Carol Alban grew up in San Francisco and now resides in Piedmont, California.  She has always been interested in the arts (painting, photography, poetry, music) as a means of self-expression.  Carol's Art studies include classes at San Francisco State University.  In art, her preferred subjects are animals, flutes and nature, and her favorite medium is watercolors.  She formerly taught a Watercolor class at the Piedmont Recreation Department.   Carol currently works as a freelance flutist and teaches privately.  Carol Alban's watercolor, "Yellow Cat" is on exhibit at Expressions Gallery Animals and Animation show.

Doc Bauman and Ruth Marcus work together on certain compositions and go by the name of DOCDOC representing two German artists: Dr. Hans D. Baumann (better known as Doc Baumann) and Dr. Ruth Marcus. Doc Baumann is an art scientist. He started in 1984 working with digital images and compositions and is the leading Photoshop-expert in Germany and publisher of the magazine DOCMA. Dr. Ruth Marcus started as a medical doctor, later she worked as a photographer and journalist. During the last years she became known as a photographer of animals by exhibitions, portfolios in magazines and book-publications of her images. The name DOCDOC unites the academic degrees of the two artists. During their common work  they created the concept of the project “Doguments of Art and History“: Presents scenes of history and art, ironically broken, at the borderline between something recognizable and something alienated– based on cultural conventions and knowledge, but questioning them at the same time.

Bart Borland lives in Oakland, Ca.. Born in New York, he was influenced by his parents in his choice of careers. His mother was an artist and his father a scientist and businessman. Bart studied Chemistry as his major and took art classes on the side. In 1967, he moved to the Haight-Ashbury and by 1969, he had a one-man show that was reviewed by Thomas Albright in the SF Chronicle and was described as “hallucinations that follow the tradition of psychedelic posters” and his work was compared by Albright to “Rauschenberg’s silk screens”. His work was loaned to the SFMOMA and he was represented at theVorpal Gallery during this period. He gave up art while raising a family and returned four years ago when he discovered digital art. The digital medium opened a door and gave him powerful new tools to create art. He states: “This medium is revolutionizing art in America. It enables fantastic composition of patterns, shapes, colors and images inviting the viewer to closer inspection. Photographs are inset among amorphous shapes to give the impression of looking through one reality to another.” Bart seems to embrace the changing times and take an enthusiastic lead in exploring new art tools and creating new art forms that express the times.

Leonard Breger has lived in San Francisco since the late 50s, and with his wife Liz (also an artist and known as Beth Pewther) in their Bernal Hts home for over 30 years. He was born in 1920 in Brooklyn, N.Y.  From childhood, he was exposed to and infused with a love for art. The great art museums in NYC were his favorite wandering places. He began to pursue his own art as a young man. Breger graduated from City College of New York, and after serving in WW2, he returned to New York City to continue his education at the Art Students League. He married Helen Breger the mother of his daughters during this time. In 1949, he moved his young family to the West Coast; first to Washington and a year later to San Francisco. He worked as a display artist at Macy’s until he found work as an art teacher. Thereafter, he taught and has exhibited his art for over 50 years in numerous Bay Area/West Coast venues. He was recognized early in his career for his artistic achievement and was given one man shows at both the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the DeYoung Museum. In 1966 Breger broke with the tradition of painting in rectangles after experiencing the Altamira cave paintings on a summer trip through Spain. He conceived of an organic relationship between wall and art rather than the "window effect" of the rectangle. His resulting cut-shape figurative paintings have continued evolving through the years, going through several distinctive phases. Breger’s recent shows include the Grants Pass Museum, in Oregon, and the Sun Gallery in Hayward, as well as numerous other venues in Bay Area galleries, community centers, churches and cafes.He continues to paint most mornings . He also continues to teach; leading 3 critique groups in the Bay Area. His art is sometimes deeply serious, ...but just as often, he plunges off into the quirky, the absurd, the joyous, Leonard affirms and celebrates life. The Bulldog Series of paintings began with a painting, for a friend, of her bulldog "Sugar". The rest followed because he was having so much fun working on the subject.

Max Chandler grew up on farms in southern Missouri, studied Math at MIT, Chinese at the Defense Language Institute and attended graduate school in art in Taiwan. He was an apprentice for several years to internationally known artist Chen Ting-shih.  He has worked in both hardware and software and participated in ten patents in milk cartons, gymnastic equipment, scanners, film recorders, and compiler techniques and others. Software projects include manufacturing control, Visicorp products, Laplink, Sim City 3000 and Sims. By using robots, he has been able to combine his lifelong interests in painting, mathematics of life, hardware and software. His approach provides an individual path combining emotional and intellectual truth in an image.  His goals are to depict systems rather than objects, blend different scales of an object, microscopic and macroscopic, cellular and chemical in layers to provide a rich shared experience. He adds calligraphic lines that make visual the fundamental elements of the image.

