The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
Bio
Eric Pelka is a painter based in Cleveland, Ohio. Born in Cleveland in 1973, he spent twenty-five years living and working in New York City before relocating to Massachusetts and eventually returning to Northeast Ohio. His work focuses on layered abstraction developed through gesture, color, and material experimentation. Pelka’s paintings evolve through an intuitive process of accumulation, where marks, textures, and forms build over time to create images that move between landscape, memory, and interior space. His return to Cleveland reconnects a long-standing studio practice with the region that first shaped his visual language.
Artist Statement
My work operates between abstraction and landscape, using layered color, line, and gesture to construct spaces that feel both familiar and unstable. I am interested in how environments are remembered rather than observed; how emotion, time, and perception reshape what we see. Each painting develops through accumulation. I build and disrupt surfaces, allowing forms to emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure. Trees, paths, and horizons appear, but they are never fixed. They act as anchors within a shifting field. I think of these works as interior landscapes. They are less about depicting a place and more about creating a condition: something felt, navigated, or held in memory. The tension between control and intuition is central to the process, and the final image remains open, resisting a single reading.