I work in different techniques of oil and acrylic paint. Most of the time there is a great deal of learning in each painting. If I used the same technique all the time, I think I would get bored and eventually stop painting.

 I also draw every day almost like a journal, whatever comes into my mind. When we were students, Zuñiga always tried to teach us to draw from the model in a simple and logical way, making us see beyond the conceptual approach of the forms.

 When I finished art school I was told, now you have to forget everything you have learned; look for your own voice so you do not become merely an academic painter. I went out and tried to forget my training and years later wondered if I did not forget too much!  Later on I started learning again so that I can paint what I want to paint.

 My methods of working are very different. I paint because I like to paint and discover what is coming up in the canvas. I can start with an idea or I can just start with a single figure that will find its own environment and composition. Sometimes the result is completely different from the initial intention. Generally, if it does not work the first time, I abandon the work.

 From time to time I go back to Velazquez, Rembrandt and Titian to see how these masters solve the problems of representation of three dimensions on a flat surface. Tonal painting, atmospheric painting offers more possibilities for what I like to do in my work. Painters like Bacon, Arisman, Oliveria, Corzas and even Giacometti, although Giacometti’s paintings are different from those others, work in that way, and so I am indebted to them.

 I think every artist is the creator of one work of art and its variations; ultimately, it’s impossible to escape from your self.

STEVE TOBIN

Steve Tobin is an American sculptor best known for his monumental sculptures of roots made of steel and cast bronze. Trained in mathematics, Tobin has always pushed the physical boundaries of the sculptural materials he chooses to work with.

He has made blown glass pieces too tall to stand on their own (but managed to devise a solution). He has created 40’ tall glass waterfalls; constructed huge clay sculptures which explode, revealing geode-like brightly colored glass interiors. Each time Tobin has reinvented himself, he has turned to nature for inspiration.

From taking molds of giant termite hills in Ghana, cast into bronze sculptures as high as 20’, or from the forest floors to make his Earth Bronze series. Tobin's monumental Steel root sculptures fabricated from large industrial steel pipes with painstakingly welded joints, explore the archetypal relationship between humans and nature.

More recently, Tobin has created a series of highly reflective stainless steel clouds, bringing the sky down to earth. Another series, Tobin has created bird nests in a multitude of sizes, from miniature to monumental, in cast bronze or welded steel, that hold precious eggs made of stainless steel or bronze: a metaphor for the seed of life.

Artist Statement

"The Steel Roots series is a natural evolution of my Earth Bronzes series. In moving from bronze to steel I have moved from naturalist to the modernist tradition. The metaphor of roots remains the same as with the bronze, but by taking direct from life casting out and replacing it with formed steel, the pieces are much more alive, animated. The roots evoke communities, families, unseen power, networks all coming together for a shared purpose. They gather energy and send it upward in support of the “tree” that is not visually apparent.

The curvilinear geometries between the roots, frame the view creating landscapes in the negative spaces that ebb and flow as the viewer moves around and under the piece. The legs are anthropomorphic, suggesting images of people dancing or huddling together in embrace and collusion. They create a sense of gathering. Juxtaposed with the buildings of San Francisco they will be fantastic organic root gods protecting and animating the space they occupy as well as the spaces viewed in between and around the sculpture.

This follows my previous public exhibition in New York, in which the juxtaposition of insect architecture, i.e. my bronze African Termite Mounds, against the magnificent backdrop of the American Museum of Natural History, and the suggestion of frantic activity in their simultaneous placement at the mouth of a subway station in Montefiore Park in Harlem (termites scurrying about in an orderly fashion in their hive vs. subway riders underground), evokes feelings of humanity’s connection with the natural world."

WATER SERIES

Convinced that photography's power comes from it's unparalleled ability to describe what's visible in front of the camera, I try to provide subjects or combinations of light and substance which test that power. My photographs are very "straight”, in other words the camera simply records what was in front of it -- one standing at the lens would see what the camera “saw”. There is no manipulation after the initial single exposure of the negative either in the darkroom or with computers, etc.

 WATER

The Water Series began about ten years ago. Working in the studio with a 4x5 camera, my initial concern was to see if I could combine water with the human figure in naturally convincing tableaux. To my surprise the variations made possible by mixing two such mythic symbols led from picture to picture until now the Water Series consists of over one-hundred images.

