This last weekend of SVOS was very quiet and relaxed until the end of Sunday. It was understandable since the Los Altos Rotary Art Show was held not far from us. We really need to learn how to choose the farthest SVOS site from popular events like this one! It was all the more interesting to see people coming in groups after 3 p.m., and not all of them were even aware of the Los Altos show.

Angela Sanders‘s garden was a beautiful place to showcase art. She has interesting stories about almost everything that grows there, but I don’t remember names of anything except for the octopus plant. That could be because it’s a very simple name, or because the name suits the plant so well, or because of all abstract shapes that the plant created with shadows and highlights in his leaves through the day. It was a feast of green shades of abstract going on for two days right next to my booth. I now have a nice gallery of close-ups dedicated to the octopus plant alone. The giant bird of paradise (whose leaves look just like a banana palm) is a close second in my photo collection. I must add that the rest of Angela’s garden is really spectacular and was carefully photographed too.

Angela and April Maiten both are mosaic artists. Angela creates beautiful tables, garden sculpture, murals, and smaller hanging pieces. She is very eager to show how things are made, and it was a great pleasure to learn what she does and how she does it. She has this impressive mural on the wall of her studio, above the potting table with all her pets in it:

Angela Sanders. The Potting Table

April works smaller and incorporates all sorts of unusual things in her mosaics, from motherboards to antique tools. One was so strange, none of us could figure what it actually was. April was told that it was a hoof knife, but the thing looked anything but that. She had this absolute gem of art on display, it just radiates warmth from within:

April Maiten. Red Burst

Next to Slava was another landscape photographer, Scott Schilling. Interesting how the two of them ended up side by side and away from the rest of other artists

There was a family who came all the way from Half Moon Bay to see my horses. They said that my little foal looked just like their filly, that was funny. They have 7 horses themselves, and it was a real pleasure to talk to them. And their daughter who is the same age as ours is an artist – that’s amazing. I could only wish… ah, never mind.

I was hoping to complete another miniature canvas, but all that leisuring around in the beautiful garden and fine weather did no good to my productivity, and I never moved past the initial sketch.

All in all, a nice weekend, and thank you everybody who came to enjoy art and support the artists!

One pleasant side effect of SVOS is that you get to know artists that you would not meet otherwise. This time it were our host, Sally Rayn and Amanda Krauss. Sally creates very bright, colorful abstractions, but I was more drawn to her black and white works. Amanda is an avid birder and it reflects in her art. There was an owl hooting before the sunset on Saturday, and I meant to ask Amanda which one it was (she would surely know!) and managed to forget all about it between talks to those who came to see my art.

I met Nance Wheeler before, probably at the last year’s AVArtFest; didn’t recognize her name at first, but she paints one of a kind, very distinctive waterscapes that refreshed my memory as soon I saw them.

We had a lot of fun talking to each other and to visitors on Saturday. A special thanks to all of you horse people for sharing your stories; it’s almost like being to the barns and trails again.

Sunday was a complete opposite to the day before. It was raining heavily in the morning, and the air was so dump that we didn’t risk to bring out pieces out. Surely paper would not take it well. Even Sally kept her acrylics indoor. The fog and raindrops everywhere were beautiful though. Wonderful weather, just not good for an outdoor show. And hopefully I got a few nice reference shots for the future. We left canopies on the front lawn in hopes that maybe the rain stops and the wind dries them up and left. They were still wet when we came back to pack, and someone left grass blades on my folding table inside the canopy. I didn’t see any tracks, but if it was indeed someone and not the wind, that someone was at jumping. The table was not touching anything suitable for climbing.

One thing that I figured out during this weekend: I am not fond of driving the mountain roads. As beautiful as Sally’s place is, it’s good to know that the next weekend it will be a shorter and less curvy drive. And Google has a really funny idea of where Sally lives and how to better get there. The very first time I ended up in the middle of the local neighborhood, with a dead end on the right and a private drive on the right. If not for the kind strangers who lived there I would probably went all the way back to Hwy 84 and then drove to Skyline without ever leaving it.

It was a good weekend. The weather was perfect: just the right mixture of warmth and cool breeze. Nina Uppaluru took every effort to make the event enjoyable for all of us and our patrons. And this year more people who came were genuinely interested in art. Thank you everybody, it was nice to talk to you all!

There were a few really quiet times on both Saturday and Sunday, and I used that to do another tiny canvas:

colored pencil on canvas, 3.5″ x 2.5″

At this point I am convinced that a canvas is the most convenient little thing to use on the go. Besides the size advantage, it lays flat despite the wind gusts, and dust does not do any damage to it.

I bought two 5″ x 7″ canvases to draw something more serious. Need to decide what exactly it will be.

