Benicia Artists’ Open Studios 2008

What: Benicia Artists’ Open Studios 2008
When: May 3 & 4, 2008, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Over 70 Artists participating city-wide
Visit www.artsbenicia.org for more info.

During one very special weekend each year over 70 artists open their studio doors to the public, providing a glimpse into the year-round activity that gives Benicia its widely recognized reputation as a key arts destination. Artists will be in their working studios to welcome visitors, speak about their process, and offer original works for sale, including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, glass, woodturning, jewelry, furniture, textiles, and photography. Benicia Artists’ Open Studios, in its fifteenth consecutive year, is free to the public and will feature over 70 studios and art venues open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday.

Visitors may walk door-to-door to visit the live-work studios housed in the historic buildings of the Arsenal District.

The Arts Benicia Gallery at 991 Tyler St., #114, offers maps and a group exhibit including work of each participating artist, so visitors may plan an itinerary based on art they would most like to see.

Arts Benicia’s Printmaking Studio/Classroom will also be welcoming visitors, with students demonstrating various printmaking techniques and showing examples of their work.

Studios open in other parts of town include Benicia’s famous glass studios, which will be featuring glass blowing demonstrations:

Lindsay Art Glass www.lindsayartglass.com 109 East F Street

Nourot Glass Studio www.nourot.com 675 East H Street

Smyers Glass www.smyersglass.com 675 East H Street

In addition, there are several studios located throughout the town and residential districts. First Street downtown offers studios and art venues as well as waterfront eateries, shops and historic sites. Don’t miss the public art piece Dona Benicia’s Mantilla envelops the General’s Chair by nationally known sculptor Linda Fleming, at the south end of First Street; or the Arneson Bench by the late great artist and Benicia native Robert Arneson, in the Benicia Marina. While in town, visitors can also tour historic buildings, such as the restored Historic Southern-Pacific Railway Depot, or the old State Capitol Building (circa 1860).

This year, members of Benicia’s dynamic Plein Air Painting Group, whose studio is the “great outdoors”, will be participating in the Open Studios weekend, making paintings on or near First Street and the Marina Green all day Saturday, and on Sunday until 2pm. Beginning at 3pm, the fresh and spontaneous work they have created will be presented in a special exhibit in the Arsenal, on Jackson Street behind the Arts Benicia Gallery. The paintings will be for sale on Sunday from 3 to 6pm.

The small waterfront town of Benicia, tucked between rolling foothills and the Carquinez Strait, is known for its thriving artists’ community. The quality and variety of artwork at Open Studios, accentuated by the riverfront appeal of Benicia, has made this event a popular weekend outing for visitors throughout the Bay Area. The addition of artists working on site throughout downtown contributes in making this one of Benicia’s most stimulating, vibrant and fascinating events of the year.

Directions to Arts Benicia Gallery: Take Hwy 680 or 80 to 780. Take the Benicia E. Fifth St. exit SOUTH, toward the water. Turn LEFT on East Military St., turn SLIGHT RIGHT onto Grant Street, SLIGHT LEFT onto Polk Street, LEFT on Tyler.

For more information, press photos & interviews, call Arts Benicia at (707) 747-0131, email info@artsbenicia.org.
Featured Artists - Benicia Open Studios 2008

Mark Eanes is the current Chair of the Visual Arts Department at Inner Spark, California State Summer School for the Arts, as well as Associate Professor of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco. Mr. Eanes has exhibited his drawings, prints and paintings widely--both nationally and internationally--and his works are to be found in numerous private and corporate collections. A series of Mr. Eanes' large-scale Master Studies was recently exhibited at Parsons School of Design in Paris, France.

Additional solo exhibitions include the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco and in Napa, California; and the Mill Valley Arts Commission Gallery. His works have been included in group exhibits at the San Jose Museum of Art; the Etra Gallery in Miami, Florida; and at the Michael Dunev Gallery in San Francisco. He has helped to curate and has exhibited in numerous shows at Arts Benicia.