Zwanda Cook, is a Bay Area Artist who enjoys creating sculptures in clay, papier mache, and plaster.  She is currently working on a series of Mami Wata's created with clay as shown here.  Mami Wata is a water spirit that lives in the river on the west coast of Africa.  Each Mami Wata created by Zwanda tells a story and each story is different just as the Mami Wata in the river is different to each observer. Zwanda says, "it is all in the eyes of the beholder". Zwanda was educated at the College of Alameda, San Francisco State University, and College of Marin.  She has exhibited her work at the Marin County Fair and won an honorable mention in their juried show, Marin Art and Garden Center in Ross, CA, College of Marin in Kentfield, CA, The Finley Art Center in Santa Rosa, CA, and The Expressions Gallery in Berkeley, CA. Her passion for her work is felt with each piece she creates.

Elizabeth Dante is a master artisan who is highly skilled in all aspects of casting and carving, She works in numerous media; notably bronze, and other materials such as cast stone, aluminum, resin, concrete, and carved marble.  While a gemologist living and traveling in Brazil, Panama and Southeast Asia, Ms. Dante attained an affinity for the Third World.  This ever-present influence has provided Elizabeth with stylistic inspiration for her work ranging from classical naturalism to stylistic narration.  Much of her sculpture explores the dynamics between round organic forms and hard rigid angles.  By exaggerating this interplay, her work creates a sense of tension that is both lively and sensual. Ms. Dante has said that her work combines ancient and modern rituals, extracting archetypes and stylized motifs. ”I pay homage to the many facets of the human spirit, characterized by warmth, humor and sometimes political commentary.” Although she utilizes an academic background that includes the Gemological Institute of America, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the College of Marin, Ms. Dante remains essentially self-taught.  She has honed her craft by working for established sculptors, most notably Elio Benvenuto.  While an artist assistant to German artist Toni Bruchert in Pietra Santa,Italy, Ms. Dante learned traditional techniques and methods for sculpting/enlarging and casting/finishing bronze; patinas; and marble carving.  Most recently as a patina artisan, Ms. Dante has worked with Bay Area Artists Steven DeStaebler, Bruce Beasley, and Ruth Asawa.  Ms. Dante has exhibited in numerous shows in the United States and Italy.  Her outstanding works have been showcased in collaborative efforts such as “Art on the Rock at Alcatraz”, and “The Day of the Dead” Exhibition at The Museum of Mexican Art.  In 1990, she received the prestigious Art of Peace Award from the Artist Embassy International for her sculpture “Woman's Liberation”, which was chosen by the Oakland Art Commission as a gift to Nelson Mandela and the people of South Africa.

Barbara de Groot is a local Berkeley Artist and teacher of art who works in various types of media such as monotypes, Chine Colle with other media, Wood Block prints, Linoleum Block prints, Mixed Media Collage, Drypoint, Transfer Methods painting and drawing.  She began her art education under the direction of Leon Friend, the chairman of the art department at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, NY. She attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School on Saturdays during her High School years where she studied with Isaac Soyer, one of three talented artist brothers who became known for figurative painting.  She became an Art Major at Hunter College in New York, where she learned basic printmaking under noted printmaker, Gabor Peterdi, painting with William Baziotes and Raymond Parker. She attended Academie Goetz in Paris, France where she learned many of her special printmaking skills. She also studied printmaking with Ricardo Licata, an instructor from Ecole des Beaux Arts. He had a gentle manner and a style of teaching that made a great impression upon her, despite a strong Italian accent with which he explained his instructions in a careful and deliberate French. Years later she studied painting and composition with Burgoyne Diller at Brooklyn College. She holds a MFA degree from SUNY New Paltz, NY.  She is licensed to teach Art in the New York City and New York State High Schools, and has a credential to teach art in the California Community Colleges and Adult Education Schools.  Locally, she shows with the San Francisco Women Artists and has received several merit awards. She has shown with the Marin Society of Artists where she also earned merit awards. Her work is in many private collections and has appeared in many exhibits in various galleries here and abroad and is archived in the Women’s Museum in Washington, DC and in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C Barbara is a painter and feels close to that artistic form of expression. However, it was only when she started painting on a plate to make monotypes that she felt free and uninhibited, as she had not when she painted on canvas. She credits her teachers, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes and Raymond Parker, working artists who all taught at Hunter College in New York, with having had an influence on her artistic expression. However the work of Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning had already left a deep impression on her before she entered college. Barbara’s artistic creations are the means by which she meets her great personal need to express emotions about the human condition, i.e. racial inequality, poverty, hunger, personal relationships, persecution, and prejudice. She also enjoys injecting humor into her work on occasion since that is also, happily, a feature of the human condition. Her monotype, Denizens Of The Deep, is a depiction of sea life, namely fish, in a free force movement. It shows exuberance for life much like dancers who use movement in a free manner to express emotions.

