Our Philosophy
It’s not that we are lucky or privileged to be artists; it’s that we feel this is our purpose. Melding equal parts playfulness and discipline, we’ve built creative jobs that allow us to help others see their ideas through to reality, and also to create our own personal work—to form, nurture and convey our own messages.
We believe buying into a limited definition of our creativity would prevent us from fully understanding and fulfilling our own creative potential. Therefore, creativity is an action and a function of all that we think and do.
The Artists
His works are calculated and complicated manifestations, while hers are much more organic experiences. As two artists working and approaching life in opposite ways, we have dared to find the balance each of us offers by collaborating in our personal and business lives. While not directly influenced by the other's work, we draw on each other’s vision and thinking. Perhaps that is the secret to our healthy relationship.
Raymond Bugelski
As an admirer of the Hairy Who art movement of the ‘60s, my transition into the Lowbrow art movement of the late ‘70s was a logical evolvement. Motivated by the rawness of the underground comix, the rebellion of punk music, psychedelic flyers, circus posters, kitsch art and second-rate horror movies, I found a home in the Lowbrow movement in which I could thrive, at least, for awhile.
After acquiring some extensive education and real world experience, I decided to put my classical artistic training into use and started creating artwork with more sophistication and intellectualism. The goal was to produce “more beautiful” imagery, while at the same time not abandoning the core of Lowbrow or its influences. While Surrealism was based on dreams and the unconscious, Pop Art depicted the mundane and the superficial. What this movement-within-a-movement allowed me was to take the best from each and combine it into satirical works that delivered popular imagery immersed in fantasy that addressed political and social issues. Despite masterful techniques and seemingly complex meaning, my objects do not reach the realm of “snobbish” highbrow, but manage to blur the line between low and high art, giving way to a new subclass of work that could be defined as Pop Surrealism.
My creativity has to do with the aperture through which I receive information. My sense organs constantly flood my mind, colliding with memories, images and experiences and resulting in tons of information to wade through. Where the normal brain possesses a strong filter for the relevant, the useful and the necessary (in exchange for an attention span), having less of a filter is the camp in which I resign. The camp of the abnormal and the creatives.
I do not care about being recognized by the art world as legitimate; if anything, I like to think I write my own rules in an unapologetic way. My work is inspired by a vast variety of topics and aesthetics that hopefully makes itself easily relatable to a large number of artists, laymen, admirers and whomevers. Pop Surrealism allows me to reach an audience that was not necessarily interested or educated in art and provide them with familiar topics that did not require a particular artistic interpretation. More important than what my art makes you think, is the fact that my art makes you think.
Haley Cavotta
When I was young, my sensitivity was stuck and misguided. I am the youngest of three, four years younger than two older brothers just a year apart. As young children, Matt was clearly following in my mother's footsteps as the artist, while Mike was more analytical like dad, dissecting all things mechanical to understand how things worked and the engineering of it all. I've always felt the complete opposing feelings of being both a distant, analytical observer and all at once so intertwined and one with what I'm observing. What I now know to be empathy and sensitivity caused me to feel mostly just envious and overwhelmed by the desire to understand everything.
I used to love those Highlights magazines in waiting rooms, finding the differences between the two images, and the game Memory, where you'd have to recall the location of the two matching images. I've always been a good seer and an intense feeler. Once I discovered that I had some natural visually artistic skills, looking back, it was all about my ability to copy, to render to reproduce. I was really only translating.
Going through high school in an advanced commercial art class with my mom as my teacher, then onto the Columbus College of Art and Design where I earned my bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, I absorbed an immense amount of information, color theory, anatomy, 3D, 2D etc. I remember realizing at one moment after my foundation years, that no matter what I looked at, I possessed the tools to recreate it, and a deep understanding of why everything appears the way it does. It was AMAZING! I felt at the time, that I understood at least a portion of THE TRUTH.
But recently, I have come to feel very uncomfortable with recreating what exists, whether it is in my head or in my line of sight. I spend so much time observing, listening, taking in, absorbing, that I find with my art, I just need more distance. This distance has represented itself through a slow transformation from more representative work of spaces and forms of the sort that at least follow the rules of a familiar universe. Next, as my perspective got even more distant, the work transformed into what I felt compelled to describe as abstract landscapes. But most recently I've been letting go totally of an expected resulting familiarity. This is where I'm at right now with my work. Let’s see where it leads. It’s a bit transcendental.