Sarah Newton

I met Sarah Newton at an Open Studios in October at the Noonin Building. We ran into each other again riding a bus from Hunters Point Shipyard studios.

As Sarah Newton prepares to celebrate her pet snake's nineteenth birthday, she reflects upon her early career ambitions:

"In the sixth grade I had decided to be a herpetologist, but I probably imagined that it consisting of drawing pictures of animals all day."

Rather than growing up in a house full of pet toads and turtles, Newton was surrounded by art supplies from her father's creative pursuits:

"We always had a lot of art materials and activities in our home, as my father experimented with a tremendous variety of art media, [...] so there were a lot of slightly used oil pastels, colored pencils, and paints around for us to use"

Newton also cites her Uncle, Van Scranton, a mixed media artist who also worked at UCSB, as an important early influence. She recalls visiting visiting a gallery that Scranton ran for a couple years:

"I think he wanted to support the artists around him and to curate shows that interested him. My cousin and I went to many of the gallery openings and my father had some photographs in a group show there."

Newton started high school in rural Pennsylvania, but returned to California for her senior year. Although she began taking figure drawing at a community college at 16, Newton wasn't excited about going to college, even after visiting art schools with her uncle. After traveling around the state working for a political action group, Newton gravitated towards San Francisco's urban environment:

"It has [been] important to me to live in a place where people are connected in public life. Where I see the people around me on the street, doing errands, meeting friends, talking on the corner, selling things on the sidewalk, playing music."

Newton started taking printmaking, as well as drawing, at San Francisco City College. Originally, she found prints to be an interesting supplement to paintings by artists like Edward Hopper:

"There had always been some painters whose work I was interested in and whose prints I thought captured something that their paintings did not" 

After taking classes for several years, Newton finally decided to pursue a BFA at California College of Arts, where she ultimately focused on printmaking. There she found guidance from instructors Charlie Gill, Barron Storey, and Larry McClary and was challenged to study the intimacies of place:

"One of our assignments in an illustration class was to spend an entire day at one specific location and sketch all day"

This interest in public spaces continued outside the classroom in Newton's everyday activities. As she would return to her apartment in the Mission district, Newton would observe both the activity of people on the street as well as deserted elements of the urban landscape:

"People move from one store and then you see them talking to a different group outside another place. Sometimes there weren't people but these were the only lit storefronts and still the invitation sort of spills out into the street [...] I wanted to capture something that wasn't friendly or welcoming but was still intriguing... something that draws you towards it even though you aren't included in it."

After graduating, Newton traveled around southern Europe and joined the Graphics Arts Workshop when she returned to San Francisