The Styrous® Viewfinder: 2020 Summer Salon

Muted Hills - painting by Andrea Wedell

Due to the global pandemic, the physical gallery is currently closed, but is presenting an online exhibition entitled, Summer Salon, which is the gallery's annual celebration of summer. This the gallery is presenting an exhibition featuring painting, mixed media, ceramics, photography and jewelry by Bay Area artists.

SUMMER SALON
July 24 – September 7, 2020

Artists in the exhibition

Suzy Barnard

“For many years I have been enthralled by the view seen from the window of my studio at Pier 70, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Ships were the mysterious protagonists of my paintings as I contemplated their unknown journeys through changing light and weather conditions. Hundreds of ships have passed by my purview, and I’m quite familiar with all the ways they can appear and disappear. 

Sas Colby

A  visual artist with over 5 decades of creating, exhibiting, and teaching experience. Sas Colby has lived in Berkeley since 1975. Her artistic practice has included textile art, collage, photography, and artists books - with words interlaced throughout.  A member of the Bay Area Women Artists Legacy Project, Colby attended Rhode Island School of Design and has recently had her work included in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Betty Jo Costanzo

Betty Jo Costanzo’s award winning art has been described as “getting lost with a purpose” and “what a place would be like if you belonged there.” She says her influences range from John Cage to film director Alain Resnais. The late and great Jay Defeo, her longtime mentor and friend, continues to be the most significant influence. And now, Costanzo reveals that for more than a decade her true inspiration is being on the land or in the water of our magnificent planet and her oceans.

Her works are held in corporate, private and public collections around the world and her public exhibitions and residencies span four decades both regionally and internationally. She’s lived in São Paulo, Brazil and on both coasts of the United States. The former associate professor at California College of the Arts has also worked and taught around the world, including England, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Cyprus. She now maintains a full-time studio practice based in Seattle, Washington.

Anna W. Edwards

  “My work has been influenced by the sights and sounds of the musicians, the music and the people of my neighborhood, Sugar Hill, in Harlem, New York. Travel with grandmother Edwards up and down the East Coast was another early memory and influence. Walking city streets connects me to a timeless energy. I don’t give a literal rendering nor are the cityscapes of a particular site, although each city has it’s own saga, rather, these are the feelings I wish to impart as I think of the place I’m painting, being expressed through me as I paint.  I always feel as if my Cityscapes give voice to the joy, beauty, and pathos that is a part of every city and the people who inhabit the city.

Some paintings are from a large series of work exploring the spiritual landscape of the individual. The works honor the Light Bearers, the deliverers of Light and purveyors of Inspiration and Wisdom, who have inspired many of us through their writings, poetry, living, teaching, art, music and inventions, to start or continue on our journey of discovery and expression of self.”

Lin Fischer

Lin Fischer is a third generation northern Californian. Growing up in Sacramento was pleasant until she discovered the bay area, which immediately attracted her. Lin's BFA in painting was earned at the University of California, Davis, where Wayne Thiebaud was head of the fine arts department. Ralph Johnson and Roland Petersen were also influential instructors at the university, besides Robert Arneson and William Wiley, among others. The MFA came later from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco where, after graduating, Lin taught painting to Masters candidates, and Design and Color to undergraduates. Other teaching included Experimental Figure Painting at the California College of the Arts Oakland, at additional venues in the east bay and Contra Costa County, and with private students in her studio. Influences on Lin’s work include Joan Brown, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and later - Joan Mitchell.

Lin Fischer currently lives in Oakland, California. She has shown her work in the San Francisco Bay 

Andrea Wedell

“I’ve always sought out rich experience above all other life pursuits; the impulse to uncover these internalized moments, and to revisit them, stimulates my impulse to paint.  

I improvise, and in a way I dance, laying down a foundation, and building on it, moving backwards and forwards. A background in theater and dance makes me particularly sensitive to rhythm, staging, and timing in my painting. I create drama. By juxtaposing layer after layer of a rich color and allowing it to shift as the light and mood changes (much like the fog in my native Bay Area),  I enhance the theatricality of my work. 

I use thin layers, opaque ones, scribbled pencil lines, bold strokes, soft ones, and value changes, often destroying the work, then starting over. I draw on a variety of painting techniques including brushed gestures, cold wax applied with brayers, and paint spread with just my hand. I study the work as it comes out the other side of all this, building on my changing sense of harmony, evolving my visual vocabulary, all in search of a deeper meaning that will connect me to something larger than myself.”

Raymond L. Haywood

  “My paintings reflect emotions and memory, allowing me to revisit vivid lived experiences in an intimate way. I love travel and have been afforded opportunities to explore diverse locales such as Belize, New Zealand, France and Mexico. As an Artist I see things in a different light, questions arise and similar to my love of math I create aesthetic theorems that I prove with my works. My paintings represent my symbolic language through the use of color. Color is the primary tool in my language that translates my feelings into image. My concurrent experience as an Artisan Carpenter and Painter led to the fusing of working with wooden panels and acrylic paint.

