I hope that you all had holidays filled with laughter and love!
Now it’s time to get back to work! There are walls that need color, rooms that need furniture and houses that need to be turned into homes. It is our job to make the places that our clients live and work to be welcoming, wonderful and inspiring. How lucky are we to do this work and how lucky are they to have us!
I am looking forward to working with you in this next year. Please come by and see us at the showroom or take a look at what we have to offer at GardenCourtAntiques.com.
California Bay Area Contemporary Artist, Lisa Espenmiller“The Way”, uses line, movement, and space to focus intent on material and repetition of pattern, in a meditative process. Hers is a controlled technique akin to writing on a scroll. Espenmiller draws horizontal ink lines, one after the other, until the entire surface of canvas or paper becomes a field of meditative resonance. The lines and washes of color in her paintings are visual descriptions of the chi or breath-energy that flows through all things.1
“I have this notion that art occurs in the process of life itself, and you don’t have to go outside of the context of your own life. It’s all there, and you just tap into it. You open up to it. You have to make yourself available to possibilities.”
— David Ireland, he Art of David IrelandThe Way Things Are2
Lisa Espenmiller “Begin in the small,” 2013 acrylic and ink on canvas over panel 20 x 20 inchesLisa Espenmiller “Born in the void” 2013 acrylic and ink on canvas over panel 20 x 20 inchesLisa Espenmiller “Know when to stop”, 2012 acrylic & ink on canvas over panel 24″ x 24″Lisa Espenmiller “Nothing slips through”, 2014 acrylic & ink on canvas over panel 30″ x 30″Lisa Espenmiller “Of its own accord “ acrylic & ink on canvas over panel 24″ x 24″Lisa Espenmiller “Some breathe gently”, 2013 acrylic & ink on canvas over panel 36″ x 36″
Artist’s Statement
The lines and washes of color in my paintings and works on paper, visual descriptions of the chi or breath-energy that flows through all things, seek to sober and quiet the mind. When the mind quiets it becomes susceptible to inspiration, to movement from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. Whether the body of work attempts to depict the inner scenery of breath-energy (The Way, Where you come from), the ever-shifting inner and outer landscape (the groundless ground), or talismanic power (chant), the goal is to engender a stilling of the hyperactive mind so the viewer can recognize the existence of a source that transcends human or divine authority – what Lao Tzu refers to as “dark-enigma” – the chi-tissue of empirical reality and the empty opening of consciousness itself.
The paintings and works on paper function both as mirror and window. Viewers are encouraged to stand before each one allowing the piece to offer a reflection of what’s inside or a view into another layer of reality. Think of them as modern mandalas or yantras.
As in meditation, my process requires that I remain rooted and immersed in the realization of the piece for a focused, uninterrupted period of time. There is little time or space for the logical mind to intervene in an attempt to control the outcome. The pace of each line, the movement of the brush or pen are guided by intuition and “no-mind,” accepting and trusting what presents itself in each fluid, changing moment.
Bay Area Artist, Ann Holsberry, works in cyanotype1, a kind of photographic printmaking that yields a rich Prussian blue combined with gouache (an opaque watercolor paint). She uses this process in a painterly manner to convey vast impressions of the oceans and cerulean skies in her Migration series which is now on display at Garden Court’s Vermont Center Showroom presented by Art Consultant, Laurie Ghielmetti Interiors + Art2
Holsberry’s Migration series is fluid and ever-changing. Using a combination of source materials—her Qi Gong meditation and movement practice, images from the Hubble Space Telescope, old maps, and her collection of nests, feathers, and other ephemera—Holsberry creates stunningly beautiful works that engage the viewer and encourage deeper reflection. Her pieces draw inspiration from nature and her fascination with migratory birds—which often appear as metaphorical symbols in her work —but her meditations on migration also delve deeper. Her works map emotional territory born from semi-annual trips to France.
