Experimentation is critical as I work with any material that adds towards a developing sense of finalizing projects. I appreciate vibrant and complimentary colors. A visual tension between color, tone, and material is a reason to sustain art making.

Working on large surfaces is a way of informing intimacy with the surface. Large and unrefined expressive marks work with a large canvas through the product of physical engagement. I paint formally on table cloths, bed sheets, and other non-traditional surfaces as a comment on industrial manufacturing and a societal intrigue around repurposing/recycling. I appreciate finding harmony in decorative material’s utility as aesthetic.

Filmmaker Shalini Kantayya’s, Coded Bias, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.  She directed the season finale of the National Geographic television series Breakthrough, Executive Produced by Ron Howard, broadcast globally in June 2017. Her debut, Catching the Sun, premiered at the LA Film Festival and was named a NY Times Critics’ Pick. Catching the Sun released globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016 with Executive Producer Leonardo DiCaprio, and was nominated for the Environmental Media Association Award for Best Documentary.  Kantayya is a TED Fellow, a William J. Fulbright Scholar, and an Associate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 

Diane Wang is an artist and designer working at the forefront of innovation. She was born and raised in the Bay Area and is currently based in San Francisco. Through her paintings, she explores perception, creation, and the human condition in our rapidly evolving world. She studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction, and currently works as a User Experience Design Lead on augmented reality. Her artistic practice explores psychological and societal unknowns that surface in her work in technological innovation, with optimistic visions for the future. Her work contains a harmonious coexistence of stark contrasts and drives intense and complex emotions through art and design.

Christie's works are layered, mixed media paintings that combine abstraction and realism. She works in layers with oil and acrylic paint, often incorporating original drawings and collage. This layering is a metaphor for the multifaceted dimensions of time, place, memory, and the everyday cultural stories that she's drawn to. Through utilizing veils of abstraction with the realistic subject matter, she seeks to evoke a sense of beauty, mystery, and emotional depth.

Amber Allen is a contemporary painter whose work combines her love of scientific theory, space travel, science fiction, and her Jewish heritage. Always on the lookout for fun yet thoughtful subjects, she favors bold colors, and explores the connections between our past and our future, with a current focus on space age themes as a metaphor for the progress of the human condition. Working primarily with oil paints, she uses a combination of palette knife and brushwork to give her work texture and interest.   

"Born and raised in rural area of California, Deborah grew up surrounded by nature, but close enough to San Francisco to be influenced by the city’s history of social, musical and political upheaval. Her lyric-driven and soul-wise music draws on folk, rock, and Americana and is often compared to Lucinda Williams and The Cowboy Junkies. Venturing into everything from funk and reggae to rock and blues, her expansive and eclectic sound has evolved over her years studying writing and poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO; voice and yoga in Mysore, India, and co-writing and collaborating with her Bay Area peers. ”

"Making art is a process that changes as the artist grows and changes.  We are constantly bombarded with images, conflicting information, and ideas.  In our current cultural moment, I want to stop in the maelstrom so that I may observe things closely in an attempt to answer the question of what matters most in life, what is it that is truly important. Right now, this truth is important to me." -Jennifer Fearon

"Animals are my primary subject mater. Animals utilized as stand-ins for people can say a lot about the human condition, but in a less individualistically identifiable way and I like this visual challenge as an artist. There are no human faces to distract from what my message is. That message is often narrative and personal. I can and often do, address environmental issues and endangered species within my artwork as a way to draw attention to the beauty and significance of these subjects. This duality of personal narrative and environmental consciousness is what interests me in my art making process." -Tara Tucker

Madelyn Covey is an Oakland/Emeryville based artist working in painting, drawing, video, and textiles. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2012 and currently works at Creative Growth Art Center. Covey's work deals with the relationship between people and media representation and how the production and prevalence of images affect culture. Cosplay, or costume play, is a motif throughout her work that explores how people are able to combat the commodification of heroes and reclaim the characters as representations of their own lived experiences. 

​"My artistic heritage is as American as Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Burchfield, their tumultuous landscapes a metaphor for a country in turmoil. My paintings often are based on photographs I’ve taken in the area where I live and also during my road trips across the United States and South America, but the photograph only starts the painting--then the back-and-forth between the mechanics of painting and my subconscious intentions take over, until there is a truce between the two---then the painting is finished. Sometimes I get ideas that won’t let me go, and I spend several days envisioning how to put them on a canvas. "

-Clare Radigan

Anahid Aslanyan is an Armenian/American artist born in Iran. San Francisco is her home, She has been drawing since childhood. She lived and exhibited at the historical Goodman Building, an artists' community in San Francisco in the early eighties. Later she obtained a BFA from S.F. Art Institute in 1988. Her work has been shown and published since 1978. She has also exhibited Internationally in Armenia and the Czech Republic. Nature is the strongest inspiration for her work.This is art that comes from the spirit, exploring the dream universe of the soul.

Holly Friesen was born in Saskatchewan, studied Visual Arts at John Abbott College in Montreal and painting at York University in Toronto. Through many years of travel she discovered the portability of watercolors and honed her skills by painting on location. Settling in Mont-Tremblant, QC, Holly opened Artbeat Studio where she painted and taught for 20 years. While living and working in the Laurentians she painted from close observation of nature. She rediscovered the luscious physicality of oils and the textural versatility of acrylics. The scale of her paintings continually grew to accommodate the large movement she felt within herself and the earth around her. Her newest pieces are largely informed by internal metaphors and dream images she encounters when painting from inside the landscape.

Casey Gray is a contemporary artist working primarily as a painter, but occasionally in printmaking, design and site-specific murals. His work examines our collective entanglement with the dignity and reality of every day, and engages the symbolic potential of collected objects and personal ephemera to tell stories and inform identity. He often works in serial format, referencing historical painting tropes as a point of departure. His work is characterized by his commitment to aerosol paints and laborious hand-cut masking techniques, resulting in a type of skewed realism. Gray received his MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010, and his BA in painting and printmaking from San Diego State University in 2006. He has exhibited extensively across the United States and abroad, and has been published widely both in print and online media. He has lived and worked in San Francisco, California since 2008. 

Hersley Casero is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Dumaguete City, Philippines. He received his BSC in Marketing and an Artist of the Year Award from Foundation University. Being born and raised in Dumaguete, the city has shaped Hersley’s perspective as a visual artist and is the stage for many of his paintings & photographs. His works have been recognized and published in local, national and international publications. Over the years, Casero has explored and experimented with a wide spectrum of materials, subjects, and concepts. He motivates others by collaborating on art projects like “Ha?: The Laughing Boy Project” and promoting the freedom of self-expression through art. Toulla Mavromati will be accompanying him as a documentary filmmaker. 

Painter, Antoinette Wysocki was born in Washington DC. She later moved to California to earn her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Currently, she resides in New York where she continues her craft. Her works have been exhibited and sold all around the world. Including New York, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, and San Francisco. Wysocki was nominated by GLAAD as Top Emerging Artist in 2007. Her pieces are often multimedia in which she incorporates acrylic, ink, charcoal, pencil, gauche and watercolor. She describes her works as expressive and abstract.

