A new series Mary Gow recently created using her scanner.
Category: Art (Page 5 of 15)
San Francisco Painter, Sophia Green. Photo by Mary Gow.
Sophia Green grew up in Massachusetts. Her parents had many friends who were writers, painters, and musicians. “In our household the arts were considered a legitimate career,” she said.
It was a close family friend and accomplished painter, Marilyn Powers, who gave her a formal introduction to creating Art. “One day she took me upstairs to her studio, set-up a small still life with a Mexican ceramic angel and instructed me to ‘paint what you see.’ I was nine years old. By the end of the afternoon I was hooked.”
To complete the lesson Powers handed her a book of Paul Cezanne’s paintings and said, “Study this and you will learn to see.” She still has the book.
When she was growing up, her father was an English professor at Boston University and read to her each evening before she went to bed. As soon as she learned to read she started to write.
“I wrote and illustrated an extensive series of storybooks detailing anything and everything going on around me from what I had for breakfast to the tugboats pulling ships through the harbor to my friend’s cat hunting imaginary giraffes. This love of words has never left me.”
Art by Sophia Green who’s currently in a show at City Art Gallery. Photo by Mary Gow.
After college she worked as a waitress and saved up enough tips to travel in Europe on the $1 per day plan. “While in Europe I got to see some amazing art and was especially floored by the humongous painting, The Raft of the Medusa by Eugene Delacroix.”
Though she felt awe and admiration for the European classics, “My psyche was more attuned to art movements of the 20th century, particularly Conceptualism,” said Green.
It seems a natural progression that words and their meanings have found their way into her visual work.
She’s working on “a very pragmatic approach using words (with their living, shifting, and malleable meanings), to probe and reflect upon shifting and variable social trends and concerns. It’s a continuation of a project I began last year and included a video installation and group of oil paintings titled, The Surveillance Series. The paintings draw on the current cultural environment of obsessive ‘watching’ and explore ideas of what relentless and pervasive observation means in our day to day lives,” she said.
She calls her current work “Definitional Painting.”
See more of her work at sophiagreenart.com. She’s in a group show that opens April 3 at City Art Gallery, 828 Valencia St. in San Francisco.
Dancing Under a Rorshach Cloud, sandblasted glass panel by Kurt Stoeckel
We have a talented paper cutout artist right here in northern California. Kurt Stoeckel lives in the Bernal Heights area of San Francisco.
His paintings, photographs, sculpture and glasswork all look like paper cutouts. Now he’s creating LED lamps. One-of-a-kind ones.
An elongated glass panel stands 65 inches tall by 22 inches wide near a doorway in his studio. Etched into it is a line drawing that looks like a cutout of two people dancing under a cloud that has animal-like shapes inside of them.
The sandblasted panel has a background light that comes with the ability to change from red to green to blue or combinations those three colors using a remote control.
Dancing Under a Rorshach Cloud reflects the current fascination of paper cutout artist, Kurt Stoeckel.
“I’ve always liked indirect lights that are kind to the eye,” he said.
The elegance of his work reflects what he values. “I love the functionality and design of the Art Deco Era. Every product was designed to have some intrinsic value beyond its use.”
It was an era of “a conscious and universal attempt to make utilitarian items also pleasant to live around. For example toasters didn’t have to have all those deco designs and shapes. And because they did they were pleasant to live around and they also made toast. Making toast was secondary and the rest of the time it’s a beautiful piece of art. It’s a generosity to all of us to live around the comfort of a pleasing design.”
Kurt Stoeckel, paper cutout artist. Photo by Mary Gow
“That was my beginning, memorizing lines and welding things together.”
In 1994 he moved to Bernal Heights. “Painting had replaced metal sculpture.” He credits Bernal artist Toby Klayman as an influence. She taught painting at City College. He took her class and later became her teaching assistant.
He took lots of pictures. “I thought of myself more as a “What if” experimenter than a photographer creating compositions. Photography was one meditative roll of 36 exposures of film a week.”
“I still find joy and peace in a meditative walk with a camera. I now choose compositions that begin with ‘What If?’ I imagine turning a decade of photos into a ten day stop-action film.”
He considers himself now primarily a paper cutter. “I’ve made 10,000 of them while living here. I still paint. My paintings look a lot like paper cut outs.”
Since 2008 Stoeckel also teaches photography and theater technology classes in a local high school.
“I feel very fortunate to have a waiting list of collectors for my paintings,” he said.
He continues experimenting.
