You’re probably familiar with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But for Preston Zeller, there’s one more: painting.

When his brother Colin passed away of a fentanyl overdose in 2019 at age 35, Zeller used his love of painting to navigate his emotions. He created one painting each day for a year. The result is 365 abstract works in riots of colors, each 8 inches by 10 inches.

“It was sheer reflective personal art therapy,” Zeller says. “It was a process of rapid iteration, to express in a spontaneous way whatever I was feeling in the grief process.”

The first time Suzon Lucore was stopped by police for feeding a homeless man, her response was swift. “You have an ordinance to not feed the homeless,” she remembers saying at the time, “but is it illegal to feed a friend? This is my friend.”

Lucore has fed homeless people for almost two decades since moving to Midtown in 2007 after completing her bachelor’s degree in painting at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.

“I saw all these people who were hungry and started feeding them,” she says.

As you listen to the lush musical splendor of Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli on May 12 at Golden 1 Center, pay attention to the orchestration and choral voices that surround his vocals.

Sixty-nine musicians and 60 singers from the Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera will share the stage with Bocelli for his fourth visit since 2015. This is one of just seven U.S. appearances in Bocelli’s 2023 international tour, a testament to the professionalism of local musicians and the artistic quality Bocelli and his team expect.

“I think they really enjoy coming to Sacramento,” says Giuliano Kornberg, executive director of the orchestra and choir. “We have a good rapport with his team and the energy in Golden 1 is really compelling. We easily get 11–12,000 people in there, which creates a great buzz.”

In 100 years, people can still admire the work of Stephen Michael Bouska.

The master stone carver works in materials that last centuries with proper care. That’s what he hopes—that his work will survive to “help us express ourselves for multiple generations.”

When he first started in stone work, it was out of necessity. As a teenage father, Bouska needed a way to provide for his young family and “feed my soul at the same time.”

Davy Fiveash is never not creating. When I catch up with him by phone, I hear telltale scratchings of a paintbrush on canvas while we chat.

“I picked up crayons like every kid does and then I didn’t put them down,” Fiveash says of his lifelong love of art and craft. “I always knew I wanted to be an artist.”

On this day, Fiveash is in his East Sacramento studio working on his newest piece, a large-scale, mixed-media painting based on his childhood titled “The Evangelicals.”