"My painting has its roots in the fanatical ethos of a small school in the South of France which made Cezanne its figurehead and had a very black and white view of art history. L'ecole Marchutz was a great place to get rooted in a concrete perspective of the fundamentals and a format of painting from real life. Twenty years later, I still paint on location, finding myself in relation to a place and seeking unity with my surroundings. Only now I've exchanged the south of France for the open-air nut house that is San Francisco."

Marian Pham is an artist and illustrator based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has studied at California College of the Arts,  Academy of the Arts University, and studied abroad in South Korea at Hongik University. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration in 2010, and is currently continuing her studies in all aspects of classical realistic art, creative writing, and comics.

Anne Faith Nicholls is an American contemporary artist based in California. Best recognized for her Neosurrealistic paintings, Nicholls has exhibited in collections, galleries, museums, and fairs around the world, and also contributed to a variety of high profile commercial projects with renowned collaborators. Often exploring the subconscious, her works are layered and mysterious, creating symbolic and alluring narratives on the human condition, with a unique perspective. 

Brenda Zlamany is a multimedia artist from Brooklyn, NY. Since 1982 her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; the National Museum, Gdansk, Poland; and the Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Belgium. She has received portrait commissions from the World Bank, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The New York Times Magazine, and other institutions. Grants that she has received include a Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, Fulbright Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship, and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship. Yale University recently commissioned her to create two large-scale group portraits, permanently installed on campus. She received a BA from Wesleyan University.

Painter, L.C. Armstrong, explains "my paintings are primarily about focusing on the good, and on the resilience of people and nature, and most importantly on finding magic in the everyday. The viewer is invited to recover the symbols that can enrich our increasingly virtual lives, and to embrace the beauty of reality."

Helen’s musical inspirations are wide-ranging: from Bach to Messiaen (a fellow synaesthete), Fats Waller to Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans, from Wayne Shorter to Astronomy, Shakti to Archaeology, and Nick Drake to total Native American respect – but most importantly of all – finding time to watch the flowers grow…

Kevin Bleau is a composer, arranger, musical theater writer, and performer based in Boston, where he teaches musical theater writing, composition, arranging, music technology, and harmony at Berklee College of Music.Kevin’s arrangements have been performed by Crystal Gayle, the Platters, Hollywood actor Wilford Brimley, Broadway divas Michele McConnell and Marni Raab, Miss New Hampshire, and many others.   As Staff Arranger for the United States Air Force Band of Liberty, he arranged and transcribed more than one hundred popular songs; these arrangements have reached over five hundred thousand audience members since 1998.

"My work is about memory and family. Although I work from photographs, the paintings are not photorealism. The paint itself, with its restive and gestural surfaces, embodies the memory with which I see the past. And the past is my family, is sibling rivalry, marital conflicts, divorce and adversity and their effects." -Patrice Sullivan

"You are invited to pick up a mask from the floor. It might not be so easy. You move, and there’s a new face, waiting. What do these faces say? You must continue to scan. Is there one that speaks to you directly? Or more than one? Will you decide? I can help you. Are you represented? Are you left out? There are three hundred masks on the wall and three hundred more on the floor! I want to ask, where are you among these creatures? We began with a hole, now there is a chance." - Hamlet Mateo

Emily Carr has lived all over the world and is the author of several collections and chapbooks of poems. After she got an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, she took a doctorate in ecopoetics at the University of Calgary. These days, she’s the program director of the low-residency MFA in creative writing at Oregon State University-Cascades.

"My work focuses on people in my life and the crowds that are a part of it.  I try and use color and paint to express the beauty I see." -Kathleen Beausoleil

Megan and Raymond have been collaborators on video, sound sculpture, and performance works since the 1970s. Primarily working on large-scale installations that incorporate sculptural construction, sound, video and other elements. Their work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. Awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Julianne Jones is an artist living and working in Franklin County, MA. She received her Associates degree in Fine Arts in 2014, from Greenfield Community College. Julianne continued on to UMass Amherst to complete a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Studio Arts in 2016. After graduating she remained in the area to work from her home studio and show locally. Jones has exhibited throughout the Berkshires, Hudson NY, and Brooklyn NY. Jones’s work delves into themes of female body image as well as racial inequality and social justice. ​

Mariel grew up between two countries, born in the United States, raised primarily in Mexico. As a border child and contemporary artist, she is interested in discussing the issues concerning life on the US-Mexican border and the ongoing search of identity that specifically happens in the region. 

Based on mystical animal hybrids and elements of Mexican folklore and folk art, her work reflects this issue, seeking identity within modern fractured culture. These native creatures, or as she calls them “Tescuani”, are a break between the fantastic and the real while they inhabit an uncanny setting and space of liminality. The analogy of animal hybridity is a representation of Mariel's own background and lineage.

Denne Locke has been an artist from the Becoming Independent Art program for several years. 

C.K.Itamura is an autodidactic interdisciplinary artist, designer, and producer. Her work blurs the lines between mediums as she combines tangible materials, sensory prompts, book arts, photography, language, time and space to create visual work, participatory projects, and conceptual installations.

Lea Walloschke is a multifaceted artist living in Berlin. She has worked as a fine artist, sculpturer, performer, director, author, graphic novelist, composer and singer. Lea has visually formed many theatre shows, dance shows, performances and films with her work as stage and costume designer. In every work, she looks for authenticity and tries to penetrate the chosen subject from all sides.

Gloria is a former art teacher who is looking forward to delving into the beautiful Sonoma countryside! Her work as a plein air painter is a snapshot of the environment, yielding bold, strikingly original content. She holds a BA from the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, and is a lifelong resident of Kansas City. With exhibitions in various local and regional shows, she is currently represented by Gallery V, Leawood, KS.

Reuben is a Bay Area based artist. He holds a BFA from  Savannah College of Art and Design.  He also attended  The Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.  During his stay Reuben plans to spend time doing fieldwork such as; sketching, photographing, and drawing of the natural environment throughout the Warnecke Ranch and Vineyard grounds. The other portion will be spent in the studio working with those photos and sketches to create paintings.

Kirsten Rae Simonsen received her MFA from the University of Chicago after studying traditional Balinese painting and drawing in Bali, Indonesia for a year at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) and with a master painter in Sukawati, Batuan (I Made Bukel). She has shown her work nationally and internationally, with work shown at Root Division in San Francisco, Peter Miller Gallery in Chicago, Pterodactyl Philadelphia Gallery in Philadelphia, and The Residence Gallery in London, to name a few. Also, she has created site-specific drawing installations for the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, and the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts.  Simonsen lives in Honolulu with her husband, dog, and bird, and she loves traveling the world for inspiration. You can see more of her work at: Instagram: @behomebeforedark.

Gilmor attended The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Iowa State University and has an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa School of Art. She is professor emeritus at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids.

