My goal as an artist is to add beauty, harmony, and understanding to the world through exploring the ways that visual images are transmitted to the viewer. My work is intuitive. I use colors to express emotions, and forms to establish order. My work expresses the space in between the interior order of the mind and the exterior presence of reality. This is where light meets the eyes. I enjoy creating works that express the vitality that life holds.

The concept of Light & Dark can be a real stickler if you spin it unpleasantly, so here I have collected my favorite paintings with the thought of Light & Dark making a soul happy through color, creating a pallet of swipes, bold strokes, and soft gold lines. Thus sharing with the viewer a bit of my world as I prefer to see it, one where magic still exists in the everyday around me. Growing up in San Francisco and living in the East Bay provide me with ample energy, creative influence, and opportunities.

“A person, an expression, where they are in place and time, is the focus of my work. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy to create a narrative that can be challenging and personal is what I try to achieve in each piece. Using journal pages, code, photos, fortunes from cookies and images of money and newspaper are added to further deepen the story. Among the artists that have influenced me are Lucian Freud, Gustav Klimt and Alice Neel. I return to their books often to study and refreshed my use of color, style and painterly technique.”

I like to tell a story in my artwork with Mixed Media projects on thick wood panel. Each wood panel is richly layered with paper and paint to include images that have been "revealed" or stripped away creating the feeling that my artworks are painted on plastered walls with torn wallpaper. I also sometimes add small objects like buttons, shells, ribbon, jewelry, tags, pieces of packaging, or some glitter to add texture.

Photographer Olivier Desmet hopes to convey the notion of Mono no Aware (a Japanese concept used to describe the beautiful transience of all things) through his black & white photography. In 2021, Olivier shifted his focus away from urban subjects, hoping to explore a different style of image-making. Using medium-format cameras, he produced a series of meditative images of nature and still life in the San Francisco Bay Area. A selection of photographs from the resulting project, “Marine Layer,” is presented here. The exhibition coincides with the release of a book on this project

Steep yourself in a cornucopia of creativity by perusing three galleries inside Art Works Downtown.

Xueling Zou, an award-winning, Chinese American Artist, lives and works in California. She creates visual stories in oil and watercolor that are inspired by different cultures, literature and nature. With simplicity of palette knife or brush strokes, she paints contemporary impressionistic portraits, figurative paintings, and Plein Air landscapes, revealing a deep sense of humanity and a passion for sharing the beauty of nature.

Janis Anton’s lush paintings are entwined with a narrative and emotive colors that ask for an immediate joyful response. The colors are a catalyst of emotion, are delight to the eye, and beg for your attention. The colors in the paintings are a mode of amplification: color is the invitation, the insistence that you respond. The romantic naturalism and botanical reference in the paintings tell a story or a myth connecting the viewer with questions about memory or a story they already know. The series come from magical gardens of imagination asking to you explore their landscape.

Gil Sambrano is a representational California artist whose work is focused on cityscape and landscape paintings. He draws inspiration from his love of big city life as well as the local scenic environment of Marin. Capturing the energy of the city at night is especially intriguing and the most expressive of his works.

It all begins with an idea.Vera Tchikovani is an abstract and gestural painter. Her painting is a journey of self discovery and a search for authenticity in artistic creation. Her process involves her whole being, emotional, intellectual and physical. It reflects her life experiences, visions, responses to life... She does not begin her painting with a preconceived plan or idea, but rather allows the subconscious guide the process and establish the rhythm, harmony and balance. She is especially committed to the search for simplicity and honest in her art, and for that gesture, line and color that would best express her inner world.

The pieces presented in this gallery are gouache paintings I have made since early 2020. These paintings, ranging from purely abstract to semi-representational are moderate in scale, and each offers a small sliver of life, while in the aggregate they reflect a multifaceted and more comprehensive way of being and seeing, as in a collage or mosaic. These paintings serve as narrow viewfinders that open onto a broader world.

This gallery features a collection of Thelen’s scrolls, where she continues the theme of reinvention and transformation. She incorporates older silkscreen and woodblock prints to create innovative contemporary scrolls.