Eduardo Paul del Rio was born in the golden, ancient town of Salamanca, Spain and raised in the fiercely tilled lands of Yuba City, California. Like any artist, Eduardo's art is the transcendental product of his experience. With a painter for a mother and a photographer for a father, he was raised with a creative instinct. Today as he treads the densely layered urban spaces of San Francisco, he manifests the grace of an older world. Perhaps his heart resides in Northern California and his soul resides in Spain. Evocatively his passion transcends place and time. Eduardo has a B.A. in Spanish Literature from the University of San Francisco and a Professional Illustration and Publishing Certificate from the School of Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain.  Eduardo is displaying selections from his Monstrous series, which includes pieces in various mediums such as oil paint on canvas, colored pencil and clay.

Joan Di Stefano-Ruiz lives in the Bay Area and is perhaps most known for her work with Stained Glass. She has an M.A in Studio and Environmental Art from New York University, Venice, Italy. She has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. And she has studied at the Pilchuck School – Washington and Dale Chihuly's international Mecca for the study of art glass.  Her studio is well respected and has been commissioned to do restoration stained glass work for places such as the Bohemian Club, San Francisco, California, Residential creations in Paris, France: Chapel window in St. Mary's in the Mountains; Virginia City, Nevada Interior art restoration at St. Patrick's Catholic Church, Oakland, California Garden Art for Musee De Brux, France and Private Residences.  Di Stefano-Ruiz pioneered the use of stained glass as the main component of mosaic stepping stones and tabletops. A local mosaic mural can be seen at Blondie's Pizza, Berkeley, California. A fireplace mosaic creation of Ms. Di Stefano Ruiz is included in the published work 'The Art of Mosiac Design: A Collection of Contemporary Artists' by Joann Locktov. Her work can be commissioned through Expressions Gallery.

Ella Driscoll is a native San Franciscan. She attended the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a B.S. degree in Public Health. For many years she worked as a medical technologist in bay area hospitals and clinics.  Regarding her formal art training, she studied art at Berkeley Evening High School, City College of San  Francisco, and with Richard Yip, watercolor artist, and with Rupert  Garcia, Chicano artist.  She also studied photography with master photographer, Allen Stross and at San Francisco City College and San Francisco State University and continued her formal art education when she was awarded a scholarship to the Academy of Art in San Francisco, California.  Ella has had a number of solo and group shows and has received a number of prestigious awards for her work. Her work has been shown in juried shows in New Mexico,  Idaho,  Washington, Krakow in Poland and locally at the San Francisco Women Artists Gallery.   Her awards include, Purchase Prize, San Francisco Art Festival, Best of Show, San Mateo Art Festival, New Brunswick  Bureau of Tourism, State of Alaska, Photography, Pacifica,  California, Photography.  She has several Merit Awards from the San Francisco Women Artists. In this show, Ella uses does assemblage pieces that comment on today’s changing world and states: “I try to portray in my work the area between life and reality and the unreal or fantasy, while still maintaining a sense humor.  I find this leads me to collage, assemblage, sculpture, painting, "shoe art", photography and boxes.

Olivia Eielson was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In college, Eielson majored in English because she didn't think it possible to capture on paper or canvas what she saw and imagined.  Gradually, however, as she took classes in studio art and history of art, and most especially when she took evening classes with Boston painter Morton Sacks, she realized that painting would be her lifelong occupation.  Encouraged by the fact that she won a first prize for painting as an undergraduate, she attended Oskar Kokoschka's Schule des Sehens in Salzburg, Austria.  After that, she was largely self-taught. For Eielson it's all about the joy of painting, and the struggle to make a finished painting that is somehow "right," and answers the need or vision or question she felt in working on it.  At present she is working on a series called "After Piranesi / After Us," about the possibility that we, like earlier empires, may leave ruins – in our case, dangerously toxic ones, but still beautiful in their way. She has had many solo shows, and representation in many juried group shows.  Her work is in private collections across the country, as well as in Asia and Europe.  She is a member of http://www.Magpie7arts.com. For more of her work, see http://www.oliviaeielson.com.