Jane has exhibited her work internationally for 38 years. She began showing at A.I.R. in the late seventies and was a national member from 1986 -2006. Her work has been reviewed in journals such as The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The New Art Examiner and is included in several books including Lucy Lippard’s, OVERLAY: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory; and Broude and Gerrard’s The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s History and Impact, Abrams, 1993; and Pioneer Feminists: Women Who Changed America, 1963-1976, B. Love, University of Illinois Press, 2006. In 2009 she was a contributor to Cabinet magazine.

Genevieve Quick is a San Francisco based artist and arts writer. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has shown her work in galleries in the Bay Area. She has been awarded residencies at the Mills College, de Young Museum, MacDowell, Djerassi, and Yaddo. Quick has received a Center for Cultural Innovation, Investing in Artists grant and a Kala Fellowship. She has contributed writings to Shotgun Review, The Present Group, and Temporary Art Review. Quick regularly contributes to Art Practical.

Zygarewicz was born in Chile in 1965, grew up in Bolivia, and moved to San Francisco at the age of 15.  She received her BA in Visual Arts from Loyola University, New Orleans and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Zygarewicz has exhibited across the US and has received numerous awards and critical recognition for both her sculptures and installations.  She recently participated in “Southern Open 2011”, at AcA, “NOLA NOW Part I:  Swagger for a Lost Magnificence”, at the CAC; “Women Work Wonders”, and “Brother, Can you Spare a Day “ at Staple Goods, “thread ~ el hilo de mis dias” AcA, Lafayette, LA.

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A widely respected performer, composer, and educator, Vessela Stoyanova is a triple threat on the Boston music scene. Born and raised in Bulgaria, most of her original music is inspired by the folk music of the Balkans. Her compositions have been recorded by numerous ensembles and performed at major Boston-area venues

Enrique Gonzalez Müller started his career as a music producer and engineer at the Plant Studios working with artists like the Dave Matthews Band, Joe Satriani, Joan Baez, Les Claypool, and members of Metallica. In his home country of Venezuela, he's produced many chart-topping albums in for Caramelos de Cianuro, Viniloversus, and Desorden Publico, and in 2009, his collaboration with Los Amigos Invisibles won the band a Latin Grammy Award for their album Commercial.

Nate is a musician, writer, and educator. He curates the Lost Marbles Salon, an experimental monthly art and science gathering at Cloud Club a Boston art collective. While in residence Nate will focus on the development of a new course for Berklee College of Music that will draw from diverse scholarship, including: media and cultural studies that address celebrity identity, fan culture; psychodynamic explorations of human-computer interactions, and the nascent field of sound studies. 

Born in New Jersey and raised in rural Connecticut, Karen developed her first connections to the natural world on the shores of Long Island Sound. She earned her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and upon graduating moved west. Her green sensibility has been prized by many private collectors and has earned a place in numerous permanent public collections including the New York
 State Museum in Albany and Providence Medical Center near Seattle. During her residency, she plans to make preliminary studies and sketches in pencil, paint, or iPad, and hopes to further develop the social and environmental themes in her artwork.

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Katherine Whitlock lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Her whimsical illustrations, charts and cartographies are collaborative journeys that fuse facts with experience based research and myths. She has been commissioned by public and private organizations to create maps of Italy; Big Bear, California; Little Compton, Rhode Island; Saint Joseph’s Prep School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and The World. Her illustrations reside in private collections across the United States. Whitlock holds a BFA in painting from Arcadia University and studied Painting and Art History at the Accademia Italiana in Florence, Italy.

Julia Barry, composer, pianist, and singer, creates music as a tool for social and environmental justice. She is interested in exploring peace—particularly the experience of natural spaces—through sound. During her stay, at Chalk Hill Artist Residency, she plans to develop and write a composition for “Habitat: Home”—a collaborative, multi-disciplinary performance series slated for 2018. These shows will explore the current hostility in America, encourage communication across our nation’s divides, and highlight art as a form of empowerment and resistance.

Bennett, better known as "Eyevan Tumbleweed," is a nature lover with an art intensive background of over 15 years. He has worked in various creative mediums not limited to visual arts. In 2002 while living in Prescott, AZ Eyevan found his medium in wood sculpture. Since then he has spent the majority of his artistic focus on a series of visages comprised from pieces of wood he has been collecting for 4 years from mountains, deserts, swamps, forests, riparian zones (rivers) and beaches. While in residence he hopes to accomplish an anatomical project.  A full body piece or a torso and head with found wood. Bennett believes that Chalk Hill Residency will prime him in an experiential way, to be able to make future full body figures. 

​Clark was born and raised in San Francisco. He lived there for 50 years. He has been a Santa Rosa resident for 25 years. A graduate of the California Maritime Academy, Clark had a 40-year career as a licensed Navigation Watch Officer on American Merchant Ships. He has been drawing for nearly 5 years. Clark hopes to capture the moment of imagination: therefore, sometimes the irrational, improbably or impossible.

Dean was born in New York City and now resides in Berkeley, California. As a visual artist his work is best described as narrative and at first glance might appear representational. He typically works with chosen themes and from them creates a series of images - paintings, mixed media, or assemblage. The work is usually concept driven and aims to tell a story. ​His overall vision and intent while in residence will be the development and exploration of a body of work centered around wine and viticulture. 

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As a painter, Christine explores themes of place, identity, boundaries, and belonging. In the majority of her work there is no human presence. Anonymous architectural structures become the central image but streets and buildings remain vacant evoking a sense of nostalgia and longing in the viewer. She distorts space, light, and distance to create an altered and sometimes unfamiliar version of a “remembered place.” A place first experienced will often appear different upon return. Because memory is changeable and fleeting, reality also becomes unreliable. In her art practice, she works to capture intimate, but barren environments in mundane moments. ​During her residency, she plans to work on her new body of work called "Fenomenal" about femininity as a force of nature.

​He makes art for the creative freedom released by a vivid and fertile mind, inspired by materials both art and non-art related. Kevin explores and pushes the limits of a material, struggling with it. The process tests his own limitations and biases. Chalk Hill Residency will allow him the time and space to draw from the past. It will give him the freedom of thought to bring it all together.

Pierce is a composer/performer and music technologist based in Spain, who will be working on a 2 channel audio installation piece, title: Cyclic Remains.  The sound composition is being prepared at the Chalk Hill Residency over the course of the summer, and was previewed as a work-in-progress installation piece on August 13th at our 2017 Summer Open Studio. This new audiovisual performance by Pierce Warnecke was commissioned by CRAK Festival (France), which will premiere Sept 21st 2017 in Paris at the St. Merry Church.

Heather has been working on a documentary film called "Who Pays the Price, the Human Cost of Electronics." She is also writing a book called the ‘Dragon’s New Rules’ which explores the major themes of the film. Heather spent two weeks at Chalk Hill working on the completion plan and roll-out of her documentary film. The film explores the human cost of global outsourcing, revealing that thousands of young people, many working illegally, are becoming terminally ill from factory working conditions. In China this is a new development; the parents of these teens had no experience with the global economy and the pressures and toxins modern day production brings to its workforce.