My distinctive use of color, texture and symbols in my paintings invites the audience into my specific vision of the world. My images evoke a sense of time and place that is both ethereal and transient.”

Shelley Gardner

“Throughout the years nature has remained an enduring source of artistic inspiration. With a garden of my own to care for, I have become increasingly aware of the cyclical rhythms in the natural world. I am particularly fascinated by the unique and often strange ways plants manage to insure their reproduction in a hostile environment. In my material applications I attempt to mirror the slow cumulative processes of nature. My multi-layered surfaces are the result of the observation of the way in which seemingly small and insubstantial matter can slowly coalesce into a solid and enduring form. The development of seed pods, the formation of crystals, the sediment of a river bottom, are all examples of the processes I hope to emulate.”

Katie Hawkinson

Quite simply, my artwork is abstract and based on nature. Over time my paintings, drawings, prints, and constructions have evolved along with my environment, thoughts and life. Though the work may appear to be quite different, there is a constant in how I experience and then attempt to express or reflect experience. I am still very affected by light and color as well as form. Paintings begin with a very simple idea based on one of these visual elements, but I never know what a painting will look like when complete until I get to the end.

The time spent working on paintings is one of discovery and response to each move along the way. It's simply more interesting than having a set intention and then carrying that out. This way the element of chance and change can be present with each day as I come to the studio. There is always a point of departure based on something real that I've seen or experienced that gets abstracted with time. I prefer working towards the essence of how I feel about something to narrating a story. This involves memory, quality of light, and the power of color interaction. Ideally I wish for my paintings to feel alive and to reflect at least part of what it is to be alive.

Jenny Sampson

  Jenny Sampson is a Berkeley-based photographer who received a B.A. in Psychobiology in 1991 at Pitzer College. She dedicates her time to her photographic endeavors: wet plate collodion and traditional black and white photography. She is part of the photographic collective @rolls_and_tubes. Jenny has exhibited her work in the United States, United Kingdom and has been published in Zyzzyva, Analog Forever Magazine (summer 2020), The Hand, SHOTS Magazine, All About Photo Magazine, Lenscratch, The Guardian, Bust, Huck, PDN, Metal magazine, Visual Communications Quarterly, Blues Review and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among others. Her work is included in the Candela Collection and other private collections. Her first monograph, Skaters, was published in 2017 by Daylight Books. Her follow-up book, Skater Girls, is due out in September 2020.

Josie Iselin

 Josie Iselin is the photographer, author and designer of many books, with new projects always in development in her San Francisco studio, Loving Blind Productions. Her books focus on those forms in nature we find at hand and in particular, at the beach. Her newest book, The Curious World of Seaweed features sixteen visually rich narratives of our iconic West Coast seaweeds and kelps. It was released by Heyday Books in August 2019.

Josie’s mission is to produce enticing, well-researched and well-designed books that combine art and science, leaving the reader with new information about, and an appreciation for, the world around them. Her writing and art focusing on seaweed, kelp and sea otter puts her on the forefront of ocean activism, presenting and working with scientists and environmental groups working to preserve the kelp forests of our Pacific Coast.

Ginny Parsons

 For thirty years, Alameda painter Ginny Parsons has been collaborating with chance on her compositions, pouring beeswax, smearing peanut butter and sprinkling borax. This series came about after grief at her father’s death, when Parsons kayaked every day picking up trash. The use of peanut butter and borax reflect Alameda’s history as an “island of industry,” since both were manufactured here. The cardboard cutouts are motivated by chance as well, left on the porch as reuse, they are sometimes "infected" by the peanut butter.

Javier Manrique

 Javier Manrique is an artist whose work encompasses a broad spectrum of the visual arts, from frescos, oils paintings, photography, encaustics to digital images. He participates in photography, painting, drawing and printmaking biennials, as well as multidisciplinary group exhibitions. He has started off the year 2020 with a retrospective exhibit at Studios on the Park in Paso Robles CA. In 2019 Manrique participated in a group show organized by the Bank of Mexico making a limited edition print on special paper made with shredded bits of the peso bill. On another exhibit the same year he participated in a biennial held at the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City where an artist and an artisan collaborate on a project, the piece created was a tapestry made in a village in Oaxaca. Manrique lives and works in both the United States and Mexico. His primary residence is Project Artaud, one of San Francisco’s pioneering artists communities. He maintains partnerships with graphic workshops and galleries around Mexico. A native of Tijuana, Manrique studied printmaking at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking (ENPEG), La Esmeralda, in Mexico City and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. Manrique has taught the Complete Fresco Course at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College for the Arts.