Judith Federico is originally from Princeton, New Jersey and has lived in San Francisco for over thirty years.  She gained her artistic sensibility as well as her appreciation for nature from her father who was born in Southern Italy.  Ms. Federico graduated from Rider College in N.J. with a business degree.  She also attended JFK University and received a master’s degree in Psychology.  She worked in a corporation for twelve years when she decided to enter the non-profit arena.  She spent another twelve years working for two different non-profit agencies in the Tenderloin in S.F.  One of which provided the means and opportunity for homeless individuals to create art.  She is currently a social worker for children with special needs.  Ms. Federico has been drawing and painting for most of her life. She also studied art for two years at City College in S.F. and has taken many art classes over the years.  She believes that for her, “Creating art is not an objective but an intricate part of how she lives her life.”

Marin Fischer was born in New York City, attended City University and Brooklyn College in New York, and received her Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Arizona State University. She now lives in Berkeley, California. A nationally known muralist, some of Ms. Fischer’s works can be seen on the Claremont Avenue underpass, the O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, and the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley. She has also been a scenic artist, painting sets for the Lyric Opera Theatre at Arizona State University; and designed, built, and painted sets for a local theatre production of the rock musical “Hair.”  Her drawings and paintings have been shown at U.C. Berkeley, the Phoenix Art Museum, galleries throughout the United States, and are currently on display at First Alameda in Alameda, California. Marin states: “My watercolor paintings and colored pencil drawings of land/waterscapes deal with the effects of light and shadow on smooth and textured planes, lines, and surfaces. These images on paper are figurative reflections of my concern with the effects of our civilization on our wild and beautiful earth, inspired by my impressions during the years I have spent dazzled by the light of the American Southwest. “

Mark Fischer is a Cetacean Acoustic Artist -- an artist who works with the sounds of whales, dolphins and birds he records while out on the ocean.  He then uses a mathematical formula and a computer to convert these sounds into images each unique from each other.  He was born in Pennsylvania, stationed in Amberg, Germany in the US Army and earned a B. S. in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University.  For 10 years he worked in software development, defense and telecommunications and since 2002 has been doing independent research in cetacean acoustics using wavelets, exploring both the science and the art of the way they use sound.

Rinna Flohr lives in Oakland, California. She grew up on the East Coast in Montclair, New Jersey and New York. She graduated from Syracuse University with a BA in theatre arts and a later completed a Certificate from the Moreno Institute of Psychodrama to use drama as a psychotherapeutic technique, which she did for a number of years. She went back to graduate school at Syracuse University, in New York and completed her Master Degree in Clinical Social Work in order to better understand the psychotherapeutic uses of psychodrama as a psychotherapeutic approach to working with people with psychological problems. She received her license as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and then for 37 years she worked as a Licensed Psychotherapist in private practice and for both the Alameda County Mental Health and Community Behavioral Health Services in San Francisco, Ca. eventually becoming Assistant Director. In 1991 her house burned down in the Oakland fire, which led her to study Interior Architecture and Design in order to rebuild her home. She completed the program at UC Berkeley in 2001. With an interior design background she began doing remodels and interiors that later led her to floral designing. She studied floral design with Ron Morgan. Her floral designs were part of the Bouquets to Arts show in the past and she is a member of the S. F. Museum floral committee. She also makes jewelry from recycled materials left over from interior design projects and later from other found objects such as found rubber from inner tubes of tires, or cement from building sites. Currently she is Founder and Director of Expressions Gallery in Berkeley, Ca. She presents her floral art as part of the current show.

Devon Gaster lives in San Francisco and is a florist and floral design instructor with 26 years experience in the Floral industry. He had his own retail floral store for 13 years and taught floral design classes in Hawaii and in San Francisco. For the last two years, he has been teaching classes at the San Francisco Flower Market. Devon Gaster presents his interpretation of Abundance and Joy as part of this current Expressions Gallery show. He will also be doing some demonstrations and classes at the Gallery and will Jury a couple of floral artists, student and public entrant floral art shows and contests during the run of the show. Expressions Gallery is proud to take the lead from the San Francisco Museums who have brought us the Bouquet to Arts Shows at the Legion of Honor and De Young Museums over the years and feature floral arts as another regular art form offered for viewing and sale in its Gallery and as part of its educational program

Paul Graf has a BFA degree from California College of Arts  and is currently a member of the Sculpture Faculty at the Academy of Art University in SF, as well as a yearly guest instructor at the Mendocino Art Center. He was originally from Maryland. He presents “sculptural paintings” that reflect his approach to the interface between 2 & 3 dimensional art through the raised textures that are the graphic results. In different lightings and viewed from different angles, many aspects of the image come forward or recede as you move about.