Being somewhat nomadic by nature, I like to move about, establishing little studios wherever I land for a while. For the past decade, I have spent part of each year living and working in France, where I find inspiration in the rich cultural history and beauty of Europe – in particular, Paris. It is a place where serendipitous discoveries seem to lead me in unexpected creative directions.3
Additionally, she is moved by the experience of seeing family members and the increasing numbers of people being pushed and pulled around the globe; movement that needs to be expressed. Though deeply personal, Holsberry’s work maintains an important universality, drawing on the individual, yet shared, experience of moving from one place to another.4
Ann Holsberry: Hover, 2014, Cyanotype & Gouache on paper, 72 in. x 38 in.
The name cyanotype was derived from the Greek name cyan, meaning “dark-blue impression.” 5 The cyanotype process, together with a number of other, older photographic processes, was revived by contemporary photographers in the 1960s The basic cyanotype recipe has not changed very much since Sir John Herschel introduced it in 1842.
Ann Holsberry: Towards the Seas 1, 2014, Cyano 72 in. x 38 in.Ann Holsberry: Towards the Sea 2, 2014, Cyno 72 in. x 38 in
MIGRATION
I am fascinated by the movement of humans and animals across the globe, and am drawn to illustrate their webs and networks of transit. I am also fascinated by cosmology, in particular the way the earth and other heavenly bodies travel through space. Accordingly, my current work is inspired both by the movements of planets and stars, and by the complementary movements of animals and people across the earth.
To express these ideas, I work with cyanotype, one of the oldest alternative photographic processes. Cyanotype was the original process by which blueprints were created, and its blue color evokes skies and oceans, giving the works a vast, dreamlike, atmospheric quality. I begin each piece by painting the chemicals onto paper in the darkroom in varying patterns, after which I expose the prints in outdoor sunlight, sometimes working in locations over which flocks of migratory birds fly, or near oceans and rivers where whales and fish are migrating. Following the exposure process, I add gouache, ink, pastel, or wax to some of the works to further develop them as paintings.6
One of our commitments since moving into our new Vermont Center Showroom has been simply, show how modern and antiques can be used to create gorgeous and eclectic interiors.
We’ve been fortunate to work in tandem with Fine Arts Consultant and Interior Designer, Laurie Ghielmetti Interiors in our efforts.
Combining modern with antique reflects the real world of interior design today and we are happy with the results.
.. more to come. Meanwhile, we hope you’ll stop in to view our temporary contemporary exhibit at 151 Vermont Street in San Francisco.
Special exhibit: Contemporary Art and Fine Antiques photo: Laurie Ghielmetti
Special exhibit: Modern Art and Fine Antiques
Special exhibit: Contemporary Art and Fine Antiques , hanging the new exhibit for 2016
Special exhibit: Modern Art and Fine Antiques, arranging art pieces for the new exhibit.
Special exhibit: Contemporary Art and Fine Antiques, preparations for the new contemporary art exhibit at Garden Court Antiques.
Special exhibit: Modern Art and Fine Antiques photo: Laurie Ghielmetti
Special exhibit: Contemporary Art and Fine Antiques
Special exhibit: Modern Art and Fine Antiques
Special exhibit: Contemporary Art and Fine Antiques photo: Laurie Ghielmetti
Special exhibit: Modern Art and Fine Antiques photo: Laurie Ghielmetti
San Francisco Bay Area Abstract Impressionism: Artist, Maya Kabat
Architectural forms, geometric abstraction, and the tension between balance, color & form inspire California Abstract Artist, Maya Kabat. The urban landscape of California’s Bay Area and the unconventional tools she uses further informs her art.
I paint to create a language for things I can’t articulate, to address the questions that don’t have answers.
For Kabat, the work is an ongoing process of refinement and regeneration. She uses drywall tools, to layer, build and add texture to her canvases. With seeming impetuosity, she may introduce a dissonant color or destructively wipe a canvas entirely clean to start over. She works fast and prolific, obsessive almost. The process dictated by an imperative inherent within the medium: She can only work as the paint is malleable. “Time” is not necessarily her friend.
[..] it means I really have to be fully committed to paint one of my pieces. I can’t leave it if it’s not done.
Maya Kabat – “Urban Field 18”, oil-on-canvas, 24 x 24 in.
