EXTRAORDINARY TIMES, EXTRAORDINARY ART

By Jolene Crowley

October
1, 2008 (SAN DIEGO) - Three local artists, Theresa Vandenberg Donche
of Mt. Helix, Encinitas resident Reed Cardwell, and Igor Kautsenko of Fallbrook,
will be displaying their latest work collectively entitled “Extraordinary
Times, Extraordinary Art!” at 6 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 25, at 3911 Harney
Street in Old Town.

East County resident Vandenberg Donche was born to a family
of Dutch immigrant farmers. Growing up on a farm in Central California, she
has always been sensitive to the sounds, smells, and colors of nature. Like
many artists, Theresa attributes a lot of her inspiration to the environment
she lived in as a child: the cultivated landscape, the overwhelming skies,
and the constant variations of the seasons. She likes to say about her art
that "expressing feelings about what you
see and smell is an abstract notion that can't be sketched. It's like a Bach
concerto, you feel it, but you can't describe what it looks like. It's an emotion.
Abstract art is the expression of an emotion."

Cardwell, who worked as an animation artist for Walt Disney
Feature Animation in Burbank for six years, currently makes a living as a
painter and teacher in Fine Arts. His philosophy is to paint  “…not
what you see, but what you prefer to see.” Reed is currently an instructor
at the Athenaeum School of the Arts, the Art Academy of San Diego and at
UCSD Extension. He has exhibited locally and nationally and has work in private
collections.

Koutsenko
was born in Evpatoria, a resort city on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black
Sea. He was educated at the Penza School of Art and received rigorous training
in the old traditions of Russian realist art.  Koutsenko immigrated to
the United States and in 1995 was granted permanent United States residency
as an alien of extraordinary abilities. Numerous works by Koutsenko have entered
some distinguished private collections in the United States, as well as the
permanent collections of the Riverside Art Museum, Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company,
Institute for Specialized Medicine, Hoffman Trust Collection and many others.

Jolene Crowley is a life-long East County resident who spent a
decade at The Tribune (which later merged with the San Diego Union), another
decade in several local public relations firms, and now operates Crowley Communications,
a boutique communications consulting firm specializing in media relations.  She
is currently studying graphic design at Cuyamaca College and plans to add design
services to her client roster in the near future.