Now through May 8th the contemporary impressionistic paintings of Sonja Navin, a local sunset resident.
Our bodies tend to speak the truth. No more so than when relaxing at the beach. The surf and sand have an ability to sooth and lull us. This series of paintings explores our ease and the gestures that allow us to let go of self-awareness. Our connectivity to the ebb and flow of shores allows us to shift into postures that we avoid otherwise.
I work to sustain that first glimpse of an image through the process of producing a painting. The many layers of paint are used to first break down an image, then to rebuild it. The result is somewhere between representation and abstraction: when a painting expresses what I cannot with words. I can communicate in a language of my own making.
I started painting as a way to record and study places. This evolved naturally from my work as an architect. I attended the University of Michigan where I received degrees in Architecture and first started painting. I currently live and work in San Francisco.
SAN FRANCISCO, April 5, 2015 – The Great Highway Gallery is pleased to announce its first summer exhibition Mooka, featuring work by artist Yasmina Dedijer-Small. On view from May 16 – June 26, the exhibition will include gauche and ink paintings. The opening reception will be held on May 16 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Wake, feed, eat, embrace, change, dress, feed, sleep, wake, eat, feed, bathe, nurture, embrace, feed, sleep and repeat. Yasmina’s new body of work, Mooka, is an exploration of these daily patterns of devotion, associated with motherhood, and the relationship art has with introspection. Both influences inform her art making process which involves hours of repetitive detail using gouache and ink on wood. Her inspiration is also found through the observation of the unfolding and sinuous patterns in nature. She believes that within these patterns lies a universal language holding transcendent qualities.
About the Artist
Yasmina Dedijer-Small currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art from San Jose University and has shown in group exhibitions at Wieden & Kennedy Gallery (Portland, OR), H Space (Costa Mesa, CA) , The Grasshut (Portland, OR), The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (SC, CA), and at La Kitchen (Paris, France). Her work has been published several times in Japan’s Blue magazine, The Surfer’s Journal, Salted, and Foam Symmetry. This will be her second solo exhibition and her first at The Great Highway Gallery.
About the Gallery
The Great Highway is a fine-art gallery and working studio located in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district. The gallery was founded by John Lindsey, a resident of the city with San Francisco Art Institute roots and a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore the intersection of land and water in contemporary work. The Great Highway Gallery’s mission is to seek, analyze, support, and promote the work of a diverse group of artists who seek sincere beauty, challenge conventional thinking, amuse us, and push the boundaries of today’s creative media. The studio collaborates with these artists in developing, printing, and presenting their work in a way that encourages the ongoing conversations in San Francisco’s many microcommunities. To learn more about the gallery, visit www.thegreathighway.com.
For Further information and Press Enquiries contact the gallery at info@thegreathighway.com or call +1 (415) 680-3891.
Reception Nov 14th 6 – 10 pm November 14th – December 16th
FOOD: El Tonayense Taco Truck
BEER: Magnolia Brewing
The Great Highway Gallery in the Outer Sunset is please to present:
Like Water
The paintings of:
Aleks Petrovitch
Matt Beard
Alex Schaffer Czech
Aleks Petrovitch
Aleks “Petro” Petrovitch growing up in the San Juan Islands and Hawaii stumbled upon many icons and symbols of a different time. His paintings lead us through an emotional journey of tradition, high seas, stormy weather, passion and courage. Aleks received his Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from the University of Hawaii, and his Masters of Illustration from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. An accomplished artist and illustrator, his work may be seen in San Francisco Bay area museums and galleries. He is perhaps best known for his colorful creations designed to educate children about nature, such as the best-selling and award-winning Redwood and Lighthouse Stacking Block sets produced for the Golden Gate National Parks Association, and the children’s board books based on them. Co-author with David Brower on the children’s book Reading the Earth, currently he is working on a new book, and on various things at Aqua Surf shop on Sloat street.
Alex Schaffer Czech
Water, in all of its forms, is one of the balancing life forces for all living things. Of these forms of water, it is the liquid state that has influenced my life more than any. Being a fisherman and wave rider, I have spent an infinite number of hours staring at the ocean, lakes, streams, which later led to looking at puddles and unnatural bodies of water. The surface of water can be activated and influenced by so many different forces causing to be a continuous canvas of change. As the sun slides across the horizon in its path of rejuvenation and life dispensing forces, its light travels through an ever-changing atmosphere to finally arrive upon a kinetic landscape. As light reaches its destination, it penetrates the molecular movement, and forms a dance hall of color and rhythm. Every moment of time projects a new face that is never similar to the last. In my artwork I work to communicate this natural phenomenon. I reference my feelings that I felt with my experiences of the past like sitting on my board staring at the vast Pacific Ocean in Rapa Nui. Other experiences like fishing in the Strait of Juan de Fuca as the gray sky blanketed the blackened emerald green water for days at a time, move me to share these powerful meditative experiences. I do not attempt to create realistic snap shots of these events. Only painted remembered heart poundings and imaginative movements of color can attempt to duplicate that which can never be duplicated.
Matt Beard
This is not an artist’s statement, it’s an artist’s confession. I’ve painted too many waves. They’ve grown old. Not the waves themselves, the act of painting them and the feeling that no matter how I treat them they contribute little in any meaningful sense to our collective conversation about them. Maybe that’s OK, they’re just waves. But what’s a wave after all? Nature is full of them: light, sound, music, heartbeats, breathing, tides, seasons, labor pains, birth, life, death, and back again, all built on the perfect mathematical backbone of Sine wave forms. Each of these we experience profoundly, yet passively, with the exception of the most obvious wave of all, the ones that move in water. Only these are scaled for our full bodied enjoyment. No other wave can be ridden the same way, no other can propel us along with its own energy as our bodies glide, tumble or get dragged along by this movement of water. It’s ridiculous. After a bit of thought they are no longer old or tired subject matter, they are the ultimate summation of existence. If it took looking at waves without looking at them in the ocean to fully appreciate them, I thought a series of paintings where the subject of each was a wave without revealing the wave itself would be appropriate. The Insinuation Series is an experiment attempting to convey the presence of waves without revealing them directly, but rather only suggesting, or insinuating, their presence by subtle clues of light, shadow and their effects on the water preceding them. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
The Great Highway is a fine art gallery and working studio featuring contemporary works in all mediums. The gallery has a deep appreciation for images and ideas that explore where lands meet water.