Optically dynamic, water is transparent, reflective and refractive. It "mirrors" and "lenses". In a sense we don't actually "see" water. We see what water does to what is in it, under it or reflected by it. Liquid water moves and its motion relative to the viewer and the light dictates what it does visually. Along the way I learned that the geometry, or shape, of the surface of the water was the most critical aspect visually.This led to building sets and devices which allow other-worldly visual environments with wave forms, splashes and fields of lensing bubbles.

Though a childhood accident left him with impaired vision in one eye,  Lawrence Schiller became an obsessive photographer; even while attending Pepperdine College, his pictures had already appeared in Life, Sport, Playboy, Glamour, and the Saturday Evening Post.  Schiller’s interests and ambitions soon developed into a profession in  print journalism, documenting major stories for glossy magazines all over the world, including Life, Look, Newsweek, Time, Paris Match, Stern, and the London Sunday Times.  His iconic images of Robert F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, and Madame Nhu, among  others are tributes to his doggedness, ingenuity, and charm as well as to his technical proficiency.
In November 1963, while on assignment for the Saturday Evening Post, he reached Dallas in time to photograph Lee Harvey Oswald. Later, he landed Jack Ruby’s final interview. After extensive interviews with the  widow of Lenny Bruce in 1968, Schiller and the writer Albert Goldman published Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce (1974); and, with the photographer W. Eugene Smith, he produced Minamata (1975), the epic pictorial chronicle of mercury poisoning in Japan.

Schiller moved into motion pictures by directing a portion of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and Lady Sings the Blues (1972) with Diana Ross. In 1971, he produced and co-directed with L.M. Kit Carson the acclaimed documentary, The American Dreamer on Dennis Hopper. His editorial direction of The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1972) won an Oscar for Best Feature Documentary for its producer. After obtaining extraordinary  cooperation from the Kremlin, in 1986, he executive produced and co-directed Peter the Great, the Emmy Award-winning television mini-series starring Maximilian Schell, Vanessa Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier.

Perhaps nothing in Schiller’s career proved more remarkable, though, than his collaboration with Norman Mailer — a friendship unique in  American literary history. For nearly thirty-five years the two worked  closely together, on books including Marilyn (1973), The Faith of Graffiti (1974), Oswald’s Tale (1995), Into the Mirror (2002), and The Executioner’s Song (1979), for which Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize. Schiller, who conceived of the project, did much of the legwork, interviews, and research for the book,  while outmaneuvering numerous other reporters to gain exclusive access to the  book’s subject, Gary Gilmore, and went on to produce and direct the award-winning television miniseries based upon it, starring Tommy Lee  Jones.

Schiller embedded himself into the so-called  “Dream Team” defending O. J. Simpson, and with his unique insider’s perspective on the case, co-wrote (with James Willwerth) the New York Times number one best-selling American Tragedy (1996). His reporting on antisocial behavior soon became the basis for many books and motion pictures and documentaries for television, many of which he produced and directed.
Schiller has been a consultant to NBC News, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and the Annie Leibovitz Studios, among many other photographic archives; and has written for The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, and other publications. Upon the death of Norman Mailer, in 2008, Schiller was named the President and Co-Funder of the Norman Mailer Center and Writer’s Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He currently is a consultant and advisor to various estates and trusts on monetizing and preserving the legacy of noted figures in America.

At the core of every human being’s life is the question of: “Who am I?” As we grow through life, many of us often identify with our body & mind and skip the dimension of being, which if we test it, is as infinite as this whole universe.

The images I produce act as a portal to reclaim our intimate relationship with the infinite. This is achieved through our primary homes: the bare earth and the bare body. Through the simultaneous use ofperformance art, painting and analog photography, I stage the body in its rawness as it relates to the landscape through situations that recall the magic of being and the nature of Light.

Through the colorful painting of the body I am arching back to the realization that has long been made by physicists and mystics alike, that this body and the earth, while they appear opaque and dense are also entirely made out of light. As we go deeper into the structure of any material, matter remains elusive.

Nothing seems to be more “magical” than light since it travels but has never been tangibly held or found by anyone, nor is it propelled by anything, nor does it stop anywhere, nor does it seem to clearly originate anywhere. Lastly, since light travels at a constant speed, in an otherwise constantly changing universe, perhaps for this reason light in many traditions is seen as godly in nature.

This realization is the seed of the work to be presented: through the bare body painted with the colors of light, I bring humanity back to its fundamental nature, bypassing the usual layers of identity, space and time, and re-contextualize it into being-ness as Light, or “who we really are”.

