At the end of August, the fifth and final leg of the Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration will open at the Tampa Museum of Art. I met with two of the artists who’ll be on view.
Joe Fig is the chair of the Fine Arts and Visual Studies departments at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, and Samo Davis is a digital and graphic designer for the Sarasota Art Museum. Both artists create new worlds with their art. Together, they represent a return to figuration that’s founded upon the principles of modernism.
Fig sculpts hyper-realistic miniatures of artists’ studios, and paints viewers taking in art at museums and galleries with a kind of realism and figuration that recalls the Dutch Masters. I met with him in his studio where he showed me the works he’ll be showing in Skyway, as well as those that he’ll be showing in November at the Sarasota Art Museum for his exhibition titled, Contemplating Vermeer. We also discussed his books Inside the Painter’s Studio and Inside the Artist’s Studio for which he interviewed several artists about their creative processes.
