ArtistS we Love
Tess FelixTess is our Program Manager, Annie's mother . She is an inspirational artist we deeply admire for her work and talent .
The mosaic portraits you see here are created from plastic debris collected along the shore close to her home in Marin, California. Tess Felix uses colorful bits of ocean debris to create playful, mosaic portraits of thought leaders and activists in the marine plastics space. Her work employs humor to tell a serious story of our plastic consumption and its effect on our oceans. |
NICHOLAS COLEY
Nicholas Coley was born in Connecticut in 1971 and raised in Muir Beach, California. He hitch hiked around the states for a couple years after high school trying to find Don Juan and Carlos Castenada. He was sure he had a destiny to become a medicine man or a brujo, but after getting hepatitis in a hostel in Santa Fe, he moved to Europe and studied art at the Beaux-Arts plus another small school for painting in the south of France. He lived, studied, and meditated daily for a year in a Buddhist Monastery outside of Bordeaux. After reading 'The tropic of Capricorn' by Henry Miller, he decided he was not meant for the disciplined, monastic life and went off in search for a more creative and spontaneous world, taking him to Prague for a year and selling paintings to tourists on the Charles Bridge. From there he took the transiberian railroad through Russia and deep into China before having a complete spiritual collapse in the summer of '94. The good news is it's been a slow climb back up the mountain toward the benificenece and belonging of a higher power. Anchored by the love of a good woman he's actually been able to support his family, three extraordinary little kids (and seven chickens) even putting a downpayment on a house...all exclusively with the procedes from painting sales, which he's damn proud of and still sort of in dumb happy shock. For almost 20 years now he has been painting full time, almost everyday. Turns out, he was something of a medicine man after all.
project vortex
Project Vortex is an international collective of artists, designers and architects actively focusing on the global problem of plastic pollution through our work. Operating at the intersection of art and science, we strive to inspire people to rethink and reinvent plastic debris through innovation, creative stewardship, and education. We aim to improve global understanding of the impacts of plastic pollution and to assist in the development of initiatives to restrict the flow of plastic debris to our oceans.
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