Through other means, such as presenting the body in flight or having it interact in various ways with the earth, I further elaborate on the nature of “Form being the Formless” (light) while simultaneously evoking our direct kinship with the earth and some of the predicaments humanity faces in our dependence on dualistic thinking.

Gardner’s canvases resemble acts of nature more so than the profoundly contemplated paintings they in fact are. A fallen leaf, the bough of a tree left barren by the onset of winter, the skin of ripening fruit, roots below the surface of the earth; she masterfully conveys aromas, flavors and the essence of time passing onto the surface of her canvases.

Her abstract allegories allude to commonplace natural artifacts and moments in time, yet they hover at the horizon of understanding, like archetypal talismans containing the knowledge of the unfathomable secrets of nature. Reds so crimson you can feel them pulsing through the canvas; leafy greens that smell of spring in the Celtic highlands, ruby-fire opalescent tears enmeshed in a fleshy matrix of leather and wood.

Concepts alluded to but not entirely revealed, her creations evoke a sense of wonder similar to the feeling one experience’s when witnessing subtle forces of nature at work. Challenging the senses with their ephemeral nuances, yet as accessible to the soul as if enjoying a stroll down a favorite garden pathway.

Gardner’s strength lies in the intensity of her commitment to her process. Several of her paintings require years of continuous work before completion. Stratum upon stratum of complex pigment coalescing on canvas not unlike memories embedded throughout the spectrum of consciousness. The subtleties in her work can catch you by surprise as you stand facing a painting only to discover another painting residing below the surface of the first and yet another hidden pattern emanating from within the more obvious first impression.

Not a speck of pigment is out of place, not a single molecule of ground earth applied by chance. As much as her paintings appear to have been snatched from nature and cast upon canvas, you will find her compositions are carefully and meticulously executed one brush stroke at a time. No perfunctory strokes are present, only inspired gestures of movement from hand, to brush, to canvas; executed like a grand symphonic orchestration.

Bob Willoughby, whose photographs transformed the images of Hollywood’s biggest stars, is a true pioneer of 20th century photography. He was the first “outside” photographer hired by the major studios to create photographs for the magazines, and was the link between the filmmakers and major magazines of the time, such as Life and Look.

I was born in 1946, the first year after World War II. My parents managed to survive the hardships of evacuation and returned back home to Riga, then under Soviet occupation.

I grew up amongst the Russian speaking population of Latvia. Russian culture became my root culture. I graduated from the technical college as an aviation engineer but never worked as such. Instead, I joined Riga Motion Studios as a designer of equipment for special effects. I was in my early twenties and mostly ignorant about art. At this time social realism was the official culture of the country and I did not care about it too much. Information about modern western art was hardly available and my knowledge of it was highly limited.

I started to photograph when I was nineteen, driven by desire to create my own personal style and vision. I was involved in portraiture and created some documentary shots, but soon realized the results did not satisfy me. I put my camera aside and concentrated on reading (Dostoevsky, Bulgakov) and cinematography (Tarkovsky, Parajanov). I was constantly looking for a way to express my personal feelings and thoughts utilizing photography. One year later it came to me clear and simple. I decided to photograph concepts.

In 1972 I created my first, and most important image - Confession.

I instantly recognized the potential possibilities of the conceptual approach. The knowledge I acquired from the creation of this image became the backbone of the work I have produced since.  In 1974, after years of disgust with communist authorities, I left my country and arrived in the USA.

Conventional vs Conceptual

Do I point my camera outwards to the existing world or turn it inward towards my soul?  Am I taking photographs of existing reality, or creating my own world, so real, but non existent?

Results from these two opposite approaches are notably different. In my opinion, conceptual photography is a higher form of artistic expression that places photography on the level of painting, poetry, music and sculpture. It employs the special talent of intuitive vision.

By translating the personal concepts into the language of photography, it reflects the possible answers to major questions of being: birth, death and life.  Creating an idea and transforming it into reality is an essential process of conceptual photography.

Today's conventional approach, with a few exceptions, completely dominates art photography.  But with the introduction of digital photography, we can change this balance.  The ease of producing altered realities will bring a new wave of talented artists who will use it to express their special world of visions with all its meaning, symbols and mystery.

In a world of high technology will you still believe in the truthfulness of a photograph?

Would it matter?

To me it matters. In all these years of creating conceptual images, I have strived to make them as realistic as possible. My technical abilities have improved which have allowed me to broaden the horizons for my ideas.  But this is not the most important part of the process.

