. What is one word to describe your art? Fluid.

7. What piece of art will be the hardest to part with if it is sold? Deep. It’s my newest and the second I’ve done in that dark palette because I find it so interesting. It also looks great in my apartment right now…

8. What’s your favorite NYC museum? The Guggenheim. 

9. Do you have a favorite NYC restaurant?That’s an extremely difficult question to answer, especially for someone whose other foot is in the food industry, but I’ve had some really memorable meals at Blue Hill NYC, Marc Forgione, and Morimoto.

10. Upper East Side or Financial District? Harlem. 

11. What’s your favorite NYC tourist destination? The High Line, or Union Square Greenmarket

12. Manhattan or Brooklyn? Tough call — I live in Manhattan, but love the Brooklyn vibe as well.

Browse the Affordable Art Fair 2012 collection and you can snag Alaina Sullivan’s water wonders before they are picked up at the fair.

You can’t trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it. — W. C. Fields

Greetings Art Lovers,

One Oxygen and two Hydrogen atoms. That’s it. That’s all you need to create the substance that no life form can live without. 

Water is a fickle mistress.  It runs below your feet, falls from the sky, and surges toward the coasts. It can change its state in an instant, morphing from solid to liquid to gas. But often when you really need it, water’s nowhere to be found.  

New York painter Alaina Sullivan focuses on the form of H2O we’re most familiar: liquid. Standing alone, water is intrinsically a very slight blue hue. In small quantities it appears colorless. That colorlessness is no where to be found in Alaina’s work. 

Alaina’s pieces start as photographs of water’s ever-changing reflections. When mirrored by water, rigid posts and masts melt into dancing squiggles, hulls become amorphous shapes, colors are reborn and flags are skewed beyond immediate recognition. Her work gives us a glimpse of the physical world through a liquid lens, and a gorgeous one at that.

Artfully yours,

Bailey

Greetings Art Lovers,

Spending summers at a lake in western New York gave Alaina Sullivan an affinity for water. Her youth was filled with “aimless floating, vigorous swimming, and paddling.”

Although Alaina’s now a young New Yorker, far from summer lakes, she keeps that fascination with the water alive in her paintings. Many of her pieces start as photographs of the ever-changing reflections hidden under docks or created in the shadow of boats. Reflected in water, rigid posts and masts melt into dancing squiggles, hulls become amorphous shapes, flags and sails are skewed beyond immediate recognition. Her work gives us a glimpse of the physical world through a liquid lens.

In “Narcissus,” the water is relatively calm, revealing to us a hint of a dock and a string of iconic lakeside flags. The warm yellows and oranges round out the piece, leaving me with a sense of home - a fitting feeling after the holiday weekend.

Artfully yours,

Bailey