Orchard Valley Ceramic Arts Guild held a show and sale, Art in Clay, this weekend at the Lucie Stern Community Center, Palo Alto. So many talented artists were showing their wares there!

Henriette Cons Ponte – Pomegranate

Jo Killen – Saggar Vessel

Mark Piercy – Teapot

Barbara Brown

Akio Aochi – Casserole Bowl

Anne Lewis – Three Covered Jars

Hsin-Chuen – Three Pots

Santa Clara Valley Watercolor Society is currently having their annual show at the Rose Shenson Gallery, and today was the reception and award ceremony there.

It rained the whole day since early morning too. The Rose Shenson gallery is relatively small, the SCVWC show takes all the space there, so refreshments and seats for the award ceremony have to be outside. There were plenty of canopies there to shelter artists and guests, and food and drinks fit nicely under the eaves. Art, fellow artists, drinks, and rain – it does not get any better than that!

I hope SCVWC will post the name of winners on their web site soon, so I will only mention a couple pieces from the show that I liked the most:

Diane Fujimoto. Ah Paris – My Alternate Reality

Nancy Calhoun. Blue Shadow

We went to the Stone Griffin Gallery in Campbell to see what Julie Kitzenberger had there. I really like her photography. Apparently, the gallery moved across the street since last time we were there and is now a much smaller place. It’s a bit crowded too, with a stack (or stacks?) of paintings by the right wall. Julie’s photos on canvases were placed nicely and prominently on a separate panel in the middle of the room. Good for her! My favorites from the gallery:

Another artist whose work caught my attention was Don Dahlke – a series of open windows with fretted tropical tree shadows. His paintings have a convincing three-dimensional quality, to the point that I wanted to look inside the windows and see what’s hiding there. And then there were shadows that looked like they were about to move in a gentle breeze. Very nice effect:

In the front window, there were several really tiny canvases on miniature black wooden easels. They were maybe 3″ x 5″; I don’t remember the name of the artist. Those canvases got me thinking: would it be possible to draw on a primed canvas with colored pencils? If the canvas is small, it probably would not sag under the pressure… Need to try that.

Today was a gallery day. We went to see the Absolute Abstraction show at the Viewpoints Gallery in Los Altos. I anticipated seeing Jane Ferguson’s acrylics which of course were awesome but was surprised to see that Floy Zittin created an abstract too, ant it was a very unusual one with tree branches growing from nowhere. I love Floy’s new pieces done on canvas, they have a wonderful touch of magic to them; not a fantasy art, just something a little different than traditional realism. It’s still watercolor, but it looks so different on canvas, its amazing.

The rest of the gallery was just as much pleasure to see as the featured exhibit: Terri Ford’s glowing pastels, Jean Prophet’s pottery, Berni Jahnke’s watercolors (she had portraits of old people on display, and shared their stories with me and Slava), Diana Jaye’s colorful oils, Kathleen Alexander’s graceful flowers and exotic fruit (at least I think that green thing was a fruit, I loved it more than flowers, and it looked great in watercolor), and so much more. It seems that every time we visit this gallery it becomes better and better.

We stopped at Gallery 9 too, since it is located on the next street. Nice to see what Belinda Lima and Rajani Balaram have there, and I don’t remember if I saw Kiyoco Michot’s ceramics before but those bowls that resemble fruit split in half are very beautiful.

To add to the pleasure of taking in art, it was pouring outside. Such a wonderfully quiet, rainy day!

On June 7 and 8, 2008, the Silicon Valley Asian Art Center hosted an art auction to benefit Sichuan Earthquake victims. The auction was organized by Professor Arthur Kao and raised $6990.00. A print of Plum Blossoms in Los Gatos Creek Park was a tiny part of that result. The whole amount will be sent to Tzu Chi Foundation and American Red Cross.