Mary Ann Leff

“I am an abstract painter and printmaker, making art since childhood. Heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement, my concerns have always been less about content and more about formal composition. I see color, shape, line, form, space and texture—and the feelings they evoke when arranged in a way that “works”-- as my subjects. In the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in experimenting with a wider range of mixed media including encaustic, graphite, oil stick, collage, and acrylic and acrylic mediums, iridescent, metallic, and especially, silver, paint.

When asked about what inspires me, I often think about the words of Jasper Johns: “Take a canvas. Put a mark on it. Put another mark on it." I seem to always work intuitively from a feeling state—with joy, clarity, sadness, grief, anger, worry or self-doubt, persistence--but usually not from depression.

The events of recent months, however, were almost paralyzing and my work slowed as I tried to understand the oxymoronic instruction to be “socially distant.” Struggling to deal with the way the world has suddenly and drastically changed, slapped in the face with the pain around me, I have been trying to find a way to contain it all. The four paintings presented here are my most recent.”

Cuong Ta

It all started when…
Needing a distraction from my work as a math teacher, I took a night time ceramics class in the spring of 1998.  When I got on the pottery wheel for the first time, I was hooked.  It was a learning experience like I had never known; my hands felt as if they were rediscovering something they had known forever.  The first year working with clay proved to be quite a spiritual process, and within a couple years, I had accumulated so much work that I started finding venues for selling my work. This led to working with galleries and participating in craft shows across the country.  

I have done a tremendous amount of production since 2000, all while still working as a full time math teacher and department chair in Bay Area independent schools.  In 2008, I started a series of wall work I called "buttons".  This body of work allowed me to explore my design vocabulary, which then fed my production work.  In 2010, the City of Emeryville purchased a large installation of the buttons for their permanent collection, which how hangs at entry to City Hall.

Connie Harris

 “Connie Harris’s paintings are studies in color and pattern. The marks are hand made, not mechanized, so while repeating they are not identical. The differences in brush strokes and pigment tones create a surface that nearly quivers with verve and vitality.”  Bonnie Earls-Solari, Independent curator.

Connie has an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and creates these pieces in her studio in the Noonan Building, San Francisco.

Irene Imfeld

I use photography’s innate specificity to investigate ambiguity, and as basis for abstract composition. Photographs are typically connected to particular subjects, locations, times. Instead, I explore depictions of reality (worth examining because they are real) by foregrounding the mystery of what’s pictured.

Through abstracting, images attain freedom of reference and interpretation, without dwelling on “what and where.” My work is always composed in camera. Later, I apply tonal alterations and/or combine exposures. This shows the world in a way that is true but different from what we usually observe. 

It causes a reduction of recognition but not of complexity.

Simone Simon

Sometimes I dream that I see whole bodies of completed work. I see many paintings, hanging somewhere I can't quite place. I stare hard at them, telling myself to remember and absorb as much as possible. When I wake up, some of the images are lingering, and some have vanished. This process of recall enables me to explore them from an expanded state, where perception is more fluid, and can open and shift. When I begin to paint, I start from a non representational place, and bring sensation into form. I see paintings as arenas where light and gesture are gathered and stored. By pouring and layering washes of acrylic paint; shapes, symbols, and content build and repeat themselves over time. They march on like a cast of characters, creating relationships and memories. I work until a presence is felt, where some kind of energy is detected; and may be provoked, enticed, or invited in  to be the guest of honor on the canvas.

Simone lives and works in Petaluma, Ca.

Jennifer LaPierre

  Thirty years of painting has empowered me with a body of techniques and becoming the multidisciplinary artist I am today ; response to color and lyrical nature of each piece, layering and revealing detailed vignettes, reduction in editing, manipulating texture and form, negative and positive reaction, and line intention. Rooted in a graphic design background with a love of typography and calligraphy, I love the expression of the line, be it gestural, tentative, structural or definitive.

Deconstructing the traditional figure, transitional and contemporary form, I am enamored with the boundaries of cohesion and tension, challenging how far a piece can be reduced and still be able to tell a story.  The landscape series was created in reflection of our land healing from our recent fires with regrowth, a new compassion and memory.

Eben Ostby

For many years, I have been fascinated by the storytelling possibilities of panoramic imagery. The eye can read a panorama like a sentence, or a paragraph, or a poem; the form can suggest many things – space, of course;  sequence; time;  and rhythm. Sometimes it seems like the only way to capture the breadth of an experience through a photograph is with a broad image. I’m drawn to places where man has left an evanescent mark. 

As do many photographers, I work in the space where art and technology converge. For me, the camera itself can be more than a recording device;it can determine how I see the world, or it can be an artistic creation of its own. Similarly, the print can be more than a reproduction of an image. I seek the warmth and character that a hand-made print brings to any kind of picture.

