Artist Profiles
Snap Decisions
Joe Chan brings beauty to social media with photographs that compel viewers to look deeply into the compositions captured by his lens. It’s impossible to ignore a Chan photo.
Fascinating, evocative and splashed with colors, the images produced by the Sacramento photographer represent a wayward journey to artistic success. Chan didn’t grow up with a camera. He mastered the challenges of light, shadow and composition after a successful career as a banker and mortgage broker.
Rock and Roll
Rock Bottom Clay Arts—the ceramic business owned by longtime friends Suzy Price and Linda Fall—is not named for low prices, nor for a low point in life.
“We named it Rock Bottom because the totems literally have a giant rock at the bottom that keeps them steady,” Fall explains with a chuckle.
Since last August, Fall and Price have created 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-foot ceramic structures they call totems—colorful displays of manmade rocks in all shapes, sizes and textures stacked together on a steel pole and rooted to a strong rock or welded metal base for display in the home or garden.
Trial by Fire
There’s a table in Stephanie Taylor’s art studio—a converted garage in the back of her family home on T Street—that holds a line of pretty, rusted objects. Two milk jugs, wire sculptures, the head of a hammer and eyeglass cases look antique.
But these items are not antique. These objects are all that remain of writer and poet Christy Heron-Clark’s parents’ two-lot family compound in Paradise that burned to the ground during the Camp Fire—the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history that raged through Butte County for 17 days last November.
Hearing The Muse
In the opening lines of the poem “Moments,” Wendy Grace Stevens writes:
How often have you heard
‘Live for the moment,’ or ‘Be here now?’
No matter the current idiom,
it’s a truth that merits attention.
Stevens seems to live by this sentiment. Amid two careers—first in banking, then 25 years working for the state Legislature, from which she retired in 2002—Stevens has lived for the moment through activities both artistic and outdoor.
We’re Here!
“I strongly believe that when people walk into a gallery, they deserve to see themselves reflected in the art,” Michael Misha Kennedy says.Over the past two decades, Kennedy has made it his life’s work as both an artist and a gallery owner to make sure everyone in the Sacramento community—especially women, people of color and members of the LGBTQI community—has a place to be seen.His eponymous Kennedy Gallery has been in operation for 13 years—and has called the stately Victorian on L Street (which once housed B-Bop Costumes) home for the past seven years.
Honest Introspection
As far as local artist Salvatore Victor is concerned, artistic success comes from getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.“For most people, making art can be difficult, because there’s a lot of emotional baggage there,” says the Tampa-born artist who has lived in Sacramento for nearly 30 years. Victor tries to apply the discipline he learned while studying martial arts as a youth to his artistic process. “I always sit with it, be with it, understand it, learn from it, keep moving, and that comes out in the work,” he says.
