ROBERT DIKEN

Robert is self taught American artist and owner of Basecamp Studio & Gallery, where he creates through various mediums. Early goals of becoming a landscape architect were interrupted by another career. Robert began drawing as a means of dealing with planning and building landscape design on a practical level in his own garden.

The colors, textures, light and forms are right there! Nature and landscape provides him with such an abundant opportunity to capture those elements, in my own version, at that moment. He prefer experimentation across subjects and mediums. Most of his work occurs when concentrating on the process, rather than the end result. The “problem solving” along the way is both inevitable and challenging, but still remains the most rewarding consequence of the work. At the end Robert tries to make art that is a spontaneous surprise.

His curiosity about learning new ways to express my work includes abstraction, graffiti and Wabi-Sabi influences. The main goal in creating is try to keep his mind open to new ideas but not doing so much thinking that it interferes with the inspiration.

Robert has been a long time resident of Metuchen where he resides with his wife Joann. Prior to his retirement, he was a managing Director at Marsh & McLennan Companies in NY. After retiring Robert became interested in pursuing his interests in the arts, both on a personal and at the civic level, with a desire to engage with the community on projects which would make an impact in Metuchen. He currently serves on the Not for Profit Board of Friends of Metuchen Arts as President and the Metuchen Arts Council as an Advisor

SIMON KELLER

My motif is gestalt in its infinite manifestations. I work with clay, preferably wild clay and other remarkable natural objects I mostly find in nature. Experiencing the geological metabolism of clay is a journey of lifelong learning and awe. Ever since I was a child. I facilitate tiny instantaneous accelerations in sculpting, turning or painting. Forging the clay in the intense heat of the kiln and fusing it with natural ash glaze, I rely only on bare necessities to create. My work is an open-ended series of takes. Meetings of moments in life with deep time. Some effortless, some struggling, intense or chill. Each is a unique expression experiencing deep time, real and now.

Simon is a native German and son of the 20th century ceramic artists Dorothea Chabert and Volker Ellwanger. He grew up in the castle of Wolfsburg https://www.wolfsburg.de/kultur/museen/schloss-wolfsburg a center for visual and applied arts, art events, music and theater. A childhood helping and playing with clay in his parent’s studio while being immersed in the castle’s eclectic artist community was formative and inspiring. After high school he followed an invitation to Japan to study with ceramic artists Daiguji Michiko and Tappo Narui in Mashiko for seven years. In the 1990ies he worked along master potter Hosui Fukuda in Kumamoto in southern Japan for six years, engaging in the 400-year-old classical pottery style Shodai-Yaki. Here he started to experiment with wild clay, a love affair that continues to the present day. His tenure culminated in the curation and execution of exhibitions in Germany (Kamabiraki – Opening the Kiln, Shodai-Yaki - Beauty of Function and Renewal, 1996 – 2000), he relocated to the United States in 2004.

Simon has been teaching at New Jersey’s oldest private art institution, the duCret School of the Arts, https://www.ducret.edu for the past ten years. He developed the comprehensive curriculum takumi (“the art of making”) based on authentic Japanese pottery techniques and an intuitive less is more approach to process and materials. Since 2016 he has hosted the Open Studio Ceramics, and added reverse engineered wild clay to the mix. His ceramic expertise has repeatedly served the new materials review board of New York based Material Connexion https://www.materialconnexion.com.

Simon’s Clay Dance performance art project (2016 – present) has had more than 30 events since 2013. Recent works were showcased at MGalleries https://www.mgalleries.org, Grounds for Sculpture https://www.groundsforsculpture.org, Frontline Arts https://www.frontlinearts.org and Papillon & Company https://www.papillongifts.com.

Simon lives with his wife Christy, a teacher of theater and son Max in Flemington, New Jersey

JOHN MARRON

John is a Zen writer, artist, publisher, Family System Life Coach and lay monk student of Robert Aitken Roshi, Manfred Steger, Perle Besserman, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Krishna Das & Dogen Zenji.

John’s art work embraces Wabi-Sabi, Dada, pure play, chance, sumi-e gestural abstraction and poured acrylic. More recently John has completed multimedia commissions to address food insecurity, LGBTQA+ rights, income inequality and climate change.

John is also a passionate community organizer and activist. His many roles include; Chair of the Highland Park Arts Commission, co-founder of the Highland Park Artist Collective, a member of the HP Main Street Board Member/Art Liaison for Window Art Walk, a Family Therapist at UMDNJ/Rutgers U Behavioral Health for 26 years, the author of Haiku/ Language / Concrete Poetry books “Oiyeau”, “Visual Syntax” & “Blips's, a Coordinator of Jizo Mind/Body Institute (Open Circle Meditation Group), an Olli-Rutgers U instructor, and a team member of the social justice public art project “Windows of Understanding”.

John currently resides in Highland Park, NJ.