991 Tyler St. #214, 707-980-0710, mark@markeanes.com, www.markeanes.com

Michael S. Moore has shown nationally since 1969 and was featured in 2006 at Arts Benicia in a three person exhibit titled: ATMOSPHERES: moods of the landscape. His imagery of the desert surfaced unbidden while on the East Coast doing graduate work at Yale University after having received his BFA at Stanford. Moore now spends a good part of each year at his studio at Wall Spring Ranch near Gerlach, Nevada, exploring the practically uninhabited northern deserts east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Moore completes his large paintings mainly at his studio in Benicia, but travels to his desert studio at all times of the year for weeks at a time, to experience all the seasons. “My paintings were always about this country even before I came into it almost 30 years ago. It’s nice over here; the light is hard and brilliant, and there’s more weather than a person might reasonably expect. I try to make work about that, about the coalescence of the image and its realization, and about the silence. Slow paintings, which bear watching.” Moore’s recent body of work captures images from World War II in the same soft, mythic style developed in his long study of the desert landscape.

120 West H Street, (707) 745-5908, illmostro@earthlink.net

Carol Dalton is a longtime, revered Benicia artist whose work is treasured by many local collectors, including sculptor Manuel Neri. She creates a series of collaged and pigmented paintings drawing from both primitive and modernist traditions. Her personal iconographic language of scores and scrapes create rough textured surfaces infused with power and presence. She strives for an “imperfect balance” of floating shapes and the suggestion of an organizational grid, forming patterns that emerge and disappear again, pulsating through the work. Carol is known for her use of rich earth tones, but in recent years her palette has burgeoned with brilliant aquamarines, blues, yellows and reds, influenced in part by her surfing trips to Mexico and Australia. Her many honors include multiple merit and excellence awards at several California State Fairs and a Gold Award from Art of California Magazine, and her work has been highly regarded by critics in Artweek and The Contra Costa Times. Carol’s work is represented by Cecile Moochnek Gallery in Berkeley and Tercera Gallery in Palo Alto.

991 Tyler St. #201, 707-745-6278, caroldalton757@yahoo.com

http://www.cecilemoochnek.com/artist-carol-dalton/DaltonCarol.htm

William Harsh is an artist who has lived and worked in Benicia since 1986. Primarily an oil painter, he also works with various water media and with monotype printmaking. Raised in Europe and the U.S., he studied painting at Boston University with Philip Guston and James Weeks, and for many years taught studio art at colleges and universities in New England and the Bay Area. He currently teaches printmaking in Arts Benicia's Education Program. His work is included in many collections in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

“From imagination and memory, I draw in thick oil paint, constructing forms to expose the emotive power of physical, tactile imagery. Through many re-configurations of what first emerges on canvas, intensities of color and movement arise. Jerry-rigged assemblies, sometimes fortress-like in appearance, get built up and “set” in ambiguous spaces. For me, the whole ensemble becomes a curiosity, the way driftwood piled high on a beach or junk piled up in a studio corner can suggest a drama. A finished picture must feel at least as real as an unexpected or dismantled monument.”

991 Tyler St. #201 707-745-8501, williamharsh@mac.com
http://web.mac.com/williamharsh/iWeb/William%20Harsh/Recent%20Paintings.html

Nikki Basch-Davis, one of the Bay Area’s most accomplished plein-air artists, is a founding member of The Outsiders, a group of seven plein air Painters whose work follows in the footsteps of The Society of Six and other early colorists. Nikki’s painting is known for its subtle color and spontaneous brushwork.

She began her art education in graphic arts, which she studied at the Bezalel Art Institute in Jerusalem. She continued her art education in London where she earned a National Diploma in Design. She discovered her true passion for painting at London’s Royal College of Art. The 1983 art show by Selden Gile, the spiritual leader of the Society of Six, renewed her passion for plein air painting. Painting with Jerold Turner and later joined by Pam Glover and William Rushton created a strong bond and the beginning of “The Outsiders”.

123 West D St., 707-746-5052, nikkibdavis@sbcglobal.net
http://www.nikkibaschdavis.com

Lee Wilder Snider is the current President of the Board of Directors of Arts Benicia. Her work often features reflections on water, the play of light or the dazzle of leaves against sky. Lee is also proficient in theater set design and large-scale civic murals, and recently completed Faces of Fairfield Mural in downtown Fairfield, CA. Lee Wilder Snider has a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley, a master’s degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a secondary teaching credential in Visual Art from Utah State University.

“Whether creating murals or sharing more intimate studio work, my joy as a painter comes in opening others to the dance of line, shape, form and color. I am continually moved by the power of art to build community and open us to wonder.”

946 Tyler St., 707-748-7213, craigandlee@sbcglobal.net