"Composing and teaching are not only the most important things in my life but also my passion. The best reward for me, like creating a piece of music, is to see students making progress in my class. I always tell my students, 'If you like to learn, I love to teach and give you all I know about music.'" - Rosey Lee

​Robin has been teaching, performing and living in Boston for over 30 years. She works with all levels of singers, beginner to advanced, and teaches Ear Training at Berklee College of Music.

Mark Thomas started creating art when he was 8 years old.  In high school he took art classes.  Mark has been with BI Art since 2007.  Mark often sketches in his sketchbook in great detail before beginning a work. He seems to care deeply about his work and meticulously focuses on every detail.  He enthusiastically attends classes weekly in photography, painting, mosaics and ceramics and his work has evolved beautifully with his studies.  In photography class he has worked with toy plastic cameras and has learned the process of making prints in a black and white darkroom. Mark's art work has been shown in numerous exhibitions at the Sonoma County Art Fair and the Gallery of Sea and Heaven. His portfolio was shown at an event celebrating our Chalk Hill Artist Residency Program. Most recently his photography was accepted into a photography show at the Santa Rosa Laguna Foundation.  Mark has also worked on unique projects like upcycling and painting furniture and a guitar and it's case.

Her drawings on paper, rendered in pen and ink, integrate human anatomy and the form of a tree. Her process begins with familiarizing herself with the terrain, noting how the trees interact with the land; How their form has been effected by outside elements (are they contorted from high winds or limited sun exposure), their height (what vantage point they've maintained, what have they witnessed over time), and their shear size (girth especially determines how old they are and the wisdom they possess). Jamie picks a few trees in particular and build a relation with them, through her imagination and through reality. In the mean time she composes a sort of portrait of them and incorporate some sort of anatomy that  suits their character. Chalk Hill's acreage will act as the next chapter to this series and the trees a new cast of characters. This project is location specific and Chalk Hill Artist Residency provides the ultimate backdrop and space to expand her work and, in turn, heightens the publics' view of nature.

​Nicolas Lefort is a French composer/performer and music technologist based in Berlin. Since the early 2000s while constructing puzzling relations between sound, space, objects and architectures, he digs down a path to explore matter in its full potentiality: as a lively embodiment of virtualities, complex causalities, unceasing transformation. He is an advanced sound synthesis, shaping time and space with his hybrid analog-digital modular synthesizer and computer generated processes.  He is currently master student at U.D.K. Berlin in the Time Based Media department as well as at the California Institute of the Arts, CA with the Music Technology and the Composition program. Monaí de Paula Antunes researches within the artistic realm. Relation is the magnet of her interdisciplinary projects, which seek transversal approaches for information systems, spatial design, and performativity. She was born in Brasília-DF, Brazil and studied Arts and Media at Universität der Künste Berlin / Generative Art Class / Prof. Alberto de Campo 

Robin's great passions are art, communities, cycling, the environment, history, music, philosophy, reading and how these aspects of her life mutually inform her. During her residency, she will do watercolor and oil landscapes, creating a “painting cycle,” capturing rivers flowing from the mountain to the sea, inspired by the Russian River as it winds from Chalk Hill through the Sonoma County landscape. This landscape painting project is her quest to create a visual poetry with the resonance of Tankas and Mandalas. Her residency will produce a cycle of paintings raising awareness of the impact of human action on the land, and arguing visually for the adoption of ethical practice with the animals, plants and other beings with which we share the land. 

Kate got her MFA in 2015 from the School of Design in Rhode Island. For over the last 4 years her work has explored California’s cannabis trade, with her Master’s Thesis, ‘Cottage Industry’ being the apex of that work. The series of 5 lithographs document the appropriation of the home as a grow house and the shifting roles that occur when the lines of work and home are blurred. The conclusion of that series has brought her to her latest project, 50 paintings of personal gardens from Northern California. From flowers to food, these paintings attempt to capture the work, care and attention that goes into curating ones own garden. Although the subject matter may be different, the projects are linked through reoccurring themes that come up while she makes the work. ​During her stay at the residency she wants to create a three part series of graphite drawings that will use, at its anchor, the Chalk Hill Estates.  She plans to illustrate the agricultural powerhouse that is Sonoma County.

​Lacey was born in Kentucky and raised in the SF bay area where she still resides. She was home-schooled as a child and spent most her time making artwork and creating elaborate games of make believe with her younger brother. ​Her early participation in children’s theatre provided the basis for her career as a scenic painter, principally for California’s Great America theme park in Santa Clara, CA. She also studied oil painting at Ohlone College where she earned her AS degree in fine art.  Lacey spent several years independently refining her work before she began showing her oil paintings and occasional installations in the Bay Area, LA and beyond.​ She creates nostalgic scenes with anachronistic elements in brushy oil paint. These paintings present an underlying narrative of shared human experiences such as connection and isolation.

​The foundation of Ben's work is composed of the simple notion of life and death.  He has a B.F.A. degree from Sonoma State University, in Rohnert Park, CA. Ben wants to spend his time at the residency applying a variety of techniques, materials and processes to a series of paintings and drawings.

Christina was born in San Francisco and raised in Los Angeles. In high school she was influenced by the paintings of Marta Chaffee and Sam Francis...inspired by their work she began to focus on painting living in Oakland. Christina studied painting, film and drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute. After two years she returned to U.C. Berkeley, graduating with a BA in Art. While at UCB she worked at the Berkeley Repertory Theater and studied music at Laney College in Oakland. She moved to New York City in 1996, invited by her sculpture teacher Irv Tepper and taught summer school art in Brooklyn and Harlem as well as beginning to draw seriously. She has been inspired by graffiti....Twist, Eskae, Crayone, Dream, Con One, Miner, etc... Currently she surfs, and studies acting with Rob Reece and draw from a small studio and is represented by the Robert Berman Gallery and herself.

Haynes creates almost-abstract images via a unique photographic and rust process. The resulting images feel like half-remembered dreams of the American landscape. Haynes is also branching out in new directions with this show: color photography is making its first appearance in his work at the gallery. This body of work not only contrasts nicely with the almost-black and white nature of his earlier work, but also reveals Haynes as a sensitive and subtle creator of photographic images, no matter the medium. Jim Haynes lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Evans is a Painter/Architect and will be at the residency for the month of October. Martin has lived in London for the last 20 years and was originally from the English countryside of rural Worcestershire. Martin will be keeping a sketch book diary of his time in residency.  He paints in an impressionistic manner, not at all tight or detailed. 

"My paintings are the result of observation informed by imagination--a place where the iconic is seen in the emotional context of mystery and surprise. There is a powerful energy when sky meets ground. To intensify that connection I strive to create a psychologically-nuanced atmosphere of unexpected color, giving it depth and consequence." -Anne Ireland

Jacob Broussard is an emerging artist originally from Louisiana, USA. He is of French Cajun descent, and paints from a Southern vernacular: a temperamental language that questions the connection between Southern identity and geographical identification. Through his artistic practice, he explores the correlation between landscape, abstraction, and self-invention. 

