A Group Exhibition: Leah Diekhoff, Amanda Thompson, and Peter Mudd

ABOUT LEAH

I grew up in the small southern Indiana town of Holland. Art became an integral part of my life when I was in high school and I decidedly chose to follow it as a career path. I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with concentration in painting from the University of Indianapolis in 2021. After graduating, I moved back to southern Indiana and upon looking for a job in the art field, found The Rumjahn Gallery. I have been working here at the gallery since the fall of 2021.

Leah’s ARTIST STATEMENT

Young adult novels have made an impression in my dreams and everyday thoughts since I was a fifth-grade child. The magical and creative universes portrayed in these novels captivate me. My artwork, inspired by these novels, creates miniature worlds encased in boxes that tell a story. Creatures and potions, science and exploration, gears and clocks, and whimsical and multidimensional realms fuel my imagination and are prominent subjects in my work.

I capture a specific moment in time for the scenes I create. Often I explore what world I would like to be a part of and how I can configure a narrative that gives me a chance to become a part of that world. I make my figures, props, and accessories from polymer clay and found objects, which are painted, sewn and configured into active environments. I often enhance these environments with painted canvases in the background. 

Tension is something I love to represent in my art, whether it is subtle or extremely visible. Books inspire me to envision words as tangible scenes and influence my art to merge the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and represent the process of pulling images from the mind into existence. With my work, I wish to show others a glimpse of the creative world I live in. My work allows for fear and curiosity, for exploration and creativity of the mind, to place oneself into a world and finish the narrative, each entirely different from the next.

ABOUT AMANDA

I am originally from Avon, Indiana and am currently in Indianapolis, Indiana. I graduated from the University of Indianapolis in 2021 with a BFA degree with a concentration in painting. I currently work full-time in marketing and create my work on the side.

As far back as I can remember, I have always loved painting and drawing.  When I went  to college, I decided to pursue my love of art.  I learned a lot in my time at college and my artistic skills got a lot better.  I fell back in love with painting and found an appreciation for a lot of new art mediums I had not focused on in the past.

I love being in nature so that tends to be a theme in my artwork.  I also love to read, which is another huge inspiration for my art.  I do mostly surrealism and some landscapes but I tend to blend the two styles in what I describe as nature surrealism.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art is mystical.  I create little worlds of surrealism with a mix of subject matter to create a dream like fantasy.  I am heavily influenced by nature and reading books.  I enjoy experiencing new things and coming up with ideas for paintings that are a little familiar and a little weird all at once.  I get a lot of my inspiration from dreams that I have and images I see on the internet.  I create these paintings because they are ideas or worlds that I want to see in real life and want others to find joy in them as well. 

I paint in a more realistic style because even though I am painting surreal subject matter, I want it to look like it could truly be a part of this world.  I do this by adding contrast, perspective, texture and many other techniques.  That being said, I do make sure that you can still see that it is a painting because that adds to the fantasy feel, whereas hyperrealism would make it look like a photograph and have a slightly different connotation to it.  I hope that my audience doesn’t just see the moment or little world I am trying to create but lives in it as well.

ABOUT PETER

I have lived in Evansville Indiana all my life. I grew up on Green River Road and attended high school at Evansville Harrison.  I studied Biology for three years at the University of Southern Indiana before dropping out to work at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana in Princeton. It was during my nearly 11 years of work there that I discovered how much I like to make art. I had been listless for years, and I was hardly able to put thoughts towards anything but abstract daydreams and philosophical confusion. I discovered I had ADHD. At the time I almost exclusively made art with a pilot g2 7mm black gel pen. Since then, I have experimented with colored pencils, paints, and markers. My art is inspired by curiosity and I find the aimless stroke of black pen on white paper while music, an audiobook, or a lecture course plays in the background to be one of the most therapeutic things to my ever racing mind.

Artist Statement

As a youngster I spent a lot of time trapped in my own head. I had two brothers, one older and one younger, who were much more socially inclined than me. I spent a lot of time thinking and over the years my mind became heavily congested with questions for and about the universe that I was unable to articulate with any direct means of expression. I want to put all of that stored energy to use. That’s what my art is, questions that are too wild for words. Too wild to be asked or answered by words.