Adventure Art
For an artist, inspiration comes from anywhere. With ceramic artist Peter VandenBerge, anywhere equals a lifetime of adventure.
“Adventure can take any form,” says VandenBerge, born in the Netherlands in 1935. “It can be in the studio making art, it can be in Indonesia in the rice fields riding the big, horned buffalo. Everything is an amazing adventure. Those are the kinds of things you can remember and that come out in your work.”
No Boundaries
My earliest memory of Maureen Gilli is from fourth grade at Sacramento County Day School.
She wheeled her art cart into the classroom and showed us an example of that day’s project: bird masks made from paper.
I marveled at her work. The detail of feathers. The expressive owl face. All from simple pieces of cut paper. I stared in awe. I thought, maybe someday my work will be that beautiful.
Thirty years later, the awe has not diminished. Today I’m in Gilli’s Citrus Heights home. Her work graces the walls, staircase, ceiling and tabletops in every medium you can imagine.
Painting With Fabric
Water ripples around gray rocks. Pine trees and blue sky reflect in the water. The river bottom is visible beneath.
This landscape can steal your breath, but when you realize the Sierra scene is not a photo or paint, but fabric, you may gasp for air.
“I love doing landscapes,” says Merle Axelrad, the artist and wizard behind this textile trickery. “I think of them not as what they are—a rock, a tree—but as layering items in space to create depth and the play of light.”
Living Color
A young woman looks up from her TV dinner. A yellow car crashes through her blue wall. The room fills with clouds of white cotton smoke from a cherry-red TV set. The image, playful and dramatic, tells such a story that you can stare for hours and see new details.
This is one of the many wild and wonderful images from multidisciplinary artist Raúl Gonzo, a West Sacramento resident and former music video producer whose first museum exhibition, “Color Madness,” runs at Crocker Art Museum through Oct. 20.
Fully Engaged
Jessica Wimbley is “busy in the best of ways—the way you dream you could be as an artist.”
As an interdisciplinary artist and curator, Wimbley works on multiple projects, from billboards and video installations to collages and portraits.
“I don’t see an artist as solely fixed to working in a specific medium and producing fine art objects,” says Wimbley, who lives in Midtown and holds degrees in painting, visual arts and arts management.
“Being a contemporary artist, I’m constantly learning and finding ways art can bridge different discussions, communities, people and ways of thinking,” she says.