John Natsoulas Gallery

521 First Street, Davis, CA

Davis, California has become one of the top small town art destinations in the country. On May 19, starting from 7pm, there will be an art benefit for Art in Public

Spaces. The Cultural Arts Committee is throwing a landmark launch party and silent auction in downtown Davis to help the city flourish artistically. The Davis mural team will be producing 10 major murals in downtown Davis over the next four months. Renowned painters working on the murals will include Bill Maul, Guy Diehl, Joe Bellacera, Kelly Detweiler, Don Fritz, Jennifer Pochinski, James Chaffee , Kerry Rowland-Avrech, Ted Fontaine, and Myron Stephens.

These painters will be producing large format murals throughout our downtown that will enhance the established art walk. Davis’s own William Maul, renowned painter and muralist, whose international reputation stems from his art and mural work in the movies Bowfinger and Cotillion 65, has stepped up to lead the mural team. We have NAA award winners, professors, and Davis High School’s own painting instructor Ted Fontaine participating. Davis will boast some of the best and most varied murals in the state of California by the end of the summer 2012.

Davis has benefited from a collaborative process between artists, arts advocates, business owners and other citizens that has significantly enhanced public spaces and the community. Art has ignited a collaborative spirit in our community that has never been seen before, with artists and landlords collaborating to benefit the community. Members of the Cultural Action Committee and the community at large have worked together to help each artist realize his or her vision and dream, and the mural project is a crucial part of this endeavor. We are creating an economic engine for Davis, increasing the city’s value, as well as increasing the beauty and spirit of our town. But mostly we’re interested in engaging the community and in bringing people from all over the world to see our city.

Our cultural partners include Dan Dowling of Dowling Properties, Jim Kidd of Selected Commercial Brokers, John Brinley of Ace Hardware and Ace Housewares, Bizarro World, Armadillo Records, Michael Bisch of Davis Commercial Properties, UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Department, the Davis Commons, the Artery, the Pence Gallery, Ashok Patel of the Aggie Inn, and Dr. Monto Kumagai of XtremeSignPost.

www.natsoulas.com

Contact Nancy Resler: 530-756-3938

John Natsoulas Gallery

www.natsoulas.com

Like Hassel Smith, Du Casse represented an older generation of painters during the “6″ Gallery years, but the artist himself- like many others- remembers that age distinctions were relatively insignificant in the atmosphere of excitement and enthusiasm in which the gallery functioned.

As did other Beat artists, Du Casse employed geometry with a painterly, expressionist aspect. Later, Du Casse became interested in simple, lightly applied abstract forms, which he called “spiritual forms,” which often demonstrated ties to Oriental imagery or thought. During the 1950s, he was experimenting with many modern styles, from loose, gestural abstraction to dynamic, geometrical Cubism.

Abstract Black & Grey

Triggered by Abstract Expressionism, her early pictures were often executed in black and white and a vast, sensuous range of gray. These works are characterized by a deep, forceful sense of movement. Some are like cascades, or fountains of pure energy frozen onto the canvas. Often, their titles refer to mythic or religious subjects.

In 1959, two years after she had completed her graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, De Feo was featured in “Sixteen Americans”, a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York–the exhibition that also introduced Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to the American public. During the same period, she also began work on “The Rose,” a Bay Area legend and a massive painting that required a number of years and a great many pounds of paint to complete.

Untitled (Unflyable Kite Series)

Untitled

was born in Vienna, Austria and fled to Great Britain during World War II. After relocating to California in 1940, Fenichel studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (1946-47), Los Angeles City College (1947-48), and the California School of Fine Arts (1950-52). In 1951, Fenichel showed at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco, and at the King Ubu Gallery a year later.  In New Mexico she met and painted with Clay Spohn (1959.) Fenichel departed from painting, moving into three-dimensional art in the early 1980’s before again returning to painting in 1990.

Lilly Fenichel was one of the most important female painters in the early San Francisco Abstract Expressionist movement. As student of Hassel Smith, she became one of the best Abstract Expressionist painters of the Beat Generation and one of the few women who continue to paint today. Her lyrical, calligraphic work was an extremely important contribution to the period, as she formed her own style and created her own message while paying respect to the works of Hassel Smith and Edward Corbett. One of the first artists to show at King Ubu as a student, Fenichel has continued her vision through her long and important career working in the Abstract Expressionist medium. Fenichel continues to paint and create art in her New Mexico studio.

Gechtoff’s paintings of the ‘50s and early ‘60s were not only abstractions; they were also symbolic markings. Poetry was an important inspiration for Gechtoff. Her exhibition at the San Francisco De Young Museum in 1957 was accompanied by pages of Michael McClure’s poems which, like her painting, often focused on natural themes. Her painting, “Anna Karenina”, is a great example of her work. Through this work she delves into figurative abstractions and, in so doing, reveals her poetic inspiration.

Lucia and theWave

Goddess

Poet and sculptor Miriam Hoffman made her first life-sized ceramic figures over fifty years ago. She is the founder of American Figurative Sculpture. Hoffman spent 1931 at Columbia University in New York, but when the year was up, so was her scholarship. She continued her education at New York City College (now CUNY), later graduating from the New School in New York with a graduate degree in art and literature. In 1941, Miriam left New York for California and enrolled at San Francisco State University. It was there that she met her husband, Joseph F. Hoffman. Their marriage only lasted two years, from 1942-1944, after which she left, although they were never divorced. Returning to New York in 1945, she attended the School of Social Sciences for two years and trained to become a teacher. After graduating in 1947, she left for Albuquerque and a teaching position at the University of New Mexico. She returned to San Francisco in 1949, met Robert Duncan and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts—now the San Francisco Art Institute—where she functioned more as a teacher than as a student, interacting with many artists of that time, including Ed Corbett, Hassel Smith, Peter Voulkos, Elmer Bischoff, Seymour Locks, Harry Jacobus and David Park.

Ralph joined the newly founded art department at UC Davis in 1957. Until the late 1960s, Johnson was known primarily for his paintings, which ranged from geometric abstractions based on natural forms to more recognizable subjects enveloped within almost hallucinatory qualities of mood and color. In 1959, he received the first place award in painting at the California State Fair, sparking controversy in local newspapers.

Luna

Seymour Locks’s nail sculptures plumb a deep, archaic well of feeling and provoke a response that cannot be explained. They were made by an artist who had been an otherwise conventional painter of landscapes, a tinkerer with Abstract Expressionism, in a city where developments in contemporary art often seemed to arrive slowly, in haphazard fashion.

On another level, of course, the nail sculptures are simply what they appear to be: stumps or fragments of wood into which the artist hammered hundreds and even thousands of nails, along with a variety of affixed objects, including gears, drill bits, brass and copper foil, charms, jewelry, bottle caps, entangled nests of wire and other salvage.

Nail Sculpture