He has a BFA in Printmaking and has spent his career working both as a commercial screen printer and as a printmaker in the fine arts. His works have been sold to art collectors and galleries and have frequently been used as promotional subjects for fine art shows and cultural events.

Harmston’s artwork reflects a point of view that he attempts to make both visually attractive and unusual. Unusual, in that the artistic medium he chooses to create with is called serigraphy or screen printing. Serigraphy is basically a stencil making process, in which each color is hand‐cut, and hand‐printed onto the papers surface. With this medium of fine art printing expresses his personal attachment to the imagery with simple hand cut shapes, overlaying with a vibrant palette of opaque and translucent colors. He loves the physical aspects of creating his art: “the stencil cutting, color mixing and the act of pulling the ink across the screen onto the paper. The medium of screen printing, while very time consuming and labor intensive, seems well suited for my creative process. It’s still exciting to lift the screen and see the colors build up on each other.”

A serigraph is an original fine art silkscreen print. There are a variety of techniques to create stencils. Harmston chooses to hand cut his stencils using litho film with an Exacto knife and exposes the stencils to the screen using a photo emulsion process. The screen is a rectangular frame over which a mesh fabric is tightly stretched. Each color is printed by pulling ink across the screen with a squeegee onto the paper. This process is repeated over and over, sometimes requiring 20 ‐ 40 stencils until the image is complete. It takes between one to two months to complete each edition, which are short, usually 50 or less, and they are never reprinted again, the stencils are destroyed and the screen is reclaimed.

Screen printing creates a unique type of art with a smooth, satin like surface quality that’s almost impossible to create with any other technique. Serigraphy became a fine art medium around the late 1930’s and by the 1960s it became widely accepted by both collectors and galleries when artist’s such as Andy Warhol , Roy Liechtenstein and others began creating major works in the medium.

This artwork is not to be confused with mass produced, mechanical, or commercial reproductions or computer graphics. Each piece is a hand cut and hand printed original, and due to the nature of the hand printing process, slight variances occur with each pass so no two are exactly alike. Each print is truly an original, handmade work of art.

Moonlight Gulch (2012) is a mixed media piece that incorporates both screen‐printing and acrylic painting. Harmston will bring a limited edition of Serigraphs of Moonlight Gulch to exhibit and sell from his Featured Artist booth during the Festival. The image itself was inspired from Harmston’s many backpacking trips into the Cedar Mesa region of Southeast Utah. “In particular, during one of those trips I stayed in Grand Gulch, a major canyon in the area. While in the daytime the views are impressive it is what occurred one night during a full moon. The full moon effect transformed the gulch into an ever changing, other worldly place. The moon was so bright during this visit that it was bright enough to read by while also remaining at times spooky. It was a thrilling sight and it inspired this piece.”

During the 2013 Fall Tempe Festival of the Arts, Stephen Harmston will be located in the Featured Artist booth at the intersection of Mill Avenue and 5th Street.

The original of “Moonlight Gulch” has been added to the Tempe Festival of the Arts Featured Artist Gallery, and will be on display at the Mill Avenue District offices at 310 South Mill Avenue, Suite A‐201, in downtown Tempe, Arizona.

When Armando was a child, his mother told him the story of a doll made by her father when she was a girl. She said the doll was so infused with a magical human likeness that the eyes (made from marbles) seemed to follow all that went on around it. The story became etched in Armando’s young mind, and at age four he began making dolls with the notion of instilling in them the same magical qualities as the doll in the story.

He currently resides with his family in Abiquiu, New Mexico, on an organic farm that he tends in his spare time. Many of the basic materials used in his 3D Mixed‐Media sculptures are grown or collected on the farm. He also sculpts and fires the ceramic panels, heads, body parts and ornaments used in his work.

Theater college in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico was Adrian‐Lopez’ only official art schooling. His grandfather was a basket maker and from him, he learned how to weave and construct objects from different materials. At first, he made baskets, too, and then he began to imbue them with a personality; taken perhaps from a tale, a myth, a fable, pastoral, vesicle, an apparition, a mystical encounter, or a dream. His baskets grow wings, rays, and faces. He still essentially is a
basket maker; an artistic/theatrical basket maker; however, the Festival has chosen one of his paintings as our 2013 Spring Festival’s representative image.

Through painting, Armando depicts his artistic visions and inner life in a detailed, colorful, and multi‐leveled format. He builds upon the foundation laid down by the old European Masters.

Using layers of under painting and glazing, he builds up the paint so that the viewer is drawn into the depths of the canvas.

He applies paint as under‐painting, and then he adds many opaque layers on top of that. Many transparent glazes are then added onto that. Much of his subject matter ranges from the angelic through the mundane and sometimes shamanistic. Much of it stems from his interpretation of the native Mexican view of the world and of the New and Old Testament. Nowadays, he paints mostly in oils, though he sometimes uses egg tempera, mixing my own egg tempera using natural mineral pigments and egg yolk. The colors are deep, soft, and, glowing.

“No one bequeathed my dreams to me, No one taught them to me. The muse of my inspiration comes every night and like Prometheus, each day I am disarmed arming my dreams,” he says of his work.

During the 2013 Spring Tempe Festival of the Arts, Armando Adrian‐Lopez will be located in the Featured Artist booth at the intersection of Mill Avenue and 5th Street.

One of his original paintings will be added to the Tempe Festival of the Arts Featured Artist Gallery, and will be on display at the Mill Avenue District offices at 310 South Mill Avenue, Suite A‐201, in downtown Tempe, Arizona.

Since Myers’ very first attempts to create art, he has been attracted to the human form.
Through his keen interest in the history and the intimacy of old objects, he expresses unique stories and hidden values through his art. As a youth he was influenced by his father’s Native American artifacts and American antiques which he remembers thinking of as treasures. He was attracted to the intimate qualities of the smaller objects: the textures of rusty iron, crawling paint on old furniture, and even the musty smell of various old objects from the past.
Myers comes from a background of art making in a university setting, where he focused on ceramic sculpture, primarily figurative. His current work focuses on sculpture that has an implied function. The possibility of people using the work for their daily rituals, such as morning coffee, is both fascinating and inspiring to him.
Myers is the 2012 Fall Tempe Festival of the Arts’ Featured Artist and his wall sculpture, “Girl with Hand Puppets,” has been chosen to represent the festival in promotions and advertising. During the 2012 Fall Tempe Festival of the Arts, Ryan Myers will be located in the Featured Artist booth at the intersection of Mill Avenue and 5th Street.
One of Myers’ original sculptures will be added to the Tempe Festival of the Arts Featured Artist Gallery, and will be on display at the Mill Avenue District offices at 310 South Mill Avenue, Suite A-201, in downtown Tempe, Arizona.