Flo Perkins is currently working and residing in the Pojoaque Valley north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has studied under renowned Italian master glass blower Lino Tagliapietra. Her work can be found in several museum collections including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum and the Racine Art Museum as well as numerous public and private collections.

Classical Jazz musician, Freddie Bryant received a Master’s degree in classical guitar from the Yale School of Music and is in demand in the New York jazz and Brazilian scenes, where he has worked with Elaine Elias, Tom Harrell and many others. He was a member of Ben Riley’s Monk Legacy Septet and the Mingus Orchestra and leads his own group, Kaleidoscope. He has toured 55 countries and collaborated with musicians from a variety of backgrounds, including Indian classical musicians, African singers, oud players, traditional Arab groups and klezmer bands. In 2006, Bryant spent a week in Cuba, performing and working with other musicians. As an impassioned educator, he has taught jazz to all ages around the world.

Grammy-nominated guitarist/composer Amanda Monaco has performed with such greats as Milt Hinton and was a student of Ted Dunbar and Gene Bertoncini. As a leader, Monaco fronts her own jazz quartet, which performs original compositions with post-bop mixed with the avant-garde as well as Middle-Eastern flavors; her second CD, Intention (Innova Recordings) was released to wide acclaim in April 2007. The am4 performs frequently in various clubs around New York City and has performed at the JVC Jazz Festival. Monaco also co-leads the jazz quintet, Playdate, which incorporates modern twists into a hard-bop, bluesy sensibility. The author of Jazz Guitar for the Absolute Beginner (Alfred Publishing), Monaco is on the faculty of National Guitar Workshop and has taught at Berklee College of Music.

Noah Dasho is a printmaker and painter based in Oakland, California. He received a bachelor of arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work often focuses on groups, clusters, or repeated patterns, especially as they relate to man-made elements interacting with nature, or vice versa. His current work combines his early childhood fascination with birds--greatly informed by his maternal grandmother’s decoy shop and his paternal grandfather’s Middle-Eastern heritage. Pieces reflect a focus on the visual assonance between the meticulous grid work often found in handwoven rugs and the majestic natural patterning of bird feathers. Dasho has shown at various venues around the Bay Area and is a member of the California Society of Printmakers.

Lacey Bryant is a San Jose artist who works in a variety of media, oil paints being her favorite. She paints primarily on wood surfaces, often utilizing found wood for the unique textures and history they offer. Her subjects are often dreamlike, inhabiting a realm of strange, nostalgic sweetness with undercurrents of darkness and mystery. Each piece is a bit of the middle of a story for the viewer to interpret in their own way. Contrasting cute with creepy, familiar with odd, Lacey sets out to quietly captivate and unnerve her viewers through the underlying tension of her work.

Beth Fein has been a visual artist and dancer for over thirty years in the Bay Area. Since 2005, she has recreated and directed dance anywhere: an annual, global, participatory, public art performance that has been performed on seven continents and in fifty countries. The whimsy of chance elements and life choices often appear in Fein’s work: should it be this or that? The ideas, of the combination of unpredictability and the necessity, of making choices, often-difficult ones has appeared in her work over a long period of time.

Javier Arce is an emerging important artist from Spain whose work has been exhibited and collected in Europe and South America. He received his Masters in Sculpture from the Wimbledon School of Fine Art. Arce’s drawings are executed on Tyvek and deliberately crumpled so that when installed on the wall in a deliberate fashion of pulling and pushing the drawings take on a sculptural feel as they project outwards from the wall.

Poet and doctor Catharine Clark-Sayles was raised as a military-brat and after her childhood of frequent moves across the United States, she attended college and medical school in Colorado then moved to Northern California in 1979 for medical training as an Army physician. Better as a doctor than as a soldier she chose civilian life and a private practice specializing in older adults.

Dr. Clark-Sayles has learned poetry by reading and working with mentor poets Margaret Kaufman, Robert Sward and David St. John. She has had many poems published in medical journals and anthologies. One Breath is her first book. The title comes from advice she was given as an intern: in an emergency take one breath and then another.

Beth Ferguson is an ecological designer, public artist and founding director of Sol Design Lab based in San Francisco. She has an MFA in Design from the University of Texas, Austin. She has engaged thousands of participants in her work that ranges from solar charging stations, bus stop interventions, solar payphones, ecological map making and public furniture made from up-cycled materials. Ferguson has taught ecological design and public art courses at Stanford University, Hampshire College Center for Design and the University of Texas at Austin. She has received commissions from SXSW, Zer01 San Jose Biennial in 2010, 2012, TEDxPersidio, Austin Cultural Contracts, Mass Audubon, Coachella, Maker Faire, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin Energy, Sacramento Utility and The Art Institute of Chicago. Beth’s work has been features in the New York Times, Make Magazine, Pop Tech, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Austin Business Journal, and 7×7 SF and beyond. 

Karen Hackenberg lives and works in Port Townsend, WA. Her ongoing series Watershed addresses the tenuous boundary between living nature and human encroachment.  “In my ongoing painting series, Watershed, I take a light-hearted yet subversive approach to the serious subject of ocean degradation, presenting a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of our new post-consumer creatures of the sea. The Watershed paintings are inspired by the incongruity of the man-made detritus found washed up on the otherwise pristine shores near my Discovery Bay, WA studio.”Hackenberg collects this flotsam and creates meticulous gouache paintings from her seascape compositions. This exhibition includes a selection of her paintings as well as her collected castaways that “bob in on the waves from far and near.”

Robin Wyatt Dunn writes and teaches in Los Angeles. He is a member of the intelligentsia. He holds three degrees and drinks coffee (lattes included) and thinks that being intelligent is a good thing and talking about ideas worthwhile. He is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. 

Marie is an architect, planner, urban designer, landscape designer and artist. She spent her residency working on her project, ‘Sculpture of Relationship,’ an artistic formal exploration of shapes responding to the work of architect John Carl Warnecke and the landscape and material environment of Warnecke’s Sonoma County ranch. Marie is working with Warnecke’s primary archival materials and conducting oral histories with members of the Warnecke family to create a series of works that respond to the family’s architectural legacy and to their relationship to the Healdsburg, California landscape where they have resided for generations.

Mary Button Durell is a San Francisco-based artist who works primarily with paper and wheat paste. Mary’s work is medium-centric and process-oriented allowing for unique shapes and forms to emerge out of a temporal engagement with her materials. For more than 20 years, Mary has explored the nuances and intricacies of paper and light and continues to experiment with her medium and its visual capacity for transformation. In her most current work, Mary has introduced color in various formats from paint to acetate. Working with limited materials in the pursuit of the properties of light and translucency, predominant motifs emerge in the shape of biomorphic forms, layering and patterns that recall the infinite organic fabrics that make up the natural world—from the ethereal and cosmic (constellations, galaxies, asteroids) to the microcosmic (cellular fibers, molecular structures). In this way, Mary’s art practice aims to reconfigure the complexity of the universe into simple materials.

