No doubt you’ve heard that we’re in the midst of a major drought here in California. Even in the short amount of time we’ve been here, we’ve seen the landscape shift and change. Fellow Bay Area artist Cynthia Ona Innis explores the shifting diversity of the California landscape.
Mr. F and I have experienced the range of California’s landscape, from six months in the high desert of Joshua Tree, a year amidst the Redwoods in Eureka, and now among the hills of Marin County. Innis’s paintings beautifully illustrate in an abstract way the amazing diversity in the state.
You are nothing but prickles and stings.. so states Anne Shirley to formidable headmistress Katharine Brooke. These hyperrealistic paintings by Kwang Ho Lee are most certainly full of prickles, but the sting is how incredibly gorgeous they are!
Cactus have this incredible dangerous beauty to them, don’t they? Those incredible textures, especially in the “fuzzy” variety, leave us longing to touch but the second we do we’ll know why we shouldn’t. Which gives them such a lovely, unattainable, untamable appeal.
To see more of Kwang Ho Lee‘s work, please visit the website of his representing gallery, Kukje Gallery.
When you’re hurting, the color seems to go out a bit from the world. Having just spent the two weeks by my mom’s side, watching her struggle against a body that is failing, witnessing her spirit soar in one moment, only to crash in the next, it seems strange to get back to “normal”.
On one hand, I want to savor each day with fervor, for now more than ever, I know there is no promise of tomorrow. But then something will grab hold of me, the whisper of a memory grips my heart and I am undone.
It’s a struggle to climb out of that hole, once you’ve lost your footing. Everything goes pale. The colors fade like old sheets washed too many times. But eventually, given time and love, slowly the washed out places will become renewed and refreshed. I know that I’m not in my palest period, yet. But I also know that the loss of color won’t last forever. It will return in even greater brilliance.
It is ok to languish in the pale for a while, though. It has to be.
The paintings featured today are by Kat Hannah. You can see more of her work in her Etsy shop and on her blog.
Very early tomorrow morning, I’ll be at the San Francisco airport. I’ll board a flight that will take me home. I’m going back to Florida to see my mom, for what I really hope isn’t, but could very well be, the last time. She’s losing her battle with cancer and all treatments have been halted. We don’t know how long she has– could be as little as two months or as much as a year. Every time I go back to Florida, it feels less and less like home to me. And once she isn’t there, I suspect that feeling might just be gone for good.
Since marrying Mr. F and leaving Florida, my heart has been torn between here and there. But home has shifted now. It isn’t my hometown, it isn’t even where my family is. It is wherever I’m making a life with my husband. And these days, that is wherever we happen to be. In each place we find ourselves, I put a lot of energy into making it feel less like a temporary landing spot and more like a home. It’s something I learned from my mom, this nesting thing.
When I think about her back in Florida, I picture her at home, surrounded by her favorite things– the teapots she collects, my grandmother’s paintings. Her home, the house she’s lived in for over twenty years with my stepfather, felt like my home, not just because I lived there for eight years but because she was there. Once she is gone, it will just be a house again, filled with her things.
The goodbye is coming, but it won’t be forever. I take comfort in knowing that she’ll be free of pain and in my belief that we’ll see each other again. But in the mean time, I’ll go home to her and then I’ll bring her back home with me in my heart.
Edited to add– I won’t be posting to the blog while I’m in Florida. Freelance work has kept me super busy the last two weeks and my spare time has been spent with Mr. F. I’ll be posting daily quotes on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram, as well as sharing a quick art find that resonates for me that day. Will be back blogging in a few weeks! Catch up on miles of artsy finds in the archives!
The paintings featured today are by Philadelphia artist Anne Canfield. To see more of her work, please visit her website.
Being an artist is all about exploration and experimentation. We begin with basic trial and error to find what works best for our vision. Once we know what works, we’re constantly searching for a new way to create, a new way to see. Seattle artist Jaq Chartier has created an entire series of work based on explorations of color.
Sometimes artists show experimental process without calling attention to it. But Chartier chooses to make the exploration both subject and process. Test pattern-like grids of color and translucent lucidity makes us wonder, are we in a gallery or science lab? The best artist is has a tiny bit of mad scientist lurking beneath the surface. Kudos to Chartier for embracing both worlds in such a beautiful way.