Catherine Hamlett lives in Oakland, Ca. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1946, the second of three children and attended to college in the Midwest.  She states: “Although I really wanted to study “art”, I was a good Catholic girl and graduated in social work.”  She worked in the field for many years and retired as a Probation Officer from Alameda County in 1999. She has two daughters, one of whom works in Hawaii and the other in Africa in the Peace Corps.  With parenting duties over and mortgage paid, it was time to return to “art”.  She has benefited from many art teachers over the last several years, including the staff at Laney College as well as private instructors. She has a background in the decorative arts—faux finishing, stenciling and murals—but it is only within the last several years that she started to work on canvas.  “I am learning to see as an artist does, slowly and appreciatively.  The light captivates me, and I love the sheer joy of color, bright and lively on the canvas.  And I love animals—all kinds of animals—and I get a kick out of painting them in humorous situations. Although I also paint landscapes, I always seem to come back to those sweet faces.”

Barbara Hazard lives in Berkeley, Ca. She grew up near New York City on Long Island and lived in many Cities of the United States. As a child she wrote and illustrated stories and it seems like she never stopped. After her three children grew up, she finished her college education at the Art Department of the University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois and then went on to get her Master’s Degree in Art Therapy at Lone Mountain College (now USF), in San Francisco. In 1986, she became friends with a group of Russian independent artists and since then has spent two months a year with them in St. Petersburg, Russia, painting, writing, and exploring the world of Russian art and life. “This experience has allowed me to let dark into my life, to allow myself to mix drawing with painting, and to leave some things unstated. I paint what I find beautiful or funny, breathtaking or haunting,” she states. She carries her needlepoint with her as she travels or sits in cafes or in the park with her grandchildren. She has crafted some exquisite needlepoint pillows this way. Her pillows and her artwork are on display as part of Animals and Sea Creatures at Expressions Gallery. She is a member of http://www.Magpie7arts.com.

Patti Heimburger lives in Alameda and has an art studio in Oakland. Patti had her first painting class at the age of thirteen, and received a BA in Studio Art from the University of California in Santa Barbara. She has had a real lifelong love affair with art. Her textured oil paintings have evolved over many years of painting and are just a natural step into something that is different from the norm. These paintings are created through fabric and yarn that is then attached to a canvas surface. These textured surfaces have no reference to the subject matter other than adding complexity. Patti chooses to show optimism, caring and goodness in her paintings. She is currently exhibiting at Hotel Nikko San Francisco. She has had many solo and group showings in California and Washington, in galleries, art centers, universities, and the Oakland Museum. Her artwork is part of a corporate collection, and private collections in many states.  Patti enjoys depicting loving couples in whimsical surroundings. You can view more of her artwork at: www.artistpatti.com.

Melanie Hofmann graduated with a BFA in Textiles from the California College of the Arts in 1996. Her home and studio are located in Berkeley.  She first explored the joy of creating art in pre-school and she has not stopped since.  As a teenager Melanie fell in love with fiber art, specifically with weaving and dyeing fabrics. Melanie has received awards from the Taegu International Textile Design competition and from Manhattan Arts International.  Limited edition prints of her digital art are in the corporate collection of Lifescan, Inc. in Milpitas. Last year, Melanie had a solo exhibition of textiles in the corporate lobby of 255 California Street in San Francisco. Melanie works with both textile and digital media.  For this show, she is featuring her artwork on tile. Her work has been inspired by a number of artists including, Jean Miro, Rene Magritte and Magdalena Abakanowicz. She was also influenced by the artwork of her maternal grandmother, Zura Young, an abstract painter. Melanie seeks to convey through her work the interactive process with her media and a visual representation of her inner world.  In addition to her work in other mediums, she offers custom designed Italian charm bracelets with digital images of photos or art transferred to the charms using the same process that she uses to transfer images to tiles.

Amy Jo Karn lives in Oakland with her husband and her two beloved dogs.  A native of New Mexico, she has been influenced by the bold and expressive art of Santa Fe, as well as by the Expressionist and Fauvist painters of the late 19th century. As a college student, Amy Jo studied Humanities and French in Boulder, Colorado, and continued on to earn a master's degree in History of Art from Northwestern University. Her shift from the study of Art History to art-making was a natural and liberating move.  Her education in the History of Art enhances and inspires her artwork.  As a painter, she is largely self-taught.  She has a constant waiting list for custom pet portraits and has shown her work in cafes and galleries throughout the Bay Area.  She was recently nominated for an Oakland Indie Award, an award celebrating independent community-oriented artists and businesses. Amy Jo paints with fluid acrylics on cradled Hardboard. This unyielding surface creates a smooth, substantial background for the whimsical subjects.  Her style has been best described as "expressive," "folk-like," and "imaginative."  Her two favorite subjects are animals and women, for their expressive qualities.  She uses bold color combinations and expressive lines to create highly emotive paintings. A hopeless animal-lover, Amy is constantly charmed by the idiosyncratic behaviors of dogs and cats.  She loves depicting their personalities and how they relate to their surroundings.  In her portraits, the pets engage the viewer directly, creating a personal relationship as a pet does with its owner.  Her portraits are adoring, and offer a stylized, playful look at the presence of pets in our homes and our daily lives.

