Sunday, September 2, 2012

Chelsea Owen's Figurative Monoprints

Chelsea Owens is a San Francisco artist whose work lately has been large figurative monoprints. The monoprints are inspired by real people - some of them friends - and filled with exuberant color and pattern alongside a powerful expression. All of these prints were done with a viscosity technique that involves rolling a layer of ink over a painted image to fill in any blank spaces which results in an interesting counter image on the roller. Chine collé with mulberry paper was also used on some of the prints.

"Red-haired Lady" 22x30
"Meredith" 22 x 30
"Ashley" 22x30

Monday, May 14, 2012

Sarah Smith's Flowers, Fruit and Insects

My drawing was inspired by Rachel Ruysch's masterful oil painting from 1716 titled, Flowers, Fruit and Insects. I borrowed heavily from this moody, dramatic scene for my ink on paper version recreating certain elements: the nest-raiding lizard, the delicately arching grasses reaching skyward and the powerful sense of light glowing from within this haunting scene.

But it is the exuberant explosion of life quality that I wanted to capture in my drawing. I filled the page with radiating, pulsating patterns of energy emanating outward from within the plants. A decomposing dead shorebird in the shadow of the tree is the source of specks of silvery luminescence mixing with the dirt and lifting off into the air.



Sarah Smith installing her new drawings

The main, central drawing is 38"x50" and the entire installation is 76"x50"
The medium is ink on paper.

Rachel Ruysch's oil painting from 1716



See more of Sarah's work at: http://www.sarahasmith.com

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Anthony Ryan's Woven Collages



In his most recent body of work, Anthony Ryan has created a series of woven collages using paper strips that are by-products of industrial printing processes. Off-cuts and test patterns from the margins of product packaging and corporate collateral act as raw material and blueprint, dictating the work’s final shape through their own formal logic and systems of arrangement determined by the artist. In these paper pieces redolent of textiles and grid-based abstract painting, Ryan fashions sometimes-dizzying explorations of pattern and arrangement that conjure op-art and color theory experiments. By employing materials that are vestigial artifacts of the technologies of reproduction the work seeks to decode a dialect embedded in the DNA of our visual culture. See more of Anthony's work.
















"Textile"
Woven paper 36 by 36 inches









"Cross"
Woven paper 34 by 34 inches













Monday, January 9, 2012

Springtime in January: Meri Brin & Sirima Sataman





































Swing by the sunny Mission and check out Meri Brin's encaustic panels and book, and Sirima Sataman's chicken drawings on panels.

See more of Meri's work.

See more of Sirima's work.