another virtual opening in the books for 2020! we are beyond thrilled to see all the new paintings by rana rochat, sherrie wolf, katherine ace and kim testone finally hanging on the gallery walls. as soon as you step foot in the gallery a powerful force of creativity hits you right in the chest and your mind is in awe of all the incredible talent on view. in the midst of covid everything feels more important. to be able to exhibit paintings created through passion and an extreme amount of effort is not lost on us. these are not paintings that are painted in a couple of days. they are thought out and meticulously rendered over months. just take a look and you will see the results of four strong painters.

“my idea is that too explicit narratives tend to overshadow intuition, gut feelings and the profound experience of mystery and joy that a painting has the potential to provide. my forms and marks, with their apparent weight, particular vitality, and inertia live in an environment i try to render luminous and transparent. i inscribe, blot, stroke, scrape and drip. the primary focus is to convey rhythm and cadence through color, line, and forms. as such, they are purely expressive or lyrical, with no other intended narration. my paintings are there for viewers to run their mind free.

my most recent paintings are moving toward a desire for increased openness, letting color and space within the piece play a more prominent role in achieving a balanced and lively visual environment, where forms, line and marks coexist. my focus is on the complex relationship between forms, marks, color and depth; how they interact to form and balance the painting. the encaustic medium involves a lot of scraping through multiple layers of wax. the final product is what remains, getting to the essence of the piece.””

-rana rochat

rana rochat, untitled 389 2020, encaustic on paper, 57 1/2 x 51 1/2 inches framed

“I hesitate to assign specific meaning or a narrative to my still-life compositions, as I believe we bring our own collected experiences and stories to observing such painted arraignments. I don’t want take anything away from the viewer.

My perceptions and appreciation for beauty in everyday life and relationships to objects inform my painting. I think we gather meaning throughout our own lives and the objects that surround us. Our mementos or memorabilia trigger highly charged emotional memories. The history of still-life genre painting, from Dutch baroque to American trompe l’oeil, is a rich pool from which I draw reference and inspiration.

I see negative and positive space, patterns and colors that attract me. I keep what is needed based on intuition and emotional attachments. Arrangement of objects in space has long been my obsession and method of artistic expression. As a child I would move things around until they pleased me, not unlike some people’s inclination to rearrange the furniture. As I developed skills to make convincing illusions on a two-dimensional surface, drawing and painting became quite magical. The hardest things, that I continue to learn, are to paint what I really see, and to take my observations into a unified composition that makes sense. Interactions and juxtapositions constantly demonstrate that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I have learned from masters like Georgia O’Keeffe, particularly when I was a first year art student visiting museum galleries in San Francico for the first time, learning the power of intense observation. A flower is not just a flower!”

-sherrie wolf

katherine ace, midnight garden 2020, mixed media on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

“The intersection of contraries fascinates me: life and death; humor and tragedy; beauty and corruption; natural and constructed realities; experience and news. I am captivated by complex issues that we all face, and yet experience personally, intimately. I am interested in the role of dark feelings, thoughts and states of mind in the process of transformation. I am drawn to fire beneath reserve.

I think of painting as a dynamic process, expressing energy through the coupling of opposites. The raw canvas is both filled and completely empty. Akin to dreaming, I begin with an image in mind but I am not clear how it will manifest. I do not derive my imagery from sleeping dreams but from my eyes, my imagination, my memory, as well as photography, historical references and chance. These together construct the “whole.” In process, I pursue a dynamic interaction between intuitive images, a sensual and physical handling of the paint, and the spirit or accident of the moment.

Although stylistically I incorporate representation, paradoxically, I approach the canvas abstractly and employ gesture founded in Abstract Expressionism. I throw paint at the canvas and sculpt the surface using painting knives, nails, pins, bottle brushes, gold leaf, plastic, anything that is lying around. I work whatever my mood, and each piece combines the intentional with the accidental, the textured layers forming what becomes the body and flesh of the painting.

I am interested in complex story telling. Figures and still lifes evolve as open ended metaphors/allegories for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors/allegories, and therefore fold, like fabric, time or paint, back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you – like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly…”

-katherine ace

“although i often paint food and desserts, this body of work is more sentimental for me, focusing on some favorite treats and memories from my childhood: my grandma’s love of ice cream cones, my dad’s daily PB&J’s, packaged snacks from the main street market, homemade cherry pie oozing on the plate, and my mom making beautifully messy ice cream sundaes for me and my sister. infused with nostalgia and a bit of whimsy, the paintings aren’t intended to honor the foods themselves as much as to transport viewers back to some simpler moments in their own lives. some of the paintings, like the trompe l’oeil candy bars, are to scale, while others are drastically over-scaled. with each piece, i hope the viewer feels a little bit of magic and child-like joy that maybe he or she thought was lost.   my painting process is quite time-consuming, requiring great degrees of intensity and patience. each piece consists of dozens of thin, translucent layers of fast-drying acrylic paint, often mixed with a satin glazing medium. rather than working from left to right, i work more from back to front, building my layers slowly and methodically. i attack many areas of the paintings in each painting session, adding lots of details and layers which eventually coalesce to create some illusion of realism. i like to think the complexity of my painting process adds to the complexity of my pieces, just like the memories I attach to them. ”

-kim testone

(l) reese's 2020, acrylic on panel, 12 x 12 inches (r) skittles 2020, acrylic on panel, 12 x 12 inches

kim testone, cherry reflections 2020, acrylic on panel, 36 x 48 inches

all available work by each artists can be viewed on our website under the artist page under each individual tab. click on the artist’s name to bring up all work with sizing and pricing. please call the gallery if you have any further questions.