Painting "Winter Bloom"

Back in November (2010) I started a portrait painting to demonstrate my technique for a teaching position at Sun City in Roseville. After digging through my inspirations folder, a collection of magazine clippings and photographs, I decided to paint from an image taken in a Japanese Cherry Orchard. Originally, there was very little weight, or contemporary relevance to the image. I simply found it to be beautiful with its subtle wintry colors and the softness of her person juxtaposed with the gnarled branches.

But after the first coat, the painting just sat in my studio, unfinished. I turned to other projects.... exploring some plein air landscapes, still lifes and several portrait commissions.

Then last week the earthquake in Japan devastated the country and suddenly the unfinished painting took on whole new meanings. I began to see the quiet strength in this woman sitting amongst the flowers. The wintry blues, violets and greens became an emotional entity in and of themselves. Her closed eyes  ignore the scenery and turn inward in meditation.  Even the cleaving of her cheekbone and defined jaw became a representation of her character.

The completed painting "Winter Bloom" will be unveiled in my upcoming exhibit at the Interfaith Service Bureau. A % of the proceeds of the sale of the painting will be donated to earthquake relief efforts in Japan. In the meantime you can enjoy the video of the final push towards completion.




Please join me at my reception Thursday, April 7th, 2011 to see the painting in person! For more information please visit Brooke's events.

Painting "The Fountain"

Brooke Walker-Knoblich begins her New Orleans series with "The Fountain." In the first, 40 minutes she covers the canvas in a grisaille layer of oil paint to establish the value relationships and overall color for the painting.
Music by Bill Douglass and Paul McCandless. Recorded in Banquet Studios.


Brooke continues "The Fountain" with a second layer of flesh tones. To be continued...







.

Painting in Big Sur

First painting location: pullout on HWY 1, north of Limekiln

Second painting location: Pfeiffer Cove.

Music: Bach's French Suite no. 4 BWV 815 -III: Sarabande.
Performed by Felipe Sarro.

Midtown Reception at Beatnik Gallery

When Beatnik  asked Brooke to have a solo show in their gallery, she furiously went to work to produce ten large paintings in ten weeks. The resulting series "Midtown" was joined by several paintings from Brooke Walker-Knoblich's portraits/figures body of work at the Beatnik Gallery in April, 2010.


Music by Blvd Park and Musical Charis.

2nd Saturday Artwalk

Midtown never ceases to amaze me. Tonight's artwalk was filled with characters and incredible artists of all sorts. I started at the Maiya Gallery and found an interesting solo show by Craig Smith. The main gallery was filled with roughly textured paintings of letters and color. It reminded me of playing with words as a child, beautifully shading the letters with my thick wax crayons. One little thing I found particularly interesting about these pieces was their construction. Upon close examination of several oil paintings, I found screw heads jutting out of the surface, right there in the midst of thick strokes.  The imperfectness of it, I guess, is what struck me.

My next stop was the Union Hall Gallery, which I'd never been to! It's a lovely little gallery on the 2nd floor of a classic Victorian. Mary Kercher (a beautiful painter from my Muse Monday art group) was exhibiting in a group show exploring the human figure. Her work always stuns me. Her self portrait meets you eye to eye as you walk in the front door.

             "Between Depth & Surface"                                     "Human Reign"

I love how free her work is. The colors seem to rupture from their transitions, sweeping the eye along harsh lines broken by strokes resembling fog. Her self portrait rivets you in the directness of its gaze. "Human Reign," she told me "was created after doing yoga." She just sits down to paint and lets it flow from her hand. The brush takes her where it wants to go.

The group show was "Human Expressed" so obviously there were a couple other figurative artists exhibiting work.

                                                 "Zero Attention Span"

Matthew Bird's drawings are more like wall sculptures, with their three dimensional elements stretching and bending beyond the frame. Up close, it's all just a dancing, swirling, delicate line of pencil. Lovely. And a young artist to boot! He's my age :)

Moving on to the Art Complex, now known as the 2110 Gallery after its beautiful renovation into a open gallery space, I stumbled upon an artist that made me giggle and prance and even tempt me to climb a cactus to make a vulture wiggle. Well not a real cactus. Or bird. It was a ten foot tall sculpture made of looped rebar studded with screws for thorns and atop sat a mama vulture, also made of twisted metal and springs, her head and legs drooping and bowing with the slightest breeze to feed her anxiously awaiting baby. The imagination and humor and well crafted use of recycled metal parts was refreshing. I'm hitting myself that I didn't think to take a photo, even one of the giant tortoise with round saw blades for shell plates would have been such a treasure to post. But I must admit that Stephen Cook's company name just says it all: Bubba's Garden Art.

