As a realist painter, Pamela Carroll works to portray truth.  With rare perception and meticulous brushwork, her still lifes present nature's offerings.

It is how the light falls upon the land that can inspire me to paint a particular scene at a particular time.  These moments are fleeting, and can often find me sprinting with my camera to the hilltops behind my house or driving up and down River road to find the exact loca- tion where the setting sun’s rays are illuminating a sliver of the Gabilan Mountains under a heavy purple cloud. It is the light that gives this landscape it’s form... shadows rounding the foothills or creating sharp linear patterns across the fields. These shapes and patterns change with the time of day and the inconstant cloud cover overhead. Land to sky... this is the relationship that I am captivated by, and it is my intent to crystallize these moments in my paintings of the Salinas Valley.

Mari Kloeppel is drawn to paint through sheer passion for her subjects-animals.  The species matters less to her than the personal connection she shares with the animal.  For Kloeppel, it is beauty and familiarity that resonate most.  Most she knows well, having lived with them for years at her rural home in Elkhorn, north of the Monterey Peninsula.  Others she has encountered through animal rescues or friends.  Her work epitomizes an emotional connection versus an anatomical documentation. 

While pondering the nature of frames, I found some illuminated manuscripts in the University library, and saw how the borders visually commented on the text, sometimes even spoofing the text.  From this discovery I realized that a frame could be many things; it could be a commentary, an informing context, an environment, a fanfare, a shelter, it could extent movement, it could be a conceptual or formal elaboration, it could embody ancillary ideas, it could be like a body that houses and expresses the mind, and many other rich permutations.  From that point I began to create pieces that fused frame and painting, with some pieces having doors that open and close over paintings to suggest; contingency, potentiality, future, past, or cause and effect.

To experience the space of a painting we project our minds into the painting, consequently I see pictorial space as mind space.  The spatial qualities of sculpture exist in our own physical space; we walk around it, proportion our bodies to it - in part it is apprehended or 'seen' by the body.  By fusing sculptural frames with pictorial images I hope to address both modes of aesthetic perception. 

Some re-occurring themes are: interspecies compassion, philosophical proofs of animal cognition (e.g. the correction of errors, pretense, and awareness of other minds), veiled symbolism, re-presenting women from a woman artist's perspective, exploring the hidden implications, or the backstory of myths, eco-psychology and nature mysticism.

In addition to the frame/painting pieces, in recent years I have begun a series of purely sculptural pieces of gilded carved wood.  Each gold sculpture starts solely with the relationships of forms and shapes guided by a love of proportion.  Only when the sculpture is complete do I see the iconographical and philosophical sources that subconsciously fed my decisions and creative process.  Body-like the gilding layers a radiant skin onto the form.   

Visually, I am drawn to; architecture, light on water, ecclesiastical furniture, clouds, lace, freak vegetables, models of the internal organs of various species, the contours of soft serve ice cream, stalactites, stalagmites, fungi, crowded forms, sooty lines, diffused edges and evening light.

When I began my project more than 30 years ago I decided that there would be three basic components to my work; Figures, landscapes and still lifes. For me the pastoral landscapes of our region of California have been useful as stages for ideas. Indeed, the 'pastoral mode' as it's called is essentially a contemplation of mortality. The classical approach to landscape requires an underlying structure (implying the inter-relatedness of all things) as well as an elegiac approach to the wonders of nature and the beauty of light. The landscape of California like the landscape of Italy is a dream made real.

As a young artist studying printmaking in Florence, I spent long hours pouring over the original drawings of Rembrandt, del Sarto, Pontormo, Michelangelo and others in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe deli Galleria Uffizi. I studied the paintings of Caravaggio and Goya and the paintings and etchings of my teacher, Giorgio Morandi. As a printmaker, I learned to see the world in the black and white and graduated values that are a signature of my drawings. Later, architectural drawing, botanical illustration and graphic design informed the structural aspects of my work.  
The making of a representational drawing requires a decoding of its underlying components, the unity of which masks a realm of abstraction inherent in reality. The use of both wet and dry drawing mediums allows fluidity in both my vision and my process. Whether the subject of inquiry is the figure, botanical imagery or still life, it is a vehicle to articulate qualities of clarity and directness. The placement of the subject on the page illuminates its essence, just as the quality and directionality of light convey the poetics of a single moment. The power of repetition, and of what has been witheld, the balance of detail, and the occasional playful incongruity, becomes a “portrait” of my visual perception.
Informed by the sensibility of artists who preceded me while nevertheless firmly rooted in the present, I regard my drawing as a still point in a fast-forward world, neither backward-looking nor gripped by the contemporary malaise, la fuite en avant, that consumes us. The content is an aggregate of my curiosity and close observation of nature’s drama, the meaning of which is intentionally equivocal. With specific narrative aspects of the work left open to speculation, the viewer may connect through a felt sense of the present and of his or her presence in it.