Maya Kabat, “Urban Field 13”, oil-on-canvas, 36 x 36 in., 2015
Maya Kabat “Upper Span 3”, oil-on-canvas, 24 x 36 in.
Maya Kabat: “Living Cities, Oakland 5”, oil-on-canvas, 30 x 30 in.
Maya Kabat “Urban Field 17” 24 x 24 in., 2015
Maya Kabat “Two Cities 5”, 24 x 48 in., 2013
Maya Kabat “Two Cities 2”, 24 x 48 in., 2013
Maya Kabat, “Strike Fault 4” 30 x 30 in., 2008
Maya Kabat“started out as a kid who just needed to make things”. As a young girl she began knitting with her grandmother. She carried that skill on through high school and into college. “I always loved thread.”
She began “quilting” as an undergrad finding inspiration in improvisational quilters such as the unique and important African-American Gee’s Bend quilt makers and the renowned African-American quiltmaker, Rosie Lee Tompkins. The asymmetry and the improvisational approach to pattern, shape and color continue to influence her work.
Prior to graduate studies at the University of California, Davis Ms. Kabat began painting because she felt a need to learn about color in ways that quilt-making could not afford. Initially, she began primarily painting landscapes, understanding space — using the basic tools to construct realistic space.
Her present work can be considered “urban landscapes” embodying that sense of push & pull with space, of dark & light, of small worlds of pattern, color & texture, “just like the city itself”.
Artist’s Statement
In this series of paintings I explore the changing form and reality of my daily life through an examination of constantly shifting external and internal environments. Referencing the urban landscape where I live, I examine how with the changing seasons, my surroundings shift with the light, the weather, the passing of time. Plates of earth move and my house shakes and then settles. The horizontal and vertical structures around me turn slightly off-kilter with time and wear, as the cracks in the hard cement remind me that nothing is fixed. The built environments in which I dwell, like my body and my mind, are not static.
My paintings play within this space between chaos and order, structure and formlessness; between a world that feels solid, unchanging, and safe, while simultaneously knowing that nothing is. The result is the visual record of the struggle to hold these two realities at once; to create a language for the uncertainty and precariousness of life without crumbling beneath the weight of the understanding.
Using a range of scraping tools I create my surfaces with stripes, gouges and flat slabs of paint, as I apply, scrape away, and reapply paint. Earlier layers are exposed and then covered, as the painting is built, cut away and edited. I see the process of painting itself as an excavation. I work to expose the truth of the painting and to locate some truth about myself within it. I paint to create a language for things I can’t articulate, to address the questions that don’t have answers.
Maya Kabat received a Master of Fine Arts in 2000 from the University of California, Davis. Notable exhibitions include a solo show at the Caffe Museo at SFMOMA in 2012, a solo show at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco, California in 2009, and a two-person exhibition at 5 Claude Lane Gallery, in San Francisco, California which was reviewed in Art LTD. Magazine in September, 2011. She was a founding member of the artist-run space, Mercury Twenty Gallery, in Oakland, California and served as President on the Oakland Art Murmur Board of Directors in 2011-2012. For more on Ms. Kabat’s substantial background [..] ^jh
In many respects it is predestined that artist, Elaine Coombs would live and thrive in San Francisco. This City’s urbane, innovative, yet intimate qualities are complemented by a surrounding wealth of verdant, lush wildnerness replete with trees, light, color, flora & fauna not found in many other cities. These are the qualities that initially drew Ms. Coombs, a native of Toronto, Canada, to San Francisco in 2000.
“San Francisco is a small yet cosmopolitan city – small enough to get to know people easily but big enough to not run into them all the time. And with the influence of the technological and creative wealth of the greater Bay Area, I think it is one of the most vibrant places in the world to call home”
Nothing but bright, acrylic on canvas over panel, 40×50 in
A grateful time, acrylic on canvas over panel, 50x40in
Preferring the poetic, acrylic on canvas over panel, 50x40in
Ms Coombs’ uses photography in her creative process to capture light & shadow as she draws on the outdoors for inspiration. Walks through the nearby Muir Woods Redwoods Forest (which John Muir called “the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world.”) is a favorite ‘muse’ of hers. San Francisco’s iconic Washington Square Park in North Beach is another & the subject of a few works on display at Garden Court Antiques. As Coombs returns to projects, sometimes months later, these photographs serve as inspiration for her work.
