Stephanie Richardson: She is an artist and designer based in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Working with a wide array of mediums, she strives to create dynamic visual experiences. In her work, she likes to combine natural elements with figure drawings and manipulate them to create supernatural scenes full of intense drama and emotion. Before coming to UD, she was an illustration major at the University of the Arts. While there, she enjoyed creating collaborative projects with her peers in the Dance and Music Business departments of her school. At UD, she is currently a BFA Fine Arts senior, with a minor in advertising. She has received many amazing opportunities such as co-curating … And I'm Black in Gallery One in the Kimmel Center of Performing Arts, being a part of the group show Unapologetic Conversations of Hair and Nonconformity at the Delaware Contemporary, and being a media production and digital marketing intern at Horn Entrepreneurship.
Izaak Rodriguez: Izaak Rodriguez is a digital illustrator and painter based in Newark, Delaware. With an affinity for fantasy and horror subjects, his work pursues an aesthetic at the crossroads of darkness and beauty. Rodriguez incorporates themes and narratives from mythology and folklore to tell stories through painting figures, animals, and other creatures. He draws inspiration from artists both historic and contemporary to create work using traditional painting methods in tandem with more modern, experimental techniques. He often combines both analog and digital media to create digital illustrations with a traditional feel. After graduating from the BFA program at the University of Delaware, Rodriguez hopes to grow into a career as a fantasy and science fiction illustrator.
Alexa Nacchia: Lex Nacchia likes to explore themes of mental health and what can loosely be described as the “human experience" through comics and animations. She's always liked to work narratively—storytelling is something that's always fascinated her. Growing up on cartoons and comics has really influenced the way she likes to make art and tell stories. Early 90's inspiration along with gross-out cartoons have really paved the way for her character designs and content. To her, art has always felt a lot like journaling. She can look back at a piece and tell you what was going on and where she was mentally around that time—it's a level of personality that can't always be achieved in other forms of self-expression. She likes to harness this ability and create works that are extensions of herself and her thoughts—just portrayed with funny little animal characters.
Madeleine Morris: Madeleine Morris is a senior fine arts major at the University of Delaware. She is a creative who gets inspiration daily from the world around her, specifically through her relationships and social experiences. Her work celebrates moments and memories with other people and is directly inspired by photographs taken by her. Focusing more recently on oil painting, Madeleine keeps her work spontaneous and candid, much like the photographs she works from. She hopes her work can spark conversations among the viewers so that they too can find something to relate to within the piece and celebrate a time when they had a similar experience.
Joshua Hurd: Joshua Hurd is concluding his journey at the University of Delaware, which has taught him immensely what it means to be an artist and how he wants to express himself to the world with his art. His artistic career began with trying out different forms of drawing and painting through taking classes after school. As he got older, he started taking photography classes and immediately knew that it was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He views the camera as an extension of his right hand and leans into nature and landscape photography, but has also recently begun his endeavors in drone piloting and filming.
Jessica Zebleckes: Jessica is inspired by the emotional state and internal narrative of human beings and the ambiguities that are tied into their personality and identity of who they are as an individual. The bodies of work she creates focus on expressing one or more aspects of a person that they may not be able to do otherwise. In her work titled, “Love is Risk", she used this idea to express the emotional impact of a situation that many couples are afraid to face and is based on her own experience and fear that she might lose the person she loves. Her vision is to make art that gives voice to things about human beings that they want to express but haven't been able to, and the work she creates serves as a way to convey the concept of who they are that is inspired from the ambiguous origin of the human mind and heart.
Brenna Bochow: Brenna Bochow is a fine arts major and forensic science minor at the University of Delaware. She is very explorative in her artistic endeavors, utilizing many different artistic mediums and techniques. She primarily works in paint, photography, illustration, printmaking, and sculpture. Her work is often inspired by her own dreams, nightmares, and personal emotional experiences with the world around her. She likes to create work that follows a narrative, whether fictional or based on real life events—she is most intrigued by work that tells a story. As someone who adores movies, video games, TV shows, anime, books, and countless other forms of media; Brenna loves to be inspired by the many great stories and works of fiction she finds so entertaining.
Brenna is most interested in conveying layers of meaning within her work, even if she's the only one who understands how it connects. For Brenna, her creation of art is critical to the understanding of her own thoughts, being both introspective and extrospective. It functions as a transition from jumbled emotions to logical thinking, allowing herself to make sense of complex thoughts and ideas. She's able to combine her expansive imagination to bring tangibility to these thoughts. The goal of her work is also to incite curiosity and encourage people to analyze and speculate about the meaning of her work just as she does about all parts of life. Because of this, there is always a note of mystery to her pieces that allows more ambiguity (and in her opinion, just makes them more fun).