A fourth generation San Franciscan, John Bucklin has been drawing and painting since he was three. Trained in the classical tradition at the Florence Academy of Art, he continued his studies in New York City, graduating with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. His work has been shown in Miami, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Since 1990, John has been spending summers in Montana and Wyoming. An avid fly fisherman, he loves to hike and camp in the great outdoors. John finds inspiration for his work in the landscapes of the American West. He loves the unknown possibilities and physical challenges that he experiences outdoors, whether he’s hiking to 11,000 ft. in the John Muir Wilderness, crossing the lonely Mojave Desert, or exploring the Bob Marshalls.  “All these adventures push me further, and are a metaphor for my creative process.

Mary Armentrout is a dance artist who works primarily with repetition and duration to uncover aspects of intentionality and presence.  She makes works that embody the contradictions of contemporary life, both our conflicted, fractured sense of self, and our discontinuous, collage sense of being-in-the-world. She grounds her work in her ongoing investigations of the Feldenkrais mind-body practice, drawing on the rich ways its awareness practice embodies and problematizes issues of intentionality and presence.  From the conflictions and dislocations she finds there, her work spills out to build odd and compelling structures exhibiting contradictory aspects of our self-awareness and being-in-the-world.  Her choreography consists of small fragments of everyday movement, words, and environments that are distilled, distorted, polished, and stripped down to reveal the layers of ambiguity, pathos, and absurdity underneath the surface.

Debra Cook Shapiro is a San Francisco artist whose large-scale and richly painted landscapes and figurative paintings are inspired by observing her children; by the places they have visited; and by memories of her own childhood, which emerge during the process of painting. Shapiro often starts with a photographic reference but departs from the photo and recreates the scene such that a new reality is achieved, infused with personal history and lyricism. 

Painter/ printmaker Linda Goodman is an adjunct instructor in printmaking at City College of San Francisco, and has taught classes extensively in the U.S. and abroad.  She regularly conducts non-toxic monoprint and monotype art classes and workshops in the United States and abroad. Linda Goodman's work is in the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Oakland Museum, California; the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. and other public and private collections. She earned her BA in Fine Art from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, where she worked closely with her mentor, Nathan Oliveira in printmaking and drawing. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Mills College, Oakland, working concurrently in lithography and etching with Tamarind master printer Kenilo Nanao and renowned printmaker Misch Kohn at CSUH. Linda's work is largely representational, wilth occasional forays into abstraction. Her drawing is squarely placed in the Bay Area Figurative tradition.

Bay area based artist, curator and archaeologist Toni Gentilli creates research-based art practice incorporates historic and experimental photographic processes with printmaking, illustration, sculpture, and installation. She combines anachronistic materials, techniques, and philosophies gleaned from various archives with artistic and scientific sensibilities to create work that explores the interrelationships between technology, nature, history, and perception. 

Monique recognized my calling as an artist at a very early age when I received my first set of watercolors. Her formal studies began as an undergraduate at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. She received her BA degree from the California College of Art.  Her graduate studies were pursued at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

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Monique now lives in Miami. Her studio is located at the Bakehouse Art Complex in the Wynwood art district. What she tries to achieve in her paintings is to capture a sense of aliveness with brushwork and color harmony.  Her aim is to paint the light and pieces of color which describe what she sees. She describes her experience while painting as a journey inward to connect with the essence of her subject. When she paints she is reacting to that essence and the excitement she feels to it’s unique beauty. Her focus is to capture the magic!

Ann Hart Marquis is a nature lover whose paintings are permeated with her love of color and reflect her lifelong reverence for nature. She has been painting since 2000. She studied painting in France, New Mexico and Chicago. Ann is interested in creating images that are representative of mood and feeling and serve to evoke an emotional connection between the viewer and nature. Her works have an abstract quality that both stimulates the imagination and encourages personal interpretations by the viewer. In 2006 Ann became the Art Director of Camera Arts Magazine. During that time, she focused on viewing submitted images and fine art photographs from around the world. Recently she assumed the same position and duties with Shadow and Light Magazine, which is an online photography publication. She uses her knowledge of her painting experience while assessing photographic images. Her art has also been influenced by the portfolios that she has seen.

Born and raised in Sonoma County, northern California, Marcy Silvera has primarily been a plein air painter for 17 years, after completing courses at the Santa Rosa junior college, and continuing with workshops over the years with such artists as: Chuck Waldman, Greg LaRock, Joan Huffman, and the great Kevin MacPherson, to continue to expand as an artist, be experimental maybe push some boundaries.

Using cut paper collage techniques Adrienne Heloise constructs images based on medieval tapestries and western hunting traditions to depict a struggle for intimacy and connection. Using vivid colors and recycled envelopes, she meticulously assembles figures and landscapes with up to 12 layers of hand cut paper.  Translating mystical landscapes into individual collages onto wood panels, she then compiles the fragments into a large-scale, humorous narrative about losing oneself. Using the analogy of the hunt as a quest for love and mystical union, the quest for transcendence becomes a violent, ecstatic collision where all is one.

My work is about the eventual distancing between people – the slow separation where the ones we love most become unknowable. It also addresses how we revel in recoiling from others; how self-imposed incubation makes us more ourselves. Cocooned and isolated, the quietness of my paintings reflects how we hold ourselves where we want to be: somewhere safe. Though their body-like forms are often abstracted, my paintings portray a pervasively human narrative. The presence of pairs in my work evokes an unspoken distance – that we may be with, but never truly of another. Even when together, my self-contained abstractions, like us, grope for a sense of closeness that perhaps we once had but have since lost.

Dylan Bolles makes performances with people and environments. He designs and constructs new musical instruments, cultivating co-creative relationships based in listening practice. His sound compositions, installations, physical scores, and works on paper are rooted in a shared temporal experience. Dylan holds degrees in music composition from Middlebury College and Mills College. He is the co-founder of thingamajigs, a California non-profit arts organization, and received his doctorate in Performance Studies from University of CA, Davis. Dylan's ongoing research projects engage practices and theories of collaboration in performance. 

My name is Stasea Dohoney and I am an artist and treasure hunter. Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, I've been residing in Sonoma County's beautiful wine country since 2005. I am a creative who is driven by passion and I find overwhelming inspiration by frequenting estate sales, old barns and attics. Some treasures just can't be left behind..thus bringing us to the Seahoney Etsy shop! Stop by on occasion or, better yet.. follow us to see new pieces and fabulous acquisitions as soon as they are added.

Alison Koehler is most dedicated to the life of an artist. Her commitment is apparent in each of the various styles and media she chooses for the creation of her art. Carefully rendered and thoughtfully crafted, she intently makes decisions which reach engaging solutions. Ali stays focused and present by expressing herself with color and form. She has been with BI Art since 2006.​ Ali is the first Becoming Independent Artist to experience the Residency.