There are so many artists in the art complex, it'd be impossible to mention them all. Most of them are working artists, photographers, painters, sculpors, etc. paying rent (mostly) for the foot traffic of this one night a month. There was one artist upstairs that made me linger over her symbolic drawings. Doracy's art works with archetypes. She told me her art speaks to her, tells her what should be done or even which direction it should hang (which of course changes depending on the available wall space). Her black canvases are scraped with whatever she can find: pens, nails, steel wool... interlacing gorgeous white marks with sweeps of form making gesture. All abstract of course. But I see an eye and what looks like a goat, and a manta ray poisoning someone with it's long tail? Very much like an intensely detailed Rorscach test. And no wonder. Doracy spent her life in psychology. We got to talking and it turns out she lived at the Cite Universitaire, the exact same housing complex I lived in back in 2003 in Paris! Such a small world connection. Next month, she's returning to France to work an art internship for a year. When she told me, I could feel the angst of my own wanderlust grabbing at my legs. What's stopping me from going too?


But as I began the 12 block trek home all I could do was grin wildly into the wind. There was no way the chill could withstand my stride as I sorted through the last 3 hours of the artwalk. I was high on all the creations I'd seen, the quarky artists I'd talked to, just feeling apart of this artistic community. Maybe that's why I'm still here: there's too many great things happening in Midtown to leave... just yet.

The Midtown Hum

The first blog post after returning from Italy has admittedly been a little daunting. The cultural adjustment alone has been a lot to digest, not to mention the new insights the Florence Academy instilled in my artistic endeavors. But returning to Midtown was a truly inspiring experience.

The memory of driving over the wetlands on that first evening back 5 weeks ago, with the egrets exploring the boggy grasses and the downtown Sacramento cityscape finally breaking the valley's horizon, has stuck with me. The swelling of familiarity and comfort began to seep in, fully embracing me only as the City of Trees dappled the windshield. But it wasn't until I heard the quivering voice of my neighbor's harmonica through the dusky glow, that I finally felt home.

Midtown is a force to reckon with. Beyond the vibrancy of diversity (yes Sacramento is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in all of California!) there's an edgy, artistic energy here that's impossible to explain without sounding like a proponent of New Age philosophies. But it is palpable and condensing. You need only go as far as 1 block in any direction to discover it's expression... stencil "street art" stamps the cement underfoot, solo trumpets moan through the trees, African drums pulse through the parks, inked bodies congregate around dive bars, once barren sidewalk medians become luscious gardens of flowers and vegetables, and free newspapers inform us of a new painting class, the latest beat poetry or ballet performance. I could go on and on about the tiniest of things that makes this city speak so intensely to those who are open enough to listen.

 If the energy of Midtown were audible it'd be a hum, buzzing even the dark rubble of the freeway underpasses. It does in fact scream through the strings and voices of myriad local bands determined to perform every night of the week. And it scratches and scrapes across white paper as wild pencils try to capture a living model's movement. It clicks through the spokes of the classic cruiser bikes and thunders as thousands flood J Street for the monthly artwalk.

Obviously, Midtown resonates with me. I have finally found a tribe I am honored to be a part of: a proliferation of painters, photographers, and musicians all speaking their own language. It's a language of authentic authority, something that can only come with discovering and understanding one's own vision, voice, and heart.

Our Response to Art and Life.

Art is a reflection of a life. To be an artist does not simply mean that you paint or sculpt, or write or are engaged in a creative, expressive process. It's so much more than that. It's a whole way of perceiving the world and yourself as an active creator within it. Art not only deeply roots our aesthetics and sensitivities to nuance, but actually shows us how a life is purposefully chosen to be lived.

It is no surprise to me that most artists struggle to make financial ends meet. The artist's purpose (the drive to search for truth no matter how hard or painful it may be; to discover meaning and beauty even in the smallest of things; to engage in connections that confirm and inspire the deepest within us) typically appears irrelevant in a culture that supports flighty entertainment and business prowess. And how a culture responds to and supports its artists is one of the most significant reflections of its own mental, emotional and spiritual health.

When art is written off as too intellectual it exposes the absence of innate curiosity to discover something new and grapple with the challenge of not understanding.  When artists have the reputation of being too sensitive it expounds the fact that emotions are not seen as something of dire importance. And when we are not open enough for art to evoke a deep response within us, we have lost an essential part of what it means to be human.