Lengthy experimentation, what Coombs calls “playing around” has culminated in an artistic process of expertly placed dots of color that shimmer with light & depth which convey the artist’s deep connection with the outdoors. Coombs does not use a brush. Her art is created with knives, palette knives of wood & steel that flex offering her the perfect painting response.
“I can’t imagine going back to using a brush again to create an image. I even prime my canvases with a knife.”
But, maybe, its best we let the artist speak for herself:
Artist’s Statement:
There is something about being in nature that makes me want to seek out these spaces time and again. Perhaps it is a memory conjured from my rural childhood; positive feelings of comfort, stability and happiness come to mind easily. It seems whenever I simply need to regroup, breathe and return to center, it is the forest that can do this for me every time.
In the studio, I refer to printed photographs I have taken on my nature walks, which inform my acrylic paintings. Intuitively, my eye separates the patterns of color that I see in the photo and translates these into a complex mosaic of dots on the canvas. Over time, the methodical application of the dot technique has become in itself a meditation of sorts. I am peacefully absorbed in the process of painting the work, which I hope is imparted to the viewer with a pleasurable feeling of well-being similar to what I feel actually being in the forest.
My unique way of interpreting a photograph owes some debt to the digital age and to the proliferation of pixelated imagery that I have grown up absorbing. As an artist I enjoy the process of separating an image into parts, breaking it down and then building it up again in a slightly altered fashion. My work has the dual aspect of seeming realist from afar and yet is quite abstract at near view. It is this dichotomy, achieved in the successful play of opposite modes of seeing that I feel is the most contemporary aspect of my work.
Featured works by Elaine Coombs can be viewed at Garden Court Antiques presented by Art Consultant, Laurie Ghielmetti Interiors + Art. Additionly, Ms Coombs creates commissioned works in conjunction with a designer, art consultant or gallery exploring a client’s personal connection to their outdoor environs.
Elaine’s paintings have been exhibited both nationally and internationally in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Singapore. Her work has been seen in a number of publications, notably: California Home + Design Magazine (2007); Art Calendar Magazine (2009); and a new book entitled Green Art: Trees, Leaves and Roots (2014). Several notable collections have acquired her paintings; the U.S. Department of State – Art Bank Program, and the Ritz Carlton Highlands Hotel in Lake Tahoe, California – as well as numerous corporate and private collectors worldwide.^jh
Combining contemporary art alongside antiques reflect the way Interior Designers innovate with their design projects today.
Next time you visit the showroom at 151 Vermont you’ll notice ‘temporary’ exhibitions of contemporary works of art.
Let us know what you think.
Currently in the Showroom we are featuring photographic works from Napa Artist, Lewis deSoto in conjunction with Laurie Ghielmetti Interiors. These ephemeral images were staged in response to the ‘destructive process’ of Land Art, a defining element of Postwar American art.
Lewis deSoto ARTIST STATEMENT Site Projects 1980-1986
The Site Projects were the step between my purely photographic work of the late 70’s and early 80’s and the sculpture that was to take precedent by 1989. The work was a philosophical response to “earthworks” sculptors like Smithson, Heizer and DeMaria. What issue was taken, was the destructive process (I mean this in digital terms, where the original is destroyed as a piece of data is constructed); bulldozers marked and moved the earth to serve their metaphorical purpose.
The Site Projects used the site as a stage that left a dwindling trace of my work there. I added a temporal element that was echoed in many works that took place during long camera exposures at night. These works dealt with notions of power and scale; like Chinese landscapes, these works compared the scale of the human against the overarching embrace
of the world, the stars and the galaxies.