To see more of Jaq Chartier‘s work, please visit her website. If you happen to be in the San Fran area, get yourself to Dolby Chadwick to see her solo show, A Fever in Matter, before it closes this Saturday, May 2nd!
Have you ever been lost in the woods? Mr. F and I have. It rarely happens to us, but on a hike in Northern California’s Trinity Alps last summer, we chose what turned out to be a very poorly marked trail. We found ourselves wandering from one point to another, backtracking, trying to pinpoint where we’d diverged from our path. These paintings by Charlotte artist Windy O’Connor remind me of colorful wanderings across the canvas.
Just as we struggled to find our way back to our beginning, I love that these vibrant trails seem to have no end and no beginning. They loop all over the canvas like the never ending scarf a magician pulls from his tuxedo sleeve. One color finds its way into, over, under another. What a wonderful way to get lost!
I recently went through a harrowing experience. I fell ( that’s not the harrowing part- kind of par for my course these days ) and took my smart phone down with me, doing major damage to the screen. This device I’ve come to rely upon so heavily became nearly unusable. And I went through some serious withdrawals until it was repaired! It’s amazing, isn’t it, how in such a short period of time, these devices have become so incredibly ingrained into our lives and our behaviors? In his abstract paintings, artist Matthew Penkala uses airbrushed acrylic to allude to those ubiquitous glowing screens.
If you go to a concert these days, you’re more likely to glimpse a sea of cell phone lights during the ballad versus the usual lighter held high treatment. We stand in line at the grocery store, at the post office, not making eye contact or conversation with our neighbors but staring into that tiny rectangle. They’ve enriched our lives in so many ways, digital waves keeping far away friends and family ever close, but at what cost to the people in the next house, in the next room?
Sometimes the world we enter when our eyes close at night is a bit scary, a bit malevolent. But often I find myself in a place that is one part memory, one part fantasy. The paintings of San Francisco area artist Jeffrey Beauchamp call to mind those fanciful dreamscapes where ordinary things come to life in extraordinary ways.
I find places from my childhood cropping up quite often in my own dreams, which may be why I responded most to Beauchamp’s paintings of children. The places I played, explored, pretended are almost always prominent. After one such dream last night, I found myself wondering why some places stay with us so strongly. Is it our connection to the place itself or the people who were there? Or maybe they become part of our dreams because of how much they captured our imagination in life.
Growing up in Florida, we spent a lot of summer days at the beach. It’s just what you did. My favorite thing about beach days was the way it felt when we left the sand and surf behind. Salty skin, tangled, wind blown hair, a bucketful of found treasures. There was a feeling of ease and freedom, elation mixed with contented exhaustion. Those beachside impressions are the subject of the paintings of Portland artist Lisa Golightly.
Using found photos as the catalyst for her paintings, Lisa explores memory, how photographs of experiences influence our perceptions. Am I more likely to remember those beach days fondly thanks to the old square photos in worn albums looked through a hundred times? Pushing back memories of jellyfish stings and sand in places it should never be, we look back with eyes that see only the wonder and magic.
All of the paintings featured in today’s post are available as prints in the Artsy Forager gallery on Great.ly! Just click on each image for a link to each print’s detail page. To see more of Lisa Golightly‘s work, you can also visit her website.
This post contains affiliate links. As a Great.ly Tastemaker and curator of The Trove, I receive a small commission on each piece sold from The Trove boutique gallery.
Artists by rule are an evolving species. We are ever learning, ever reaching for the next inspiration, the next way of seeing. So when I see an artist who has already been featured putting out exciting new work, I can’t help but want to share it with you! Miami Beach artist Yolanda Sanchez is showing a new body of work at J. Johnson Gallery in Jacksonville Beach, FL continuing her explorations of the “felt experience” in paintings that feel light as air.
Taking cues from calligraphy, Asian art, and poetry, Sanchez’s paintings seem almost short hand notes of the visual stories happening in nature. Flowers unfolding, dripping dew, colors tumbling one over another. These new compositions are lively but deliberate, each stroke carrying with it life and meaning.
To see more of Yolanda Sanchez‘s latest work, please visit her website. If you happen to be in North Florida, be sure to stop by J. Johnson Gallery in Jacksonville Beach to breathe in these works for yourself. Her solo show, There is Only the Dance is up at the gallery until May 15th.
