Ray Mckenzie - Growing up in Michigan on the Great Lakes, the natural world had a significant influence on my development. As a teenager I spent many days sitting on the shores of Lake Erie and watching the horizon, especially that space where the air touches the water. This visual became the background for daydreaming about my future. “Who did I want to be? Where would I go? What would I do? What would the world be like there?”. It was in this depth of cloud, water, land, and air that I would find myself and more importantly find dreams of who I would become. When I wasn’t at the lake, I would be riding my bike through country highways. Whipping through wooded areas and seeing the stretching farmlands. Riding as fast as I could, imagination taking me to all the places in my books, the landscape became blurs of color and patterns. My paintings are only roughly planned before I start, I know the palette of colors I’m using and an idea of an emotion I want to evoke. Sometimes that feeling changes as the painting evolves and takes me somewhere else. I use a combination of thick viscous paint worked with a palette knife with washes applied with house painting brushes. This combination allows me to work the paint in different ways in between layers.

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Ped Dragich - Born in Serbia, Ped immigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1973 at age five. As with many immigrant families, hard work became the norm, with his father working construction. While most kids spent summers swimming, Ped's father took him to work and taught him every phase of construction. He later joined his father's company after college.Never giving up on his dream of being an artist, he began stretching his own canvases and built his own frames. He displayed his work and to supplement his income, he started his own company called, The Tile Guys, still around today after 20 years. He also played professional soccer for the Columbus Invaders. He got married, had two daughters and coached soccer. Life was happening but art remained in his heart. While building a round shower in his new house in 2006, he had the idea to create a painting surface that was not flat but instead lightweight and flexible with a hard surface covered by canvas. This resulted in his filing a U.S. patent application for the very first curved (wavy) canvas, opening an avenue for a new method of painting. Ped's long journey from immigrant to learning construction to opening a tile business, to building his family's home led him back to his real passion - Art. He creates art with the same vigor and enthusiasm he does with everything else in his life - with ingenuity, drive and hard work

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