Spring Group Show

Description

Gallery Bergelli is presenting a group exhibition of new paintings by gallery artists Jose Basso, Bryn Craig, James Leonard, GR Martin, Susan McDonnell, Greg Ragland, Daniel Tousignant and, Sanjay Vora. Two of the featured artists, Jose Basso and Bryn Craig are profiled in Marin Magazine’s May issue as winners of the popular “Get Covered,” contest. The gallery will be open during the Larkspur Flower and Food Festival on Sunday May 26th with hours extended from 11am – 6pm, our local will be artists in attendance.

About the Artists

Jose Basso

Basso was born in Chile in 1949, he quickly attained fame and recognition in his own country, and by 1978 he had started exhibiting throughout Europe and the United States. The next two decades brought tremendous success including scholarships, awards, and multiple op¬portunities to represent his country in international juried exhibitions. His works have been admired and collected by Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and the Queen of Spain Sophia de Borbon. Perhaps most notably, however, he was selected in 2007 to create a mural for the headquarters of the O.E.A. in Washington, D.C.
As a true master of contemporary art, Basso is admired not only for his tremendous skill but also for conceiving of a style that has never been executed before. Basso’s landscapes are powerful in their simplicity and dramatic in their boldly contrasting colors. Punctuated only by mini¬mal houses and trees, his horizons are at once intense and serene. In is Basso’s ability to create such a dichotomy in a single harmonious work that sets him apart as one of the most innovative artists working today.
Bryn Craig
Craig is well known for his iconic images of Marin, often represented in scenes such as a darkened Larkspur street lit by the marquee of the Lark Theater, or the image of the house seen in this painting. The house is actually a structure in San Rafael and the truck and boat are taken from photos of Point Reyes Station, but Craig felt they would have more impact if he placed them into the meadow he reconstructed from an old watercolor. Born in 1931 in Lansdale, PA, he studied at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and taught at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. Mr. Craig has been a Marin resident since 1978.
“The house in the meadow doesn’t really exist, at least it doesn’t exist as shown here,” Craig says. “I was much taken by the building’s strength and solidity, it should stand alone on a hill, lonely, but protecting those that live in it, so I moved it.” - Excerpted from an article by Dan Jewett that appears in the May 2013 issue of Marin Magazine
James Leonard
Leonard lives and works in the North¬ern California Bay Area. Leonard has been the subject of more than 20 solo exhibitions over the last eight years. His work is collected by individuals and corporations na¬tionally and internationally.
“My paintings are also the attempt to integrate my pro¬found respect for individuality with the process of making art. I work with in an introspective, intuitive fashion and strive to bring a personal sensibility to the work.”

GR Martin

Martin has been painting professionally since 1997. His work has been exhibited nationally in gal-leries and museums that include, The Oakland Museum of California, The San Diego Museum of Art and The Masur Museum of Art.

Martin’s highly detailed style puts his work within the realm of classical realism while his offbeat compositions create surreal environments that draw you in. Structured and focused, his work is also expansive and open to in¬terpretation- encouraging you to find your own meaning within the ambiguity.

Included in this exhibition is the piece titled “Rex”. Depicting a beautiful peacock set against the stark white background. The male’s impressive plumes drape along the right side of the painting, drawing the viewer into the composition of the piece, teasing the imagination to strive farther past the basic compositional elements of the painting.

“A peacock at the right side of a horizontal canvas is the image that took hold after thinking through a range of ideas. The bird’s color is slightly off-natural and it presents a crest of jewels rather than a feathered version. Detail is focused on its head and face. The peacock is set against an abstract background that fades vertically. Rex is a metaphorical representation.”

Susan McDonnell

McDonnell’s paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in galleries through¬out the United States. She received a BA and MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Susan McDonnell uses egg tempera to make her paint¬ings. When making egg tempera dry pigments are mixed into a paste with water and then mixed with egg yolk as a binder, Egg tempera paintings are known to maintain the brilliance of color through the centuries.

“My paintings are combinations of what I perceive as real and underlying unseen elements of nature. My perceptions of nature are often defined by its patterns, delicacy and astonishingly exquisite details. I record the process of contemplative observation in the garden where there are microcosms of interconnected systems, aligning and flowing in and out of each other. It is a continual work in progress. The gardens I paint are reflections of the works in progress we call “our lives”.

Greg Ragland

Ragland was born in Augusta Georgia and grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He studied architecture at Arizona State University, received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California and his MFA from the University of Utah.
Greg Ragland’s paintings have a sense of playful seren¬ity about them. His colors and compositions flow together to create depth and movement of which his subject, the hummingbirds, are able to take flight within his work. The artist refers to the calming and bright backgrounds of his paintings as “Color Fields,” in which these small energetic birds play.

“My intent as the artist is for the viewer to get lost in the calming beauty of these spontaneous experi¬ences in the nature within the seductive “Color Fields.”

Daniel Tousignant

Tousignant was born into a family saturated in the arts, and raised on a dairy farm in Min¬nesota, he started painting at the age of five. The unique spirit and energy of every scene he paints captures the subtleties of color and light. Daniel never ceases to bring delight and wonder to his body of work.
Tousignant has attended the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Chicago Art In¬stitute, Central School of Art in London, and the highly respected Royal Academy in London, England.

“I love recalling collective memories of peaceful horizons, creating environments with open, expansive, clear horizons – an old tree, a vista of pastureland, and the distant billowing clouds of my lazy youth.”
Sanjay Vora
In his large-scale, multi-layered paintings, Sanjay Vora explores the realm of love, memory and nostalgia through a process of covering and retrieving representational, figurative scenes with layers of repeti¬tive abstraction.

His works have been shown and collected throughout the United States including exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Italy and Washington D.C. San¬jay’s latest group show, Portraits, was recently reviewed by DeWitt Cheng in the East Bay Express as well as Bar¬bara Morris in the September/October 2011 issue of Art Ltd. Magazine. In 2002, he obtained a BS in Architec-ture from the University of Virginia and received an MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. Sanjay is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Painting at the University of California, Berkeley, and he lives and works in Oakland, California.

"Celebration" is about a captured snapshot in time during my uncle's wedding in 1986. The phrase, "let it last a little longer", repeatedly scratches through and across the entire surface in an attempt to retrieve this joyous scene from my past which is inevitably unattainable. Ultimately, this piece is about the beauty of the process of longing and the result of all of the elements coming together. “-Sanjay Vora


About Gallery Bergelli
Gallery Bergelli features contemporary and original paintings and sculptures done by national and international artists. It presents work that is both visually exciting and technically strong in a unique and inviting art space.

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