Tag: Special Exhibit

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Maya Kabat: California, Color & The Urban Palette

Artist, Maya Kabat
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 “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.

Featured works by Maya Kabat can be viewed at Garden Court Antiques presented by Art Consultant, Laurie Ghielmetti Interiors + Art.

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

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Elaine Coombs, Fascination With The Rhythms, Colors & Patterns of The Natural World.

Elaine Coombs
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”


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

Further reading: