Painter Jenn Malone and photographer Maria Savidis-Markatos are compelling storytellers. Malone’s Coffee House ll imbues a South Orange Avenue café with the gravity of a Walker Evans photograph. Photographer Savidis-Markatos Blue Mountains of Ketchikan abstracts the Alaskan site with the majesty of a Marsden Hartley Mount Katahdin painting.
Both Maplewood residents, they are active members of SOMA Arts, the longtime, all-volunteer artist cooperative, heading its annual SOMA Studio Tour. Malone is a past, six-year chair. Savidis-Markatos is on her maiden voyage.
Now through Nov. 8, Malone and Savidis-Markatos are among the 70 artists in a group show at SOPAC called UNVEILED26, juried and designed by painter and curator Jeremy Moss. The show is a part of the Nov. 7-8 Studio Tour SOMA.
Malone came to art after ten years on Wall Street pricing variable rate fixed income products. When her kids hit elementary school, she hit drawing classes, soon turning to paint–oil specifically. In art she finds life. “I paint because I fear death.” In the art world she finds emotional depth. “I’ve found my people.”
Malone’s lone buildings, still lifes and interior scenes often pare to essentials. Her coffee house series become metaphors—time? isolation? hidden danger? In eliminating, she illuminates.
In Black Tulip, a sole bloom stands tall, a sentinel-destined to fall. It’s in a vessel crafted by Petra Pankow of Bloom Ceramics, part of Malone’s SOMA community. “I painted it to figure it out. I like the starkness where wall meets surface and the graphic nature of the line work. I like how the colors interact, the deep purple and the lavender, the traveling dark.”
Attending a protest rally, a woman holding a flag haunted her. Memory became 2026’s No Words. The high value red of the flag’s stripes plays in the woman’s pale, red-tinged eyes. “I depict situations worth memorializing, celebrating,” Malone said. “And, sometimes lamenting.”
Malone also makes verbal and visual puns. In My Side (SOPAC exhibit) rumpled bedding is a symphony of modulated tones, light and shadow–an abstraction of restless nights, punctuated by the book near the pillow.
Veteran photographer Savidis-Markatos captures both the small, the close-to-home and the large, the exotic. She paints street scenes, fauna, often landscapes. Sometimes it’s stillness and silence. Other times, movement and sound: Carnaval de Melo Candombe Drummers, Uruguay, February, 2024 completed April, 2024.
Now 70, Savidis-Markatos has traveled to 30 countries–Japan is next. She travels with her NikonD850 and NikonZ9, adding a D810 on longer trips.
“I always fear the airlines will weigh my shoulder bag,” she said.
Savidis-Markotos returns to her ancestral Thessaloniki, Greece about every year and a half. Stateside, she’s a past Newark, New Jersey educator, creating websites and mentoring student photographers.
Savidis-Markatos started with film photography as a teenager, later switching to digital. “I still love the luster of silver prints.” (Her husband has co-opted the darkroom to make craft beer.)
Launching Photography by Maria Savidis in 2001, she’s followed worldwide. She’s returned to exhibiting after a long hiatus. She estimates there are thousands of images on her website. “My site also includes my bird collection–over 500 species.”
Savidis-Markatos first takes multiple digital images. “I reflect on what I saw, what I felt, and how to communicate that to the viewer.” Then, she becomes a virtual painter, wielding digital tools to emphasize lines, adjust color intensity and superimpose images into the single image of her final print.
For The Blue Mountains of Ketchikan, she was on a moving boat. “I layered three images together then used the line and brush tools to digitally alter the landscape, giving a more geometric feel while keeping the delicate detail of the coniferous trees.”
She also heightened the green tonality throughout. With strong diagonals and horizontals, Blue Mountains resounds in semiabstract wonder.
Savidis-Markatos took multiple photographs of her niece during an area The Nutcracker performance. The ballerina is shown seven times, shimmering in the foreground before ultimately swirling into abstraction. Initially printed as Inspiration, now with intensified yellows and purples, it’s Bold Inspiration.
Dandy-lines (2026) was shot on Thessaloniki’s waterfront. A 1997, 42-foot site-specific work by Greek sculptor Giorgio Zongolopoulos, Savidis-Markatos’s wryly-titled photograph heightens the seascape’s futurism–a modern Greece, more than its ancient past.