Beth Ferguson is an ecological designer, public artist and founding director of Sol Design Lab based in San Francisco. She has an MFA in Design from the University of Texas, Austin. She has engaged thousands of participants in her work that ranges from solar charging stations, bus stop interventions, solar pay phones, ecological map making and public furniture made from up-cycled materials. Ferguson has taught ecological design and public art courses at Stanford University, Hampshire College Center for Design and the University of Texas at Austin. She has received commissions from SXSW, Zer01 San Jose Biennial in 2010, 2012, TEDxPersidio, Austin Cultural Contracts, Mass Audubon, Coachella, Maker Faire, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin Energy, Sacramento Utility and The Art Institute of Chicago. Beth’s work has been features in the New York Times, Make Magazine, Pop Tech, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Austin Business Journal, and 7×7 SF and beyond. 

Naomi envisions each landscape design as a unique composition of color, texture and sculptural form. Her approach is rooted in a richly diverse background that began at Otis/Parsons College of Art And Design, where she obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Art with an emphasis in drawing and sculpture. After over a decade in the interior design industry, a keen interest in urban design, natural phenomena, and architectural design eventually led Naomi to USC. Under the mentorship of Mark Rios of Rios Clementi Hale Studios, she obtained a Masters Degree of Landscape Architecture in 2006 and has since worked with several renowned Southern California design houses, including Magni Design, Marmol Radziner and Associates, Ahbe Landscape Architects and KAA Design Group.

A fourth generation San Franciscan, John Bucklin has been drawing and painting since he was three. Trained in the classical tradition at the Florence Academy of Art, he continued his studies in New York City, graduating with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. His work has been shown in Miami, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Since 1990, John has been spending summers in Montana and Wyoming. An avid fly fisherman, he loves to hike and camp in the great outdoors. John finds inspiration for his work in the landscapes of the American West. He loves the unknown possiblities and physical challenges that he experiences outdoors, whether he’s hiking to 11,000 ft. in the John Muir Wilderness, crossing the lonely Mojave Desert, or exploring the Bob Marshalls.  “All these adventures push me further, and are a metaphor for my creative process.

Christian Lapie was a student at the School of Fine Arts of Reims from 1972 to 1977. He continued his studies at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1977 to 1979. He first devoted himself to painting and realized works from tarps mounted on frames with chalk, oxides and ash.  After a stay in the Amazon, it is dedicated to the realization of monumental sculptures: figures of gross and charred wood. Fort 61 , Echigo Tsumari sculpture park in Japan, The Crow's Nest in Canada ... He realized d other works for the Solomon Foundation at Château Alex in France, the Museum of fine arts, Rheims , the Abbey of Saint-Jean Orbestier in Mulhouse , Château d'Arsac, the star panel Parc de Sceaux (work cast) in Path of the Sun and the Moon in Jaipur, India (stone work) 1 and Constellation of Pain in 2007 for the Chemin des Dames in France at Place Stalingrad in Reims and in front of the station Champagne-Ardenne TGV .

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Kristina Quinones was born and raised in Connecticut. Received her bachelor's degree in Printmaking from the University of Connecticut in 2001 then moved to California. In 2005 she received her Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. Quinones has exhibited in group shows throughout the United States. Recently Quinones was awarded the Affiliate Program at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Artist in Residence at Chalk Hill Residency.

Victoria Veedell captures the essence of nature by examining the effects of light on form in the natural world. She has been painting the landscape in one form or another for over 20 years. Originally from Houston, TX she earned a BFA in painting from Texas A & M Corpus Christi.  The university years opened her eyes to the world of art. She travelled widely before finally settling in San Francisco in 2003.  All the while no matter where she was she continued to paint and exhibit her work. She frequently attends artist in residence programs around the world. For her, attending these programs has become an integral part of her art practice. Her first residency was at the Vermont Studio Center in 2001. Followed by Chitraniketen Artist Residency in India, Kamiyama Artist Residency in Japan and Chalk Hill Artist Residency in Healdsburg, CA. The residencies provide an opportunity for travel and time to paint.

Allison Watkins is a visual artist who currently explores our perceptions of materiality through her photography and textile based works. She is interested in documenting the instability of all forms and how our grasp of, and relationships to these forms change throughout time. Allison was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a MFA graduate of San Francisco State University, and a BFA graduate of San Jose State University. Her works have been shown in exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Camerawork, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, The Textile Arts Center (NYC), En Em Art Space, and the Napa Valley Museum, among others.  Allison currently makes her home in Northern California, where she teaches fine art photography at colleges and universities in the Bay Area.

Jason Avery is an award-winning full time contemporary painter who lives and works in northern California.

Scott Cazan is a Los Angeles based composer, performer, creative coder, and sound artist working in fields such as experimental electronic music, sound installation, chamber music, and software art where he explores cybernetics, aesthetic computing, and emergent forms resulting from human interactions with technology. His work often involves the use of feedback networks where misunderstanding and chaotic elements act as a catalyst for emergent forms in art and music.

Visionary sci-fi painter Justin Sobczyk was born in sunny Southern California and living in foggy San Francisco.

 San Francisco based artist Brett Walker makes still and moving pictures.

Danielle Nelson Mourning lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Mourning received her MFA from the Royal College of Art in London, England in 2005. Upon graduation, she received the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art, which funded her work in Ireland and resulted in her work’s inclusion in its permanent collection. Mourning cites American conceptual artist Christopher Williams as a significant influence on her practice, whom she worked for while attending Art Center College of Design. Her exhibition history includes solo shows in Los Angeles and New York.

"I’m exploring how art and design can influence and rewire how we use natural resources, in small incremental steps, to move the needle towards sustainability."

Clark has been drawing for over 6 years, and he has exhibited at the San Francisco Travel Association via ArtSpan, and his drawings have been shown at Fulton X and Chroma Galleries, and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts . Clark hopes to capture the moment of imagination: therefore, sometimes the irrational, improbably or impossible.

"I record on tape. I record peculiar sounds I hear. Once the recording is on tape, the sound will be altered, by hiss and by the technical quality of the cassette player and by the speaker system. But everyone will be able to recognize the sound. And intuitively he or she will listen differently, because of the circular motions and the calming speed."

Ron Nadarski was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA in 1978. His work has won numerous awards including a Joan Mitchell Fellowship nomination for Painting in 2009. Ron earned a MFA degree in Painting from Boston University in 2009, MA degree in Painting with secondary focus of Drawing from Eastern Illinois University in 2006, and a BFA in Painting from Arizona State University in 2004. As a BU graduate Ron was mentored by renowned artist/painter John Walker. Ron now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, pursing his studio practice while engaging the local community with vibrant curated exhibits.

Composition and color are the driving forces in my oil paintings. Looking through my eyelashes and out the corners of my eyes to simplify shapes and colors, I work from life whenever possible. I strive to capture light and atmosphere - a representational impression and my emotional response to the setting and the subject, whether it is plein air landscape, studio still life or portraiture.

Making the connection between the infinite nature of the cosmos, our physical fragility and boundless emotional landscape, Wagner’s work and practical research marry the esoteric, mystic, natural, mysterious and future possible. The latent and coded narrative that each material brings to mind, activates our relationship to natural resources, industrialization and cosmology. Her minimal yet unrestrained compositions (whether canvas, panel, found wood, ceramic or aluminum) combine recognizable geometries and color dynamic through natural, synthetic and industrial materials, layering the surface like a bold and complicated narrative in which one is often implicated by their own reflection in the pieces.