I will participate in this event with the Fine Arts League of Cupertino. Look for a large setup with 24 panels and several canopies!

The event features over 100 local artists. There will be live music and some great food.

Date: June 26, 2010
Hours: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Address: on the grounds of Triton Museum of Art, 1505 Warburton Ave. Santa Clara, CA 95050

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Silicon Valley Open Studios will take place during the first three weekends of May. All sites open 11 a.m. till 5 p.m.

Visit me at the following locations to see new small art (4″ x 6″), tiny miniatures, and bigger pieces:

May 1 – 2, Site 179
5 other artists are showing at this location: Janki Chokshi, Iona Ezaki, Belinda Lima, Slava Shabrov, and Nina Uppaluru.
21471 Columbus Avenue, Cupertino, CA 95014-4972

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May 8 – 9, Site 364
4 other artists are showing at this location: Amanda Krauss, Sally Rayn, Slava Shabrov, Nance Wheeler
16060 Skyline Blvd, Woodside, CA 94062-4420

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May 15 – 16, Site 440
4 other artists are showing at this location: April Maiten, Angela Sanders, Scott Schilling, Slava Shabrov
23442 Toyonita Road, Los Altos Hills, CA 94024

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Pacific Art League holds the juried competition and exhibition, In the Garden. Fortitude was juried in and is on display on the 1st floor at PAL from April 2 till April 29.

Fortitude
colored pencil on drawing paper, 9" x 6"

Dates: April 2-29, 2010
Hours: Monday – Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Address: 668 Ramona Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301

“Out of the Dark” will be on display at the Cupertino Library. The heme of the show is “Graduations.” It has been created in cooperation with the Fine Arts League of Cupertino and sponsored by the Cupertino Library Foundation.

Out of the Dark
oil pastel on colored paper, 9″ x 12″

Dates: April 1, 2010 – June 20, 2010.
Hours: Mon. – Thurs. 01:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., Fri. – Sun. 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Address: 10800 Torre Avenue, Cupertino, California, 95014-3254

We went to the Stone Griffin Gallery in Campbell to see what Julie Kitzenberger had there. I really like her photography. Apparently, the gallery moved across the street since last time we were there and is now a much smaller place. It’s a bit crowded too, with a stack (or stacks?) of paintings by the right wall. Julie’s photos on canvases were placed nicely and prominently on a separate panel in the middle of the room. Good for her! My favorites from the gallery:

Another artist whose work caught my attention was Don Dahlke – a series of open windows with fretted tropical tree shadows. His paintings have a convincing three-dimensional quality, to the point that I wanted to look inside the windows and see what’s hiding there. And then there were shadows that looked like they were about to move in a gentle breeze. Very nice effect:

In the front window, there were several really tiny canvases on miniature black wooden easels. They were maybe 3″ x 5″; I don’t remember the name of the artist. Those canvases got me thinking: would it be possible to draw on a primed canvas with colored pencils? If the canvas is small, it probably would not sag under the pressure… Need to try that.

Fortitude is a part of the 2010 From the Heart show at the Main Street Cafe and Books in Los Altos from February 1 till February 28.

The show features wonderful works of 36 members of the Fine Arts League of Cupertino.

Main Street Cafe and Books is located at 134 Main St., Los Altos, CA 94022 and is open Mon-Sat. 6:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Sun. 7:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.:

Today was a gallery day. We went to see the Absolute Abstraction show at the Viewpoints Gallery in Los Altos. I anticipated seeing Jane Ferguson’s acrylics which of course were awesome but was surprised to see that Floy Zittin created an abstract too, ant it was a very unusual one with tree branches growing from nowhere. I love Floy’s new pieces done on canvas, they have a wonderful touch of magic to them; not a fantasy art, just something a little different than traditional realism. It’s still watercolor, but it looks so different on canvas, its amazing.

The rest of the gallery was just as much pleasure to see as the featured exhibit: Terri Ford’s glowing pastels, Jean Prophet’s pottery, Berni Jahnke’s watercolors (she had portraits of old people on display, and shared their stories with me and Slava), Diana Jaye’s colorful oils, Kathleen Alexander’s graceful flowers and exotic fruit (at least I think that green thing was a fruit, I loved it more than flowers, and it looked great in watercolor), and so much more. It seems that every time we visit this gallery it becomes better and better.

We stopped at Gallery 9 too, since it is located on the next street. Nice to see what Belinda Lima and Rajani Balaram have there, and I don’t remember if I saw Kiyoco Michot’s ceramics before but those bowls that resemble fruit split in half are very beautiful.

To add to the pleasure of taking in art, it was pouring outside. Such a wonderfully quiet, rainy day!