Painter Thea Schrack @ The Bryant Street Gallery

 Artists Tea Schrack

Illusive is the word that best describes my attraction of this subject matter. By nature it is not static, only I make it so.

My hope is that the work connects to the viewer by evoking some kind of passion. Maybe it’s in the color or just a feeling of wanting to be in it.  In some abstract way I want them to get lost in the work, like I do when I photograph or paint it. Water, being never static is a life lesson, forever becoming something else, we can learn from it. Embrace becoming something else-called change. Learning from waters fluidity, living like water and never being trapped.

Inner landscape=the act of painting

Outer landscape=the act of photographing

Jay deFeo has been an inspiration since I was at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980’s. Her piece the Rose was buried in a wall of a class room and held such a huge amount of mystery to us students. Her current retrospective reenforced my feeling towards her work

Blue Shadows,  23"x15",  Encaustic

Light On Water,  43"x47",  Encaustic

Oil and encaustic paintings : 

Encaustic wax is a combination of beeswax, resin and pigment for color.  It is applied hot, around 220 degrees, then fused with a heat gun or torch.  The surface (birch panel) is built up with numerous layers of not only wax, but also oil paints and pigmented wax.

Color photography, printed with archival pigment inks is combined with a number of layers of Encaustic wax.  The photograph is mounted on birch plywood panels, the edges finished and ready for the wax painting.

Amy Sollins: Black dust and double edged fairy tales

Amy Sollins

                                                                                                 Automaton, Charcoal and Pastel on Paper, 31" x 24 "

For the past eight six years I’ve been making charcoal drawings of my possessions, including my grandmother’s cast iron doorstop, my underwear, my jewelry, a small bronze Buddha. I draw with the softest charcoal possible so that the dust falls in shadows. The titles often describe the objects and sometimes their colors. For example, a black charcoal drawing of nine views of a bar of white dove soap is titled Nine White Doves. I completed a series of drawings based on Andersen’s Fairy Tales that are framed with matchsticks. Recently, I’ve been making more elaborate drawings with charcoal, pastels, and watercolor.

                                    Attachment, Charcoal, Pastel and Watercolor on Paper, 30 1/4" x 22 1/4 "

I’m utterly in love with the sound of charcoal as it crunches between my fingers as I push it into the paper, how it glides along the surface and disappears when erased with a kneaded eraser or chamois, how it breaks and cracks, how the dust settles naturally or when I blow on the drawing. These were the first methods and tools I learned as a beginning art student and here I am again. I’m reminded of one of my favorite (and often quoted) passages from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Indian on Horseback Toy, Charcoal on Paper, 22 " x 30"

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

The vintage beauty of Michael Cutlip

Michael Cutlip 

My materials are vast. I don’t like limitations. Anything goes in my studio…if it makes a mark, I will use it.

I draw inspiration from most that is naïve. Children are, hands down, the best artists. Their freedom and uninhibited nature taps into that certain energy which all mature artists seek their entire lives.

Urban nature, street art, things old, vintage, warn-out, discarded, natural beauty in its abstract form and simply the moment, the moment of creation – where one move inspires the next. One has to only open his eyes…..beauty is everywhere.

The process is essential. I work in the moment. In my experience, a planned painting is a failed painting. The painting must be free to wander. The best works are those that seem to simply happen.

Michael Cutlip is a full-time, working artist living in Berkeley CA, with his wife Akiko and their two children Sumi and Luca.

NocturnalMonotype
16" x 20"

Blue CarnationMonotype
10.5" x 13.5"

Gumi has got to be a food group

California-based artist Jeanne Vadeboncoeur has created a series of photorealistic paintings that feature charmingly expressive gummy bears. She paints the candy bears in various positions—sitting primly, on their heads, toppled over—Vadeboncoeur has imbued her subjects with a curious melancholy. The infusion of melancholy is most striking. 

To me it looks like honest art about any creature that knows it's own fate ... and let's be honest, it's probably going to be eaten, and it knows it. Considering that they are made to be eaten combined with they daily war they fight to exist in a food chart that dose not even recognizre them as a food group you start to imagine just how it feels to be from the world of gumi. Pathos injected into candy, few can pull that off. Perhaps only one, Jeane Vadeboncoeur.