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1 week ago | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan |Bob Narod
DC artist Natalie Cheung explores the endless options of photography sans cameraWhen Natalie Cheung was a child, her parents hoped she’d become a piano prodigy. After 11 years of private lessons, however, the diligent student was delighted when they decided she could call it quits. By then attending Falls Church High School, she had been given her first camera. “I was working in the wrong art field,” the photographer recalls, and has never looked back.
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1 month ago | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan |Paul Warchol
What could a painting be if it could take any shape or form? That question was circulating in the art-world air when Steven Cushner studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s. Back then, winds were gusting toward conceptual art, which challenges the conventional notion that a material object is the goal behind a work of art.
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Feb 28, 2025 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan
As she shapes stoneware, Catherine Satterlee unearths the many facets of clayWhile an undergrad taking classes in clay at Bennington College, Catherine Satterlee puzzled over a professor’s words. “I think ceramics for you is a safe harbor,” the adviser told her a half-century ago. In the decades since, Satterlee has tested the waters as an art teacher, graphic designer, painter and member of the Hirshhorn Museum’s exhibitions staff.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan
Visiting her family’s second home on the Chesapeake Bay years ago, Shirley Gromen loved to go fishing with her dad. Now she illustrates those fish, along with regional birds and plants, on wondrous black-and-white porcelains. Mugs, vases, plates and platters are incised with her drawings of swimming crabs and striped bass, or perhaps a pelican pausing among native grasses. Enhancing the tactile surface of her ceramics, Gromen applies a sgraffito technique.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan
Trey Jones doesn’t like to waste anything. So when he watched cabinetmakers tossing out plywood scraps in the workshop they all share in Alexandria, he started saving odd pieces, believing one day he’d know what to do with them. Just six months later, that day came. While visiting a client, the furniture-maker spotted a Japanese Nerikomi vase, its patterns formed of layered and sliced clays. “I saw that and it clicked,” he says.
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Aug 1, 2024 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan |Catherine Funkhouser |Michelle Brunner |Julie Sanders
Time Travel Its location might be beside any sleepy harbor. A place where the sound of silence is broken only by distant foghorns, calling seagulls or sailboat halyards clanking in the wind. […] Fresh Take A timeworn, vintage home in Cleveland Park’s historic district needed significant TLC—and a keen eye. Designer Martha Vicas, who was searching for new digs of her own, eagerly stepped up.
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Jul 5, 2024 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan |Roger Davies
Its location might be beside any sleepy harbor. A place where the sound of silence is broken only by distant foghorns, calling seagulls or sailboat halyards clanking in the wind. Yet the town house where interior designer Patrick Sutton and his wife Tracy reside stands just blocks from the heart of Baltimore’s animated Fells Point. It’s just a water’s bend away from the luxe Sagamore Pendry Hotel, an early-20th-century property Sutton recast for modern sojourns.
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May 24, 2024 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan
Art Studio, Artists, May/June 2024With cosmic beauty, John Ruppert’s sculptures echo the natural worldBehind John Ruppert’s Baltimore studio, a motor roars. From the side of his truck, the sculptor controls a hydraulic lift, raising a flexible, galvanized-steel wire object to stand eight feet tall. When the structure is lowered to touch the ground, its weight pops open the cylindrical form.
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Feb 24, 2024 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan
Exploding with energy, Zemer Peled’s organic sculptures balance beauty and peril Inspired by the splendor of nature, Zemer Peled’s exuberant ceramic art also sends cautionary alerts. In one jubilant piece, a flurry of blue-and-white petals mounds and evolves into majestic blooms, their pointed tips at times poking the artist who made them. From tabletop to towering scale, dynamic forms may twist and seem to shout. Others pop from the wall.
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Jan 3, 2024 | 
homeanddesign.com | Tina Coplan
Dennis Lee Mitchell plays with fire to create art brimming with mysteryWhen Dennis Lee Mitchell’s work was first shown at the 2018 Art Miami fair, the artist overheard visitors bewildered by the large pieces. Were they photographs? Or possibly pencil drawings? Standing nearby, he didn’t bother to correct them. Mitchell’s medium of choice, in fact, is smoke. The amorphous, volatile substance captivates him. “It’s unpredictable and I like that.
