UPCOMING EXHIBITS
- April 11-May 22, 2008
- Opening Reception Friday, April 11, 2008, 7-9 pm
- With Music by Ernie Baber on Sitar
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“Women and the Things They Carry,” Ceramics by Mark Tanous
“Our children, water, firewood, love,
rice, heartbreak, purses, us, our stories most of all... they carry on. This show is a celebration
of Women. Their strength, their humor ,their compassion. Women do the most important jobs and against
the odds. They make the world go ‘round. This is a tribute to the important women in my life and
all of our lives.” — Mark Tanous
“Vessell #7,” by Mark Tanous, Ceramic
The Work of Studio Artists of the Pacific Grove Art Center
Eighteen years ago this month I opened the door to Studio 12 for the first time. I was lucky to have made it to the top of the long waiting list after only a short time, and knew that this empty room, this “room of my own” as Virginia Woolf would say, would become the most important room I would inhabit in my life.
For this is what it means to be a Studio Artist here at the Pacific Grove Art Center: to work without distraction, to find a center to one’s life, a haven, a sanctuary, a place of solitude, but also a place of interaction with a group of artists devoted to their own vision of what it means to make art.
We are definite individuals, most of us working every day, behind closed doors, painting in inks, oils, acrylics, watercolors; printing linocuts and monoprints; piecing together collages and quilts; painting on silk, spinning wool, executing intricate needlepoint designs; sculpting stone, taking photographs. We work alone, in silence or listening to Bach, Billie Holiday, or Franz Ferdinand; in winter, when the studio is so cold that our hands are like ice, in summer when the heat makes the brush slip out of one’s grasp; occasionally sharing our work in progress and asking for feedback; encouraging each other and celebrating each other’s successes. We teach classes and private students; we share the space with four galleries and a ballet school; tai chi classes and special concerts. This combination of silence and vibrant activity inspires us, keeps us going when we doubt ourselves, and most of all gives us what Connie Pearlstein told me we most need—a destination, both literally and figuratively.
The destination is that empty room; no longer empty but now filled with eighteen years of pastels, collages, drawings, prints and ink on canvas paintings. Filled with pieces that worked and others that didn’t; students that inevitably taught us more than we taught them; frames and canvases, keepsakes and photographs; and always the art, some finished, some in progress, and some still in our minds, turning ideas over and over until the time is right for them to come out in our work.
What you see here has been created here, in sixteen studios by sixteen very different artists. Thank you for appreciating art and what we do, here, every day — Julie Brown Smith Studio 12
We are the artists:
Juanita Anderson, Marale Childs, Debra Davalos, Mark Farina, Mary Fletcher, JoAnn Kiehn, C. Kline, Russell Levin, Robert Lewis, Connie Pearlstein, Marybeth Rinehart, Dante Rondo, Sherard Russell, Julie Brown Smith, Frank Sunseri, and Julie Terflinger have been invited to display their work in this exhibit.
Left: Connie Pearlstein, Right: Marybeth Rinehart
Julie Terflinger
Sherard Russell, hand-painted silk Paintings by Dante Rondo
Julie Brown Smith
Marilee Childs
Joann Kiehn and Mary Fletcher
Artwork by Students From Julie Heilman’s Children’s Art Classes