Joanna Katz is a long time resident of Berkeley.  She was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the daughter of a college professor and a poetess.  She spent her in teens in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  She has a B.A. in fine arts from the State University of Iowa, Iowa City where she became convinced of the importance of learning the techniques of realistic representation as a foundation on which to build.  She has used that foundation for interpreting many different subjects in many media.  She says, "My paintings and collages are of things I love to look at and subjects that disturb me.  Recently my pleasure has been painting watercolor landscapes.  On the darker side are my representations of litter and greenery in water based media." Her work has been shown at many local venues including Levi Plaza, SOMAR both in San Francisco; ProArts Gallery, Oakland; Giorgi Gallery, Berkeley;  Richmond Art Center.  Also, she has shown at many venues outside the Bay Area.  An acrylic portrait by Joanna  was purchased by Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, another, including a panel of test she wrote were purchased by Chaparral House here in Berkeley. In the current show Joanna shares her pleasure in the cats she has known with two pictures.  "As a very small child, when my mother used to bathe my sister and me, sometimes one of our cats would come to watch.  My painting Drawn Bath is reminiscent of those times. Comfy Cat is a cat that lived with my father in his later years." She is a member of http://www.Magpie7arts.com.

Lucy Lewis currently lives in Berkeley, California.  She grew up in Los Angeles and began her interest in art at an early age. Her mother was an artist. She studied dance with Bella Lewitsky, in Los Angeles, California and Performed with Anna Halprin, in San Francisco in 1965. She was inspired by Georgia O’ Keefe and her sense of connection with nature. The work in this show is a multi-media collaboration with well-known artist and muralist, T. Scott Sayre, utilizing dance, video art and liquid projections. Lucy and Scott have been collaborating for the past seven years. Their work was exhibited at the Los Gatos Museum of Art in 2005. The process involves layers of light, color, words, movement and music to evoke the rhythms and textures of the element of water. Other multi media works include; Between Two Worlds, The Planets, A Tree Telling of Orpheus, and the Ravens Fly at Dawn. These works have been performed at the International Conference of Alternative Modes of Healing at Santa Sabina Center in San Rafael.

Sandra Lo was born in China. She grew up in China and Hong Kong and immigrated to the US in 1989. She started learning drawing at a very young age. Her father, William S. Hung a famous oil painter, has been her teacher. Sandra took some workshops, figure drawing and painting classes but other than that, she is mostly self-taught.  She is following in her father’s footsteps, and has become an accomplished painter who works primarily in oil and pastels. Sandra has a full time job in another field but still finds time to paint on lunch hours, evenings and weekends.  She is a member of San Francisco Women Artists and her paintings are exhibited at SFWA Gallery in San Francisco, every month. Sandra’s portraits are extremely well executed and she offers commissioned portraiture through Expressions Gallery. Her still lifes and an example of her portrait work are part of Amazing Blooms show now at Expressions Gallery.

Jennifer Wallace Mack has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute.   She works in various media: painting, photography, mixed media, and jewelry. Her work is consistent in the quality and detail in each medium she applies.  She has exhibited at a number of solo,  and group shows, many of which were juried.  Shown at Expressions Gallery are her mixed media paintings and her magnificent jewelry.  Jennifer has served on various Board of Directors for long standing Artist Organizations such as the San Francisco Women Artists where she was a past President and continues n the current Board as Vice Treasurer and The San Francisco Gem and Mineral organization where she is currently Treasurer.

Dr. Ruth Marcus lives and works in Germany. She first studied medical surgery and worked as a medical surgeon for years. Then she started to build houses. In addition she worked as a photographer and journalist and she is the owner of an advertising agency. She lives on a court at the foot of a castle with her husband, her Doberman Toele, the cat Tussie, the Arab stallion Sharon and the rabbits H5 and N1. Ruth started photography by working on free photo projects in 2004. She was educated at the film academie in Hamburg and learned a lot from the photographic experts Doc Baumann and Uli Staiger and was influenced in her early years by the sculptor August Gaul. Her main photographic theme is animals. Her intention is to show them as natural and beautiful as they are. All of her photographic projects start at her personal environment. So it has been with the project " Touching your soul: animals as therapy“ in which she takes pictures of her seriously ill first husband together with Tussie the cat. And the same thing happened with her illustrated book “Hundeaugenblicke“ (dog-eyes-moments) which appeared at the Collection Rolf Heyne 2007 in Germany. After that, she started taking pictures of her beautiful doberman “Toele“. The book shows several breeds of dogs in new and known positions in front of a black or white background. She first presented her works in the exhibition show Photo figure 05 in Berlin and then she participated in various group exhibitions in Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg. Her work has been shown in individual exhibitions at Meiser in Hanau 2006 and 2007. In the summer of 2007 she will have an individual exhibition in the National Museum Koblenz. With a selection of her works she is represented at the Flo Peters Gallery in Hamburg.

