"Canoe II" is the latest limited edition print to be produced by Sue Nash. The original oil painting from which this print was reproduced is in the permannent collection of the Hotel Hana-Maui. The owners of the hotel chose this image as one of the pieces of art to decorate the Sea Ranch Cottage Suites in the form of Artist Proofs. These Artist Proofs will not be sold. The regular signed and numbered edition of only 195 prints has just been made available exclusively through the Hana Coast gallery as part of the Hotel Hana-Maui Collection.

As a professional historian specializing in art history, Dr. Sue Nash became interested in the mythology and visual legacy of Hawaii when she moved to Maui with her family in the middle 1980's. After the experience of living in Korea and Japan, and teaching art history in Taiwan, Sue Nash came to Hawaii with a reverence for visual symbols. And in the islands, the petroglyph is one of the best known Neolithic symbolic languages.

Petroglyphs are works of art incised or pecked onto rock. Filled with mystery and a compelling power, they speak of the universal longing to create beauty and leave a permanent record. It was these images which impelled Sue Nash to become an Artist/Historian, a creator of art along with being a teacher of art history.

There are in the U.S. only a handful of artist-historians ... painters and printers who cultivate the discipline of the historian, but whose end products are pictures rather than words. Dr. Sue Nash is one of them. She spent several years preparing for her new career in art, studying printmaking and papermaking at Hui Noeau Visual Art Center on Maui, and as a member of Lama Ho'iki, an organization dedicated to perpetuating the arts of Hawaii.

Based on the ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs, Sue Nash interprets these powerful island images onto paper using the drypoint intaglio and monoprint printing techniques with oil-based printing inks. She uses the time-honored medium of printmaking because of its immediacy and responsiveness. Nash seldom exceeds four or five prints in an edition, and each of these prints is itself a unique monoprint. More recently, Dr. Nash has gone back to oil on canvas using vividly hued primary colors to portray her images.

Margaret Bedell uses her painterly palette much in the same way as a musician uses an intrument. She creates symphonies of color, taking full advantage of the dazzling array of floral colors in the islands. Her work is exuberant, with a tropical richness that a very natural result of her own avant-garde multi-media artistry.

Mrs. Bedell has a master's degree in printing and is considered to be one of the most outstanding university-trained printmakers in the United States and Canada, where she was born.

The Discovery of Beauty ~ The Expression of Delight ~ The Art of Exuberance

That is the painting philosophy of Maui artist, Ed Lane, as he searches out dramatic Hawaiian Island vistas, plantation homes, churches and people.

In 1994, Ed completed a successful 36-year career as President and CEO of a large regional advertising agency, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The same year he moved to Maui and fulfilled a lifetime dream by beginning a new occupation as a full time artist. His goal now is to share his enthusiasm for Maui and all of the Hawaiian Islands with others through exuberant oil paintings.

Eds interest in and training in art began as a child. Surrounded by artists in his family, his creative abilities were recognized and encouraged. He spent much of his youth studying at the Kansas City Art Institute and the William Rockhill Nelson Art Museum in Kansas City.

Ed graduated with a major in history and minor in fine art from the University of Missouri. He served two years as an officer in the Air Force before beginning his advertising career. He excelled in the creative aspects of advertising as a writer and art director. His advertising was hailed by associates and clients as “exuberantly, creative, and above all successful”. His creative work received numerous national awards including EFFIEs from the American Marketing Association, and CLIOs. Ed was named Ad Man of the Year in 1995 by the Phoenix Ad Club, served as regional chairman of the American Advertising Agency Association and is a lifetime member of the Mutual Advertising Agency Network.

Today, Ed spends his days either in his Wailea studio or doing plein air paintings in Maui and the other Hawaiian Islands. He has also spent time in Arizona, California, Tahiti and France traveling with his easel and painting supplies, capturing the light, unique colors and vistas of those areas. During the summer of 2003 he participated in an art fellowship in Hungary as part of the International Hungarian Art Exchange Program.

His paintings are in private and corporate collections in Maui, Honolulu, California, Arizona, New York, Washington, Illinois, England, Japan, Spain, France and Hungary. He has been selected to be in over 65 juried shows in Hawaii and on the mainland, has received numerous awards in national juried shows and has received reviews by art critics in Honolulu and Maui. In 2001 the Hawaii State Foundation for the Arts purchased a painting for the State Collection. His work is represented in galleries in Santa Monica, Maui, Honolulu and the Big Island.