Most projects began with drawings, some formalized instructions that could be reengaged at a later date or by myself or other artists. This was, in part, a response to the ephemeral nature of color print photography at the time. Now these works can be translated digitally and placed on paper with pigments for permanent display. The desired print size of the work has also grown over the years, starting at 18” x 18” and ending at 30” x 30” sometime in the early 1990’s. I have engaged larger sizes now that these are translated to digital media.
We like to imagine how our designers could make creative use of antique, reclaimed lanterns: either electrified as a primary lighting source for a bedroom, study or hall or perhaps converted into gas lighting.
The marvel of these lanterns is their flexibility, they can look at home in a modern setting as well as the most traditional of homes.
Pair of Venetian Red and Gilt Tole Lanterns, Italy circa 1780 Very Large Scale Copper and Iron Lantern, circa 1870Green painted industrial hanging lantern, English circa 1900
At the Garden Court Vermont Street Showroom, we continue to feature select contemporary works that allow you to visualize how design works in the ‘real world’ intermingling styles and periods, fine Continental antiques and decorative pieces alongside more modern works. We’ve been fortunate to work with the informed Bay area interior designer and fine arts professional, Laurie Ghielmetti in hosting this exhibit.
California’s San Francisco Bay area was a major center for the emergent Abstract Expressionist school of art in the years following World War II. The work was characterized by ‘non-objective imagery that appeared emotionally charged with personal meaning’; an exuberant ‘free-spirited wave of creative energy’.
The Abstract Expressionist Movement in San Francisco derived inspiration from a broad collective of artists: San Francisco’s Beat poets, Dixieland jazz musicians, and the area’s stunning vistas were essential parts of Abstract Expressionism, as were artistic and spiritual contacts with Asia.
Today, we showcase a personal favorite, a large-scale work by the California Bay area artist, Jerry Carniglia.
UT-2151 2014 oil on canvas 81 x 63 inches
Jerry Carniglia ARTIST STATEMENT
As much as every instant of the painter’s process requires his in-the-moment decision-making, the resulting works are multi-layered compilations of action over time— gestures and counter-gestures that amplify or obscure one another.
In his large-scale paintings on canvas, monumental non-representational forms hover in pictorial space and imply a potent energy force such as a tidal wave, avalanche, or cosmic flash. The dynamic forms and rich palettes of burnt umber, gold and maroon create an epic quality, like that in works by Titian, one of Carniglia’s influences, but without reference to specific mythic or religious subjects. Although rooted in Abstract Expressionism, Carniglia’s work could be described as contemporary Baroque, with its exaggerated sense of motion, grandeur and implied drama. In what he describes as our post-existential era, Carniglia’s act of painting is a search for meaning, not through religion, myth or history, and not as a personal rationalization in a meaningless world, but meaning that may be found in the unseen and otherwise unarticulated structures that underlie all of existence.
Jerry Carniglia was born in San Francisco in 1946. He received an MFA from UC Berkeley in 1993. He is the recipient of the Eisner and Phelan Prizes, a Gerbode Foundation Award and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. His works are in the collections of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Museum.
** excerpted from Chandra Cerrito Contemporary Gallery, Oakland, CA
The blending of traditional, antique and contemporary makes a space interesting, exciting and a bit unexpected. To be sure, interiors design with a focus on all traditional or entirely contemporary stylings are splendid. But, often, when a designer takes the risk to blend styles; mix contemporary with antique, the results can be range from the stunning to dramatic.
A blend of styles reflects the way we live today; a mashup, if you will, that makes a larger statement than strict adherence to an normative or aesthetic.
Today, we celebrate an artist whose work we are showcasing in our Vermont Street Showroom, Dianne Romaine. Her Chroma paintings speak to her fascination with light and its magical properties. Select pieces are now on view.
“Dianne Romaine’s use of saturated pigment in her Chroma series composes a dramatic, almost photographically rendered void flooded with light. This captured moment references the photographic, giving the viewer a frozen glimpse of a transient glow.” – Oakland Art Museum http://oaklandartmurmur.org/
These “Chroma” painting reflect a fascination with light that has been with me always- how it spills into a room, the edges, the slow, subtle changes as time advances, its magical presence. The light in these paintings come from layers of color, progressing to darks, allowing an internal illumination.