Sonia Melnikova was born and trained as an artist and architect in Moscow and holds a Master’s degree in Fine Art and Architectural Design from the prestigious Moscow State Architectural Institute. Her artworks in various media were exhibited in art salons in Moscow and, since 1987, in San Francisco, including The Jewish Museum San Francisco; Fort Mason; College of Marin; De Anza College; Gallery Route One; and Virginia Brier, Spectrum, Bradford, Euphrat, Koret, Expressions, Liquid Spaces, and San Francisco Women Artists Galleries. The artist’s current medium is digital photography but her training and “inner eye” as a painter and architect shows throughout her works, which have an uncanny resemblance of painted media. She tends to work in series, the central theme of which is often a nostalgic reflection on things of the past. The artworks selected for the “Animals and Sea Creature” exhibit present photographs of found art on the beaches in and around San Francisco. Sonia works on series. This series is called “Still Life in Sand and is comprised of 54 photographs. ” I am a gatherer when it comes to enchanting things that can be found in nature - stones, shells, twigs, dry leave, uprooted seaweed, driftwood, feathers and other bits and pieces. I used to take these home to preserve but there is only so much room. The camera helps to prolong the life of these ephemeral fragments, which change before out eyes and disappear before we have savored all their beauty and mystery.

Monica Meza was born in the San Francisco bay area and grew up drawing and painting cartoons. In 2005 she received her B.A. in art from California State University - Fresno. Currently she works freelance as an illustrator, storyboard artist, concept artist, and animator.

Alana Perlin, MFA, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She first became interested in art when her mother, Linda, encouraged her to enter coloring contests as a young child. Perlin's formative visual artistic experience has led to many interdisciplinary approaches in her artwork. Since earning her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she has exhibited multimedia and installation work internationally. Her recent shows include "WEB3DART 2007" in Umbria, Italy; "Better Than the Real Thing" in Dublin, Ireland; "Blue" at the San Mateo City Hall Gallery; and an upcoming participatory installation on June 7th at The San Jose Museum of Art. Perlin's work spans a range of traditional and new media in-order to suggest a sense of visceral beauty.She focuses on series that play with the notion of natural versus imagined creatures and animals. Perlin invites the viewer to make critical connections between the ephemeral beauty of sea life and the fragile
forms being threatened through human intervention.

Laura Rattay is a local artist. She is self taught as an artist. She only recently started to make unusual purses out of cardboard and images she assembles. She has sold her work to local clients and other artists. She has included purses with floral imagery as part of this show at Expressions.

Diane Rusnak lives in San Pablo, although she spent most of her life in Berkeley, Ca.  She came from the Countryside of North East Ohio. “ I became interested in art when I was small and remember drawing grandpa’s cow at age five. Adults there admired realism and copying that style so that is what I did until I had the shock of attending Ohio State University where I was taught Abstract Expressionism in oil!” She graduated Ohio State with a B. A. in art and then came West in the 1960s. The color of Matisse and the work of the Surrealists inspired her, as well as the strong activities at that time on the Feminist Art Movement.  Eventually, Diane became a symbol oriented artist working in a variety of media and sizes and focusing on the content of her journals where she recorded over 3000 night dreams over a span of 30 years.  Diane has shown nationally and is in several shows a year. She is a member of http://www.Nordic5arts.com  and http://www.Magpie7arts.com.

Emily Jurs Sparks is a native Oaklander.  She is a soprano with the Oakland Symphony Chorus, and she also likes to write.  She has had no formal art training, but has been making things all her life.  Her house and yard are her main canvas, where her biggest installations are the deer mural on the hillside retaining wall, Allegra the garden dryad, and the pique-assiette (broken ceramics) wall on the driveway that delivery trucks keep breaking. At home, few surfaces are safe from paintbrush or glue, though so far her Saab is untouched.  Her current art form is toy-size Art Cars, inspired by what you see in the “How Berkeley Can You Be?” parade. Emily combines materials such as in collage, piece- and glue-work.  She does not use patterns; all her work is original.  Animals, the whimsical, and the unexpected are driving forces. Her favorite subject has always been animals, and they are passengers in all her Art Cars. These cars are often sighted at DakotArt on Piedmont Avenue, and are seen this summer at Expressions Gallery in the Animals and Sea Creatures show.

