NEW YORK, NY.- A harbinger of good luck, the bluebird signals to us that joy is forthcoming.

For the artists of Bluebird of Happiness, each coming to blue in their own way, our joy is actualized in their paintings through saturated hues, an impossibly light touch, and a flair for the psychedelic. Their meditative fields invite us to move slowly, loosen the reins, and let our eyes dance.

Daniel Hill
Daniel Hill’s work is an exploration between vision and sound and the power of this connection to generate compelling visual environments. The inquiry of this integration has also satisfied a strong interest in the ideas and methodology of science as a basis for the conceptual underpinning of the work. As such, the method of creating his work is scientifically inspired with a well thought out and tested process oriented to have optimal pragmatic results both for the quality of the work itself and the benefits of the process for the maker. Pursuing a union between the perceptual and conceptual with visual art that can be both perceptually powerful enough to hold the eye in our visually demanding world, yet simultaneously meditative, reflective, and firmly rooted in a solid conceptual foundation.

Daniel Hill is a painter, sound artist, curator, educator, and writer whose work explores the relationship between visual art, sound, and science. His paintings employ a rules based system in which the notion of embodied cognition is an inquiry as well as the balance between the aesthetic and conceptual.

Hill’s paintings are held in many private and public collections, including United States Embassies, Microsoft Corporation, and Bank of America.

Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: ODETTA, NYC, Museum Modern Art in Hunfeld Germany, International Fine Art Festival in Kranj -Slovenia, Scholes Street Studio, Seton Hall University, McKenzie Fine Art, Westbeth Gallery, Brattleboro Museum of Art, NurtureArt, Holland Tunnel Gallery-Greece, Pace University, and Margret Thatcher Projects.

He has curated “Visual Inquiries: Artists Inspired by Science” at Pace University and co-curated the traveling exhibition “Emergence and Structure” at Lafayette College, Miami Dade College and the University of Florida.

Hill has appeared on panel talks or contributed writing to; The Brooklyn Rail, The CUE Art Foundation, The Helix Center, SciArt Center, TransBorder Art, Interalia Magazine, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, SciArt Magazine among others.

His sound environments have appeared at Scholes Street Studio in Brooklyn, NY, and in the video/sound installations “Mythograph” and “Aurorasis” with Angie Drakopoulos exhibited in New York and Paris.

His music has received airplay on radio stations in New York, Canada, and Europe.

He is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor of Art at Pace University in Manhattan and resides in New York City with his wife and two sons.

Paula Overbay
Imagining nature at a cellular level: molecules as a metaphor, everything about our environment is a whirlwind of activity in which we are only a small part. This natural energy keeps the weather cycling, resides over growth in Petrie dishes and changes our consumed bread into cells. Our world is in constant flux where the elements exchange from one cell to another as common as breathing and as mysterious as the stars.

The dots in Overbay’s paintings represent this world of throbbing particles as mass, line and pattern. Moving dots smoothly from one element to another represents the transference of energy and remains one of the most important formal considerations to resolve each time. The journey starts from a single point and continues into color masses that coalesce and disintegrate like the murmurations of birds or run in long strings like beads and curl into snails. The many dots turn into form.

Paula Overbay’s work has been exhibited nationally and regionally. Selected solo exhibitions include the Muriel Guepin Gallery, Brooklyn and New York, NY; Jeffrey Coploff Gallery, New York, NY; Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery, Portland OR; Mixture Gallery, Houston, TX; Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Portland State University, Portland, OR; Jamison/Thomas Gallery, Portland, OR and Eastern Washington University, Spokane, WA.

Selected group exhibitions include ODETTA, New York, NY; Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY; Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn NY; Victoria Hall Drawing Rooms, Jersey City, NJ; Schema Projects, Brooklyn, NY; The Chautauqua Institute, Chautauqua, NY; New York Institute of Technology, New York, NY; College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ; OK Harris Gallery, New York, NY; Paris Paper Fair, France; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Pacific NW Bell Headquarters, Seattle, WA; Giuistina Gallery, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Anchorage History and Fine Arts Museum, Anchorage, AK; Carnegie Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA.

Overbay has been awarded three residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL; two residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; a residency at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts, Ithaca, NY and a residency at Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium.

Overbay holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA and a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.

Her work is in numerous public, private, and corporate collections.

Overbay’s work can be found at Muriel Guepin Gallery and ODETTA in New York, NY and Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn NY.

She currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Andra Samelson
Andra Samelson’s work explores the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm, emptiness and form. The imagery in her paintings is often associated with molecular and galactic systems. Rendering forms from the inside, her migrating, dotted lines, made of searching, fugitive points of passage, create ephemeral edges and shifting boundaries in the immediate act of becoming or dissolving as they explore a space they cannot remain in, the space of their uncertainty.

She is interested in the space between things, in gaps, in blind spots, in the space between stars and minute particles, the silence between sounds and the opening between thoughts. In her dotted line drawings, the spaces between the dots set up a rhythm that continuously shifts the focus between inside and outside space, emphasizing their inseparability and returning the viewer to the primacy of the ground.

She has long been magnetized by the color blue, which appears often in her artwork. With its unique, inexpressible effect on the eye, an energy that is a contradiction composed of excitement and tranquility, blue has a deep emotional resonance for her, associated with the life of the spirit, with healing and transcendence.

Originally from Denver, Colorado, Samelson currently lives and works in both New York City and Delhi, NY.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College and is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Samelson’s work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe including ODETTA, the Salena Gallery, Five Myles, Main Window, Trestle Gallery, Site Brooklyn, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and a retrospective at the Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago.

She has been a visiting artist at the University of Virginia and the ceramics factory Ditta Grazia Majoliche Artistiche in Deruta, Italy and her public artwork, commissioned by New Jersey Transit, is permanently on view at the Hudson Bergen Light Rail’s Second Street Station in Hoboken, NJ.

Her work has been reproduced and reviewed in the New York Times, Art Forum, New York Arts, New American Painting and elsewhere, and is represented in several private and public collections including the Rubin Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Jones, and the Loyola University Museum of Art.