The poor concept, perfectly executed, still makes a poor photograph, therefore, the most important ingredient of a powerful image is the concept.  The blend of talent to create a concept and the skill to deliver it - those are two major building blocks of creating a convincing conceptual photograph.

It is not a new idea to manipulate photographic images. As a matter of fact all images are manipulated to a certain degree. The real power of photography emerges when altered reality is presented as existent and is expected to be perceived as such.

An obviously manipulated image is a trick that shows a lack of understanding of the unique power of photography - the belief engraved in our subconscious that what was captured by the camera has to exist. In the best examples of successfully manipulated images the question "Is it real?" does not arise.

My first introduction to digital manipulations showed me how similar analog and digital techniques are. Each has it's bright and dark spots. At this moment I don't see any reason to switch to digital. I still prefer the glowing quality of an original silver print and the laborious process to achieve it.  Yet, I believe, that it is only matter of time before digital technology replaces analog and the conceptual approach will receive a well deserved place in the canon of photographic art.

I also want to believe that, many years from now, artists will continue to develop the language of photography, understanding and preserving its unique power. 

“Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

My paintings are derivative of landscapes. While they qualify as Abstract Expressionist works, they are created with an intention to document a landscape, whether it be emotional or physical. Each painting contains the essence of places visited or felt. As a painter based in Los Angeles, the city bares a presence in my paintings. Rich colors and abstract shapes coalesce into an overall harmony, which are reminiscent of rip currents, mountains, city lights, and reflections in swimming pools.

My work centers around an infatuation with color: how it changes based on surrounding colors, lighting, intensity, and hue. Recently, I have been working with oil paintings on multiple layers of glass. I have been fascinated by the effect of pulling paintings apart to their individual layers and observing the way light and distance impact the paintings, creating a three dimensional effect. The result of this process seems to imbue the works with a life of their own. Colors shift and change based on the light during certain seasons and even at certain times of day. Blues emerge brightly from crimson layered glass during mid-day and recede quietly back into the red background in the evening. The drama created by interplay of time and color allows a viewer the sensation of renewal and a range of visual diversity housed in a single painting. Overlaps created by the multiple layers of transparent color in the glass paintings provide spontaneous variations of color and intensity.

For as long as I can remember, I have been compelled to create. As a kid I would spend hours digging in the ground making armies comprised of bizarre, little clay and stick figures. Three-legged dogs and winged monkeys, my creations were always a little sad, a little misshapen. My own troop of misfits placed in the crucible of the mid-day sun to cure. They were my inner workings made outward. 

In my work I try to take feelings and give them form in order to create a world that feels comfortable and real. My work revolves around the tangible interpretation of the everyday. Through a dreamy window, I explore ordinary human experiences, and with compulsion I morph those settled common occurrences and make them strange. 

I interchangeably utilize human and animal imagery to symbolize both the best and worst parts of the human condition along with our connection to the environment. Birth, death, love, loneliness, hardships and happiness are some of the themes that I work with, to depict the inner struggles and conditions that make up life that we all experience from day to day. Transforming those feelings into work that include my own symbology, as well as archetypal themes to illustrate the interconnectedness of all humanity.

Beginning in 2012 I set out to capture an image daily and post it on social media. There was no specific focus or goal behind this endeavor other than to observe the world around me. Over the years I've discovered the images I've taken have reflected something within me rather than simply documenting the world around me.

My experience of wandering around seeking out subjects that compel me to capture them is an intimate activity. Everything drops away the moment I look through the lens of my camera. What draws me to want to capture an image is as much a feeling evoked by the subject as it is about the image itself. The image seems to transmit something that is just out of reach of my consciousness . It is a challenge to articulate what photography represents to me but I do know that it has become a need that only seems to be satiated by the act itself.

Bruce Barnbaum has been creating images as a fine art photographer for more than forty years, and is regarded as one of the world’s master silver gelatin printers. Barnbaum’s unique style is characterized by his vivid imagery, sweeping forms and dynamic compositions.  An advocate for both photography and environmental activism, Barnbaum produces works which simultaneously convey his passion for the conservation of the natural world while capturing the grandeur and awe of the most beautiful unspoiled regions of our land.

An accomplished author, Barnbaum's internationally acclaimed books include Visual Symphony, The Art Of Photography, Tone Poems - Books I & Book II. He has also taught photographic workshops around the world for over 30 years, and founded the famous Owens Valley Photography Workshops, which enjoyed international acclaim from 1979 through 1990. Barnbaum's photographs can be found in numerous museum and corporate collections the world over and continues to teach workshops internationally.

