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

Viewpoints Gallery in Los Altos is having an unusual show this July. It features 5″ x 7″ watercolors created by long time friends Floy Zittin, Elaine Frenett and Jean Warren from 2005 till 2010 as a form of keeping in touch after being separated by family moves.

I never saw anything like that – a beautiful collection of small masterpieces with a deep meaning behind them.

Today was the reception at Nina Uppaluru’s show at Gallery 9. Nina has about 20 watercolor and acrylic paintings there.

“Up And About” is probably my favorite from the show. All those lush colors and intricate shapes are mesmerizing. I say “probably” because other works make it hard to choose just one.

Up And About – acrylics on canvas, 36″ x 48″

It was nice to see how many people came to see Nina’s beautiful art and to talk to her. Attention well deserved.

Stumbled upon a very nice blog – Illustrated Life by a Jeanette Jobson. It’s a wonderful collection of many styles, media, and subjects paired with great writing. And she does something that I don’t think I was aware of before – gyotaku, fish printing.

Roses in the Snow, iced watercolour, 9 x 12

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!

Terri Hill presented her unusual approach to watercolors at the FALC meeting today. She starts with an underpainting – an abstract shape in primary colors that will later shine through the finishes artwork, unifying and complementing Terri’s vibrant colors. What else that underpainting does is suggest very natural highlights and shadows as if created by objects not visible in the painting. The result is nothing short of magical.

Terri painted from her own photos, but what I loved was that she was using them as a vague reference, an idea for the subject and composition, but not as something that should be copied.

In an odd way, watching her working on a background that progressed from an abstract to gently moving water helped me to overcome a creative block with one of my colored pencil pieces. Where nothing seemed to work, to the point of not wanting to even try anything anymore, I now see many new possibilities – so nice to feel free again, thank you, Terri!

The festival moved to the Pioneer Memorial Park, Mountain View this year. It’s a smaller place than the grounds of the Triton Museum (or so it looked to me), but the park is right next to downtown Mountain View – a place that is more popular than Triton. No, seriously, many people have no idea what the Triton Museum is or even that Santa Clara has an art museum.

Fine Arts League of Cupertino and Campbell Artists’ Guild, to clubs to which I belong, were sharing a lawn at the edge of the park. I was showing with FALC and chatting with CAG friends too – nice!

Kushlani Hall only brought her jewelry; no encaustics, no oils or oil pastels. Her jewelry was gorgeous, of course.

Saw the finished piece that Holly Van Hart was doing at the FALC demo in May. It’s changed a lot, and I still liked it very much. She also had a larger painting similar to that one, and they complimented each other nicely, hanging on the same panel.

Haven’t seen what Donna Orme was doing for almost a year, so it was a special pleasure to stop by her display. I am yet to see a single monoprint of hers that I didn’t like. I can’t even pick a favorite because if I turn my head and look again I’ll change my mind. Her work is that awesome.

Found some great new art that I haven’t seen before: graceful watercolors by Cheryl Kampe and dreamy acrylics by Nance Wheeler.

The third weekend was the quietest out of all three. There were almost no visitors, very few people even walked by. Maybe it was the heat, maybe something more interesting was going on in the neighborhood, maybe we didn’t do enough to promote the event.

Slava and me were showing at the Great American Framing. Marsha Sims, Kathy Sartain, Cathy Zander from the 1st SVOS weekend at Community School of Music and Arts were here again, and I met other artists that I don’t remember seeing before: Lei Min and Linda Salter.

Lei’s oils are beautiful and energetic. She used to do commission portraits and showed me an prospect from her solo exhibit with awesome portraits of Taiwan, Philippine, and Malaysia prominent figures and of their family members.

Linda Salter paints and draws many different subjects: great portraits, still life, figure drawings, landscapes. She seems to work in every medium available – oil, watercolor, graphite pencil, pastel, ink – and always experimenting. She was doing nice small ink drawings while in the gallery. Made me want to pick up my ink and brushes again.

We still had some guests, some good conversations with them and with each other, and I saw the local University Arts store for the first time. To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. It’s huge, it’s full of great stuff, and what I can’t or won’t use myself is still fascinating to look at. I am not going to their San Jose store, ever.

Got my horse photos, thanks Irina!

Myrna Wacknov creates wonderfully expressive portraits. I was watching her demonstration at FALC today, and how she lets colors play their own game on paper is nothing short of a miracle. It’s not chaotic color mixing but a sign of confidence; Myrna clearly knows her medium, paper, and tools, has excellent drawing skills, but doesn’t struggle to control anything. I really like that. She was drawing from a photo, but the result was not merely a copy, it was better, it was truly alive.

Today’s demonstrator at the Fine Arts League of Cupertino was Joyce Faulknor. The demo was about painting glass, and Joyce worked on several pieces at various stages of the progress that saved her time necessary for the paint to dry. She paints with a great confidence yet allows watercolor to do its own magic on the paper. And from the very beginning of the demo you can feel how passionate she is about teaching. Joyce is a pure joy to watch.