Fabled Flora: Yelena Strokin, Robert Langham III, Claire Rosen, & Julia McLaurin

Upon seeing YELENA STROKIN’s images for the first time, the viewer can’t help but be captured by their elegant, Old World beauty. The glowing, Caravaggioesque light that defines her work imparts a jewel-like quality to glass and fruits. Bold colors of produce, flowers, butterflies and European antiques set against a rich background are arranged in carefully crafted compositions that recall the old Masters of the Flemish style of painting from the 17th century. Vegetables seen through Yelena’s lens, are luxurious pieces of sculpture. Sumptuous textures, whether the shimmer of fine fabric, the luminosity of fine porcelain and old silver or the earthiness of rough wood add strength and richness to her images.

Yelena was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, has traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia and now makes her home in Bucks County Pennsylvania. She is a trained chef and has formally studied design and photography. Her love of classical, European art and antiques, her appreciation of the natural beauty of objects from the fields and woods near her home as well as country breads, fruits and vegetables from her kitchen and garden have all found expression and harmonious life in her artwork.

Whether formal and delicate or simple and rustic, Yelena’s exquisitely crafted work possesses a timeless quality that transcends culture and continents to add graciousness and beauty to any setting. Her work is published in many American as well as in European magazines (Burda Food: Sweet Dreams (Germany), Magazine Freundin: Donna (Germany), Cigar Aficionado (US), GENTE (Italy), Bucks Life (US), Home & Table (US) and more). Yelena’s work has been exhibited in local and metropolitan galleries.

CLAIRE ROSEN is an award-winning artist whose elaborate constructions often feature anthropomorphic animals, archetypal heroines, or symbolic still-lives evoking the aesthetics of classical painting influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and referencing the Victorian Era. The transportive images captivate with a fascination of the natural world and ideals of beauty. 

Rosen has twice earned a place on Forbes “30 under 30” list for Art & Design and her work has received recognition from Aesthetica Art Prize, Communication Arts, IPA, Graphis, PDN, Photo Annual, People’s Choice Photoville Fence, Photolucida Critical Mass, Prix de la Photographie and Sony World Awards. Her work has been featured in Complex Art+Design, Creative Quarterly Journal, Der Greif, Direct Art, Faded + Blurred, Fast & Co, featureShoot, The Guardian UK Observer, Hi Fructose Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, NPR Weekend Edition, National Geographic Proof, PDN, Refinery29, Slate Magazine, The Washington Post Insights, and The World Photography Organization.

Rosen’s work has been exhibited worldwide, from New York to Seoul, and can be found in a number of private and public collections. Her first solo museum show was at SCAD Savannah Museum of Art in Georgia (2013) and her work has been included in juried and group shows at Annenberg Space for Photography, Aperture Gallery, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Consensus, MOPLA, PhotoPlace Gallery, with five consecutive years on the Photoville Fence in Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, Calgary, Houston & Santa Fe. Rosen graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006 and Bard College at Simon’s Rock in 2003. 

ROBERT LANGHAM lives in Tyler, Texas, in the same brick-street neighborhood where he was raised. Until recently, he worked in the same darkroom at The Tyler Junior College where he has taught for 40 years. As an assistant at the Ansel Adams studios in Yosemite, Langham honed his skill at interpreting landscape imagery as expressed in his “Shiprock, New Mexico” images. Though he teaches digital photography and the use of photoshop, which he uses for commercial work, his personal artwork is done on film, using large format cameras and a traditional “wet” darkroom.

Langham is also very much a naturalist and environmentalist. His hometown, Tyler, is in the Blackfork Creek watershed, high in the Neches River drainage. His “Blackfork Bestiary” series (a bestiary is an ancient scientific catalog of animals) is a portfolio of live animals and insects from this Blackfork Creek ecosystem, are photographed in a very non-traditional manner and composition. All these critters (from black-widow spiders and poisonous snakes to possums and frogs) are then safely released back into nature. Nor is Langham afraid to experiment with staging non-traditional photographic subjects. In his “still-life” work, “Magic and Logic,” he creates what he refers to as a “kinetic still life.” He reinterprets what we think of as a traditional still life work with movement and fiction done in camera without post-processing trickery. “Magic & Logic” reflects how he worships the mystery of dreams and ideas that find their way into a tangible creation. His work is in several museums, including The Harry Ransom Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Museum of Southeast Texas at Beaumont.

JULIA MCLAURIN was born in 1981 to Polish immigrant parents. From a young age, McLaurin grew up in Houston, Texas. Her upbringing straddled a life in post-war communist Europe and a growing up in America, which influenced her art later in life. At home, her parents spoke Polish, so she became bilingual and multi-cultural. Her summer vacations were uniquely spent in summer camps in both pre and post Communist Poland, as well as time in Warsaw. Growing up she rode, trained and competed in show horses and jumpers, both in the U.S. and Europe. All the while, she was also challenged by family entrenched in old-world religious beliefs that contrasted with a greater freedom of thought in America. The contrast of life in Pre and Post Communist Poland, and life in the United States, early on, molded a perception of government and leadership. Art was fully part of her family life. Both grandmothers were architects in Europe, and her mother, who was also trained in architecture in the U.S., nurtured her life long study of print-making and sculpture, primarily at the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Her father practiced medicine. McLaurin’s path into photography was indirect. Despite obtaining an undergraduate and Masters in Psychology and Biology, McLaurin found herself drawn back to art and visual expression. In 2010 she opened the Srenka (“Mermaid” in Polish, and the symbol for Warsaw) Photography Studio with both of her sisters. McLaurin began experimenting with photomontage, enhanced by her early training in 4-color printing processes. Today, she is a full-time artist and photographer. McLaurin, her husband and children still call Houston home.