Ron Moultrie Saunders

Ron Moultrie Saunders, a co-founding member of the 3.9 Art Collective, is a photographic artist and landscape architect. Originally from Jamaica, Queens, New York, he currently lives in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. He creates photograms: photographs that are made without the use of a camera. 

His art work has been exhibited throughout the US including “The Secret Life of Plants”, solo shows (San Francisco International Airport and CordenPotts Gallery, San Francisco, CA), and group shows "Echoes of Bauhaus Photography Cast Long Shadows" at Ruth's Table, San Francisco, California (2020),“Self:Scape” at Middlesex County College, New Jersey(2012), “Exposed: Today’s Photography/Yesterday’s Technology” (San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art), “Measure of Time”(Oakland Museum of California at City Center). His work is published in several books including “Self Exposure: The Male Nude Self-Portrait” and “From Art to Landscape”. Recently he completed an artist-in-residence at STAR (Shipyard Trust for the Arts) in the Hunter’s Point Shipyard in San Francisco. 

His studio is located at Minnesota Street Project Studio in the Dogpatch area of San Francisco.

Jan Watten

“Unexpected Landscapes” is a body of work that is about being spontaneous and in the moment, capturing moments of beauty, disarray and chaos found in nature.  From film to pixels, the images capture light and uncomplicated moments in time that I find in the natural world around me. “

Watten has a BFA in Photography from California College of Arts and Crafts. She has shown her work domestically and internationally.

Sharon Wickham

“Leave the Light On”

A series of photographs that is really about Hope...
Hope out of the Darkness...
Hope waiting for Us. 

Stephanie Williamson

“I am a photographer and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born and raised in New York City and spent my childhood summers in the Midwest. I appreciate a good road trip, and enjoy finding the quirks in the everyday.

I teach photography classes at City College of San Francisco and at Solano Community College.  I photograph with a Canon digital SLR, a vintage Rolleiflex twin lens medium format camera and several Holga and Diana plastic cameras. I also shoot with a couple of old Polaroids and several vintage Brownies.

My new book of photographs and tiny stories There is No Place Like Here has just been published.”

Dorie Meister

a·dorn·ment

A thing that adorns or decorates; an ornament. The action of adorning something.

Simple forms, textures, ancient beads, repurposed, organics and intention are featured in my work. Made by hand using simple hand tools and textile techniques such as coiling, weaving and crocheting.

I love each aspect of creation - the meditative quality of hammering a texture into metal, forging round wire flat or following the flow of a single piece of wire as it takes the shape of a hoop earring. Then there is the steady satisfaction of making a hand link chain, piece by piece, uniform and unique at the same time.

Handcrafted quality, small batches, unique pieces design for adornment and beauty.

John Wood

Tom White

 "Butoh drawing is a dialog between Japanese Butoh* and the evolution of drawing, writing and thinking. The way in which images (ideas) of all sorts emerge, and how these images are deployed is the thesis of Butoh Drawing.

 In theory, when a child begins to crawl, he/she is developing a part of the brain that will later read, write and think. Our experience with Butoh Drawing is that we re-live this childhood development as adults. We re-learn, and are able to re-express ourselves in a more fulfilling way."

Viewfinder links:

Gray Loft Gallery exhibitions

Net links:

Gray Loft Gallery ~ Summer Salon
Summer Salon artists

Gray Loft Gallery 

2889 Ford Street, third floor
Jingletown
Oakland, CA, 94601
United States

grayloftgallery@gmail.com
510-499-3445

Styrous® ~ Sunday, July 12, 2020

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Tom White @ the Gray Loft Gallery ~ 2020 Summer Salon

July 29, 2020

Styrous @ the Gray Loft Gallery ~ 2020 Summer Salon

July 14, 2020

Gray Loft Gallery ~ 2020 Summer Salon

SUMMER SALON
July 24 – September 7, 2020

Suzy Barnard

Sas Colby

Betty Jo Costanzo

Anna W. Edwards

Lin Fischer

Andrea Wedell

Raymond L. Haywood

Shelley Gardner

Katie Hawkinson

Jenny Sampson

Josie Iselin

Ginny Parsons

Javier Manrique

Mary Ann Leff

Cuong Ta

Connie Harris

Irene Imfeld

Simone Simon

Jennifer LaPierre

Eben Ostby

Ron Moultrie Saunders

Jan Watten

Sharon Wickham

Stephanie Williamson

Dorie Meister

John Wood

Tom White

November 3, 2021

August 13, 2020

July 29, 2020

July 14, 2020

SUMMER SALON July 24 – September 7, 2020

John Wood

SUMMER SALON
July 24 – September 7, 2020