Klea McKenna is a visual artist whose work has been shown and published internationally at venues such as SFMOMA, Datz Museum of Art in Korea, The Museum of Photographic Arts in CA and the Hecksher Museum in NY. Her photograms are held in the collection of the SFMOMA, LACMA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection and the Mead Museum of Art . Klea is represented by Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles, Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco and Gitterman Gallery in New York. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. 

"As an artist originally form Romania, my work is informed by the relationship between my identity to my sense of displacement, memory/narrative, movement/changes, and the ways I have devised to reconcile these incongruous elements. My intricate yet expansive drawings tackle the dichotomy between containment and liberation by infusing a static diagram with a charge that propels into motion."

Mark Growden is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, singer, music educator, conductor, and visual artist. He is the founder and Artistic Director of The Calling All Choir, The Chromatic Community Music Center, SF SingFest, and The SF Jaw Harp Choir in San Francisco, CA. He was the founding Artistic Director of the Marigny Opera House in New Orleans and is the co-founder of the New Orleans Dance Festival. He is mentored by Vance George, Director Emeritus San Francisco Symphony Chorus; is an Alice Parker Composers Workshop Fellow; and has also studied with Michael Kaulkin, Joseph Stillwell, and Remy Charlip. He has released several critically acclaimed albums and has toured the US extensively. He has composed original musical scores for dozens of dance and theater companies and scored several films. Growden has devoted his life to making music for other people and to helping other people make music for themselves.

Frank Ryan is a native Californian, born and raised in Marin County. Inspired by the landscape of his surroundings, he focuses on  the immediate aspects of direct observation to find unique perspectives on the common subjects of his experience. Ryan draws from the historic themes of American and European realist traditions to reflect on contemporary American life.

"I recognized my calling as an artist on my 10th birthday when I received my first set of watercolors from my uncle, Ray Bertrand, a WPA Muralists and art teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute. My formal studies began as an undergraduate at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I received my BA degree from the California College of Art, and my graduate studies were pursued at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena."

"Painting for me is an intuitive process; it’s about finding a dynamic and spontaneous balance between the recognizable and the unknown. I think my way into painting came through letting go of trying to capture what something looks like and instead allowing how the thing feels – its presence – to emerge from its surroundings."

"My installations and drawings collaborate with natural phenomenon such as soil, wind, water, and light. I seek to make visible the beauty of nature, its changes and its unseen forces. I wish viewers to engage with nature ‘s power as it is shown by and in contrast to manmade, fragile linear elements. I see my installations as extended, three-dimensional drawings in space that move as we circulate around and through them and situate us in movement and sound, silence and contemplation. I seek to capture fleeting moments of wonder."

"I call myself a painter but I make monotypes and aquatints too. For the monotypes, I develop an image by dabbing etching ink onto a Mylar plate with my fingertips, subtracting the lights with cotton swabs. I then print from the Mylar onto a sheet of paper, and repeat the process over 50 times to create an image. The monotypes are really printed paintings: I make a single copy. The technique enables me to achieve a depth and subtlety of color that I have not found possible in any other medium."

Kris (born in 1978) is a sound and visual artist residing in Berlin. Although his focus is on sound, he is also exploring constantly formats and aesthetics of cinema. In his sound art work he uses film-editing techniques, prepared drums, tape manipulation, no input mixing and a vast amount of raw and processed field recordings. His performances for film and tape involves live super8 manipulation and scoring, an arte povera approach to expanded cinema.

"For many years I have traveled and painted. I find being in one place for ten days, two weeks allows for a deeper understanding of that place. I see my paintings come more alive as the place opens up and shows its self."

Nathan was raised in Pasco, Washington an agricultural community in the shadow of Hanford Nuclear Power Plant.  The futility of this environmental contradiction gave Lynch an acute sense of location and deep appreciation for irony.  In the five formative years after graduation Lynch worked as the prop master for a local community theatre, the effects of which are still being realized in his current body of work.  His concerns for political conflict and environmental upheaval are filtered through notions of absurdity, hand fabrication and the dramatic devices of storytelling. 

"My interdisciplinary practice interrogates the ideological positions of representation as they are linked to forms of racial and colonial authority. Engaging with the mediums of painting and drawing from a conceptual and material standpoint, my work often confronts the viewer with the implication of their own body in the production of meaning. The illustrations and photographs used in my work circulated within popular and mass produced history books and newspapers of the 19th and early 20th Century, or alternatively were commissioned to form the basis of official ethnographic and scientific archives. The subversion of the original authority and pedagogical function of past images and texts serves as a way to rethink our contemporary relationships to knowledge and power." -Kahlon

Ayla Nereo is a voice for the planet, a beacon of light, a modern bard of beauty singing directly from her soul. With lyrical poetry splashing like dazzling paint across a canvas of sound, she builds layer upon layer of vocal melodies into majestic loop-pedal harmonies, weaving syncopated threads of guitar, kalimba, piano, and percussion into her live performances. 

"My creative work is driven by listening. Tuning in to my inner silence, to the sounds of nature, to stillness within and movement all around me in life. When I am listening well, the creative impulse comes swiftly, in words, songs, visions, images… and my job is to translate that into form. To create in sound and image and writing what my inner ear has received."

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Laura evokes with her paintings a sublime isolation, an atmosphere of impasse and uncertainty, between real and virtual vantage points. Featuring orchestrated color of a unique and compelling design—vibration, contrasts, varying between synthetic and organic colors.

Fine Art is my Philosophy. It has given me the reason to exist. Art is the purest, most unmediated contact I have with life. I am trying to bring out the full potential of everything constituting my life: every particle, element, and material. I strive to give them a good long life as they deserve. This is the way I thank them for constructing the world I exist.

Jeff has been painting and drawing all of his life. His impressionist/expressionist watercolor paintings are of local scenes that capture the feeling and light of place, using ancient Japanese colors. These landscapes are like snapshots of the regions that Jeff explores on foot, near his home in Sonoma County. 

Tramaine de Senna is a studio-based artist, born in San Francisco, and grew up between Vallejo, Oakland, and Berkeley, California. She acquired two B.A.s with Honors in architecture and art in 2004 at the University of California at Berkeley, and her M.F.A. in 2013 from Sint Joost in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Breda in the Netherlands. In 2015, she became a laureate of the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, Belgium. She currently lives and works in Antwerp. 

Hugh is a performer, composer and sound artist. He designs site-specific immersive sound environments for outdoor spaces, permanent and temporary. He designs and produces spectacles in the tradition of Renaissance garden entertainments and fetes from England, France and Italy. He creates spatialized musical experiences which expand the time and the experience of conventional musical compositions: an opera for the forest. Hugh's site-specific work is rooted in ways of looking at and hearing nature; he travels extensively recording avian 'dawn choruses' and babbling brooks. These recordings are used to build a portrait of a place, as well as serving as the seed material for musical compositions that reflect the presence of the human in nature.