Chaya Spector was born in The Bronx. She is  a self taught Photographer and mixed media artist living in Oakland for the past 25 years. Nature has been a primary source for her images, being drawn in by the many colors and textures. She shoots with  a Canon SLR digital format primarily using close up macro and Portrait lenses. Whether photographing nature or people she fills her frame with both nuance and simplicity. Chaya has shown her work in Ithaca New York , SF and Oakland having had pieces at the California Modern Gallery in SF, State of The Art Gallery in Ithaca, NY, The Napa Library, Go West , Richmond Art Center and SomArts, as well as various cafes in the bay area. Her work has been published in Birders World 2004, Cal Photo Journal of Photography and on the www.magnoliacloudforest.com  Website, and www.cittiproject.org website. Her images add a depth of color and a sense of adventure to this show highlighting Animals, sea creatures and animation. You can see more of her work at : www.redeyephotos.com.

Tom Tuthill was born in Middleton, N.Y., 1942. He attended Orange Community College in Middleton, N.Y., where he received an A.A.S degree in1963. He was strongly influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism. He was included in the following shows in the Bay Area: “Inherited Image: Variations in Collage,” Allrich Gallery, S.F. 1991; “Testing the Market,” a juried exhibition, Untitled Gallery, S.F. 1992; “What’s in a Word,” Gallery Concord, Concord, CA 1995; one-man show “Fin de Siecle Postcards,” A Selected Retrospective, 2C Arts, S.F. 1999; “Art & Poetry at the Lake,” Lakeview Branch Library, Oakland,CA 2007. He states “My work is the pure product of intuitive juxtaposition. I choose to work on postcards first of all because of the scale. I like an intimate miniature art that the viewer must approach and contemplate and because postcards are one of the great visual clichés of the print era. I recompose the iconography of art, science, history, literature, etc., intuitively juxtaposed to punch holes in time/space and cause the viewer to see anew all the old hats on the hat racks of image.”

Emily Van Dyke is originally from Logansport, Indiana but is currently living in Berkeley.  She attended Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana and earned a degree in Art Education. During her time at Ball State, she had the opportunity to explore a variety of media, but was particularly interested in printmaking. Her printmaking interests include intaglio, relief, and book-making. The prints in this show are color reduction woodcuts. Unlike most printmaking techniques that allow the artist to produce an unlimited number of prints, reduction woodcuts limit the edition to a finite number. Each of the prints in this series are #2 in an edition of 4.

Sara Waugh lives and works in San Francisco.  She grew up in Newburgh, NY, and she comes from a long line of painters,  including seascape painter, Frederick Waugh, and landscape painter & cartoon artist, Coulton Waugh.  Sara Waugh studied painting and drawing at Columbia University and the New York Studio School in New York City, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and SUNY New Paltz in New Paltz,  New York.  Waugh graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology and Minors in Mathematics & Physics. These subjects continue to influence her paintings.  Waugh's paintings have been exhibited in solo and group shows across the United States, including a juried exhibition at the Barrett Art Center in New York State.  The roles of artist, model, and the female nude in art history are subjects that interest her.  Her current series, "The World Below," fuses her interest in science with the placement of the feminine in art to create a fantasy space for the viewer to contemplate the roles of women in art and science and ideas of female sexuality.   These works are a mix of media, including watercolor, ink, gouache, acrylic, and oil stick on archival watercolor paper.

Charles Webb owns and operates a film, video and digital media production company in San Francisco. He has written, produced, directed, and photographed projects in the United States, Europe and China that encompass diverse genres including national TV commercials, documentaries and nationally released independent features. In parallel with these and other film and video projects, Mr. Webb has created a collection of  neo-primitive/neo-shamanic paintings, sculpture, fetishes, jewelry and other artifacts, which seem to have “emerged” from an imaginal tribal culture.  The collection intertwines ancient materials and methods with the synthetic and cyber. To date, this “evidence” has been exhibited in San Francisco, Berkeley and Sedona Arizona. The current depictions of magical animals proudly displaying their anomalous body art are presented here for your perusal, mystification and amusement.

Jessica Wishard grew up in Santa Cruz California where she found a passion for the arts at a young age. After attending a high school program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she went on to pursue art more seriously. Jessica attended Mills College where she emphasized in oil painting and photography and had the opportunity to work under artists Hung Liu and Catherine Wagner. She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts and a double minor in Art History and Cultural Anthropology.  Jessica is “endlessly inspired by cultures from around the world,” and draws ideas from her travels to Mexico, Central America, Asia, and Europe. Jessica currently lives and works in the Bay Area and continues to create in mainly oil paint and photography.