Ryan Jones

Looking Forward to the Past | August 12 - September 17 | San Francisco

In Ryan Jones’ recent body of work, color takes a second stage to time and space.  His exploration of the human experience in black and white stirs energetic emotions of connection and also its absence.  Depicted scenarios play into the thrill of celebrations and performances while remaining infused with the past through aesthetic cues of mid century Hollywood, noir and popular culture.  Maps and travel remain an ongoing narrative throughout Jones’ work and continue to backdrop his figures evoking a reverie of travel and relaxation.  Expressing these nostalgic themes through the lens of the present gives traditional realism a refreshing and innovative update in this new body of work.  

James Wolanin

Recent Works | August 12 - September 17 | San Francisco

James Wolanin taps our culture’s collective visual conscious, creating vibrant reflections on American life. Blue skies, effervescent smiles, and carefree adventures characterize the artist’s Utopic vision, which blends nostalgia for mid-century glamour with a contemporary aesthetic. Identifying with Pop artists like Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Alex Katz, Wolanin gives us sparkling, stylized images that read like mixtures of glossy advertising and ecstatic daydreams. In his latest series, “A Summer Song,” a sense of warmth radiates from the canvases, full of sun-soaked beaches, pools, and polished women in retro-style bathing suits that instantly conjure the golden age of American leisure.

Ross Penhall

Far & Wide | August 5 - 31 | St. Helena

Far and Wide is a continuation of the hours spent alone collecting, collating, and creating ideas depicting the real and imagined places I’ve been. Manneristic exaggerations of the vertical and horizontal come together with muted and saturated color mixed side by side on the canvas. 

Aerial, linear, atmospheric, and forced perspective are techniques used to heighten and accentuate the distinct characteristics of each landscape. 

Bobbie Burgers

The Tender & The Unnerving | July 16 - August 10 | San Francisco

The Tender and Unnerving is the underlying sentiment running through my newest works. By laying down a series of marks, whether pastel that is smudged, watered, and left to run, or inky stains that absorb and bleed into the raw canvas, I leave the most intimate connection of paint, hand, and canvas to evolve mostly by its own will.

Gregory Kondos

Celebrating 97 Years | July 1 - August 15 | St. Helena

Gregory Kondos has spent decades depicting California’s unique, majestic beauty, from its rolling farmland to its varied coastline, to the forests and peaks of Yosemite, where he has often served as artist-in-residence. He has been drawn as well to the deserts around Santa Fe, and to Europe, especially Greece, the country from which his parents emigrated. Now in his nineties, he is celebrated as one of the world’s foremost landscape painters, known for his light-filled palette and intuitive, organic forms that seem like effortless extensions of nature.

Sharon Booma

Continued Pursuit |  May 8 - July 11 | San Francisco

The power of a painting has to come from the inside out, not from outside influences.  It is not just an image; it’s an image with a body and that body has to contain its spirit.  A painting, really, is made by its reason for being there - the weight of the intention.  What’s behind it decides everything.  It’s inner secret cannot be resolved or formalized or passed on as a repeatable process.  It has to be reborn and this is especially true of painting, which depends on extreme human effort and expression.  I try to be an artist who can provoke empathy, one who completes your thought, an artist who makes visual what we feel.  It testifies to the beauty of imperfect human thought and action mixed up with feeling.  That’s my “Continued Pursuit.

Cole Morgan

Imagine Anything | April 1 - May 31 | Online Exhibition

Resembling enigmatic diagrams, charts, and games, yet situated just within the realm of abstraction, Cole Morgan’s paintings combine meticulous, focused detail with a sense of deep, open-ended mystery. Originally trained as a draftsman, Morgan combines his masterful skill in realistic drawing with an appreciation for the material joys of paint and color. Saturated pigments—cobalt blue, bright crimson, lime green—seem especially brilliant against his painting’s light-infused backgrounds.

Arty Grimm

Push the Sky Away | March 5 - April 30 | San Francisco & St. Helena

The evocative canvases of Dutch painter Arty Grimm skate close to representation but never quite leave the abstract realm. Like the work of cubists and abstract expressionists who were inspired by prehistoric and ancient art (Picasso, Miro, and Twombly, among others), her paintings seem to reach deep into cultural time, unearthing forms from the collective human consciousness—monoliths, totems, and organic figures suggesting fruits or flowers. Grimm has frequently spoken of art as a method for making beauty out of chaos, a “sieve” that chaos, or randomness, can fall through and end up transformed. Her definition of beauty, however, as shown in her paintings, is not frozen perfection, but rather an embrace of chaos itself—a way to contain the unknown while preserving its wildness.

Brad Howe

Large Scale Sculpture | June 25 - July 30 | San Francisco

Balancing playfulness, wit, strength, stillness, and motion, Brad Howe’s sculptures are dynamic experiments in color and form. Having started his artistic career making mobiles reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s pioneering midcentury kinetic art, he continues to infuse his work with a sense of lightness. Even in sculptures made of heavy steel, he creates elements that twist, rise, and perch. His quieter, stationary wall sculptures incorporate arching lines that recall elegant movements. In addition to Calder, his influences include Arp and Brancusi—artists who infused solid matter with a similar gravity-defying feel.

Martha Sturdy

Premier Exhibition | May 14 - June 30 | St. Helena

Each of Study’s sculptures radiates a unique character, a larger-than-life personality born of the artist’s sharp insights into life and nature and her willingness to let her materials speak for themselves. Ribbons of brass cascade and loop, knot and crumple, echoing life’s unexpected situations. Blackened towers made of cedar logs that she splits, chars, and finishes by hand showcase the grain and knots in the wood—the tree’s secret history. Spheres, triangles, and cubes made of brightly colored resin stack into tall, whimsical totems designed to ignite optimism in her viewers: “I am determined to influence people to look at color and how beautiful it is.”