Gwynn Murrill’s work bridges figurative and abstract sculpture. Her animal figures serve as points of departure for the exploration of form, becoming vessels, which reduced to their most basic lines and shapes, elegantly echo the essence of her subject.

Paring away everything that is not absolutely necessary to perceive her subjects in all their purity, Gwynn often sacrifices details leaving us with sculptures emanating primal characteristics and universal attributes. Gwynn’s signature bronze works are fluid in line and form, elegant, inviting to touch and instilled with vitality and a sense of being--either caught in an tacit moment of serenity and self-possession or brimming with the implied potential to pounce, twist, or take off at any moment.

In my art, I create a space for personal connection, inviting viewers to interpret and engage with their own experiences. Rooted in my history, my work evokes feelings of sadness and introspection. I created and use a unique technique, embedding dry materials onto paper with sandpaper, to explore light and shadow in realistic portraits. Each piece reflects my personal connection to subjects, mainly my daughters, and is titled simply to allow open interpretation. As authentically as possible, I curate compositions to evoke specific emotions and incorporate props to enrich narratives. Ultimately, my art serves as a visual diary, reflecting my journey and inviting dialogue about universal human experiences

Born in 1967 in Sacramento CA, Annie has a MA in fine art from Sacramento State University and has been showing her work professionally for the last 19 years. She has created her own technique of drawing by sanding charcoal into paper. She has been using and perfecting this technique for the last 18 years. She teaches regular workshops both online and in person in Dallas, Sacramento, London and Italy. Robinson has been an art teacher at Adelante Continuation High School, CA for the past 18 years. She has shown her work both nationally and internationally and her work is in private and public collections including: the Art Renewal Center, the Count Ibex Collection, Museum of European Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona and the Haggin Museum).

Robinson has won an impressive number of awards. In the last five years alone she has won Best in Show at “Beautiful Bizarre” 2019, the Bouguereau prize and 1st place in drawing in the 14th International ARC Salon Competition as well as an ARC Purchase Award (2019/2020), Second Place in drawing in the 15th ARC Salon (2020/2021), and Second Place Drawing again in the 16th International ARC Salon with the work of “Lucid Dreaming”(Forward Back). She also won the grand prize for the Portrait Society of America (2021) and recently won the president’s award at the AWA Lifting the Sky juried art show. She has been showing regularly with Arcadia Contemporary, NYC, since 2017, and is scheduled to exhibit at Rehs Contemporary Galleries, NYC in the “ARC Select” show in 2022. Her work has appeared in various media outlets including: the Sacramento Bee, The Locator, WE tv, (now Amazon Prime), Million Dollar Listing New York, Art in the 21st Century, Natsoulas Press, Churn Magazine, American Art Collector cover and story, International Artists, Manifest India, “Strokes of Genius,” American Artist Magazine, and the Museum of European Modern Art’s 2021 “Women Painting Women”.

Born in 1950 in New York, Jane Rosen is a painter and sculptor renowned for her animal themes. She earned her BA from New York University in 1972 and later taught at the New York School of Visual Arts. As a child, she often visited the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian Collection, where her admiration for hawks and falcons became a central focus in her work, alongside other animals like ravens, horses, sheep, and wolves. Rosen excels in various mediums, blending sculpture, painting, and drawing in each piece. She has taught at esteemed institutions, including the School of Visual Arts, Bard College, LaCoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been featured in prominent publications such as the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News. With over 200 solo and group exhibitions across the United States, her art is included in the collections of numerous venues, such as the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Chevron Corporation, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.