Throughout the years, Imboden has shown her photographs in an extensive range of group and solo shows at galleries and museums within the United States, South America, Europe, and most recently China.

Imboden’s photographs are in the permanent collections of several international museums including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The National Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Bibliotheque Nationales in Paris, France, The Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany and many other public and private collections throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

In 1993, Connie Imboden won the Silver Medal in Switzerland’s “Schonste Bucher Aus Aller Welt (Most Beautiful Book in the World)” Award for her first book of images entitled “Out of Darkness”. Her most recent book, “Reflections, 25 Years of Photography”, features photos from 1983 to 2009 charting Imboden’s artistic journey and offering new insights into her work and vision.

She teaches photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where her experience as a photographer began. Imboden conducts workshops around the world.

Imboden is also the president of the board of governors of the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund. The Baker Fund focuses its grant making exclusively to Arts and Culture and in 2008 initiated the Baker Artists Awards, an innovative online process offering significant prizes to emerging and established artists of any discipline.

My work is about the human condition. Not specific people, but a kind of general statement about the condition of human kind at the dawning of the 21st Century. I work using the human figure and head as a starting point. By putting a recognizable human form in front of the viewer I make it easier for the viewer to connect with my work. I juxtapose the figure with elements that may at first seem discordant in order to create metaphors that will I hope shine a glimmer of light on man’s place in the world. My work can be funny, sad, scary and at times and to different people all three. I love word plays and I love visual puns. Like T.S. Eliot’s “J. Alfred Prufrock” I hope my work makes the viewer smile and at the same time squirm with recognition.

My first experience with clay was in Tennessee. I was in first grade and my father had been called back to active duty during the Korean War. We moved to a trailer court just outside of Fort Campbell. The ground was a lovely red clay. One day I made a whole set of clay toys and tools and left them to dry on the porch steps. While wonderfully plastic, the clay didn’t hold together as it dried. I returned to find them all cracked apart. That first experiment linked forever clay and my imagination. It also made it clear that the importance is in the making not in the keeping.

I coil build almost exclusively. Coil building has a rhythm that I like. It is a very different process from throwing or from carving. I can almost conceive of the form of a piece from the first coil. I begin to feel as if I have become a kind of a channel for ideas. It is the doing that seems to be the stimulation for ideas and connections that I probably couldn’t make consciously.

As I get older I look back a bit more. I can see more of a pattern to my ideas and interests. They weave through out my life. The other day I reread Kafka’s Metamorphoses, a story that has served as a touchstone for me for years. It was both as I remembered it and not at all the same. In some ways my new work is a re-seeing of ideas I’ve carried with me for a long time but from a very formative place. I still feel a sense of wonder as each idea appears and reappears for me.

Born in 1950, Poland, Andrzej Pluta has been producing beautiful images for over 30 years. As a young man he attended art photography school and fled the political situation in his home country in 1970. He first traveled to Rome and then later to Canada, moving from Toronto to Montreal and Vancouver undertaking personality and editorial fashion photography. In 1980, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked in the music and fashion industries.

Andrzej Pluta creates his images using analog photographic gear (Sinar 8×10 view camera) captured on Fujichrome film using traditional lighting methods.  Pluta does not alter his images in the darkroom or by computer manipulation, nor retouching of the original color transparency. He has developed his own unique style through experimentation. Each series of work produced brings about imaginative abstractions and varied color palettes.

His photographic works are in numerous public and private collections, notably in the collection of Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. He has exhibited internationally including; Stara Gallery, (Warsaw), JCJ Haans, (Antwerp), European Parliament, (Brussels), Museum of Man, (Sofia) and in major metropolitan cities across the US and Canada, with over 20 solo exhibitions in New York since 1990.

My paintings are translations of the dynamic, lyrical, real and abstract qualities, which I observe in the unending variety of shapes, colors and textures found in the landscape. They are recreations of a specific moment in time in which light, atmosphere, earth and sky come together in celebration of the simple and profound beauty of nature. I endeavor to instill a sense of immediacy and totally engage the viewer.

The unique character of California and specifically Napa Valley landscapes have been subjects of many of my paintings since moving from the Midwest to Napa in 1977. Over the years my work has been represented in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Boston. My works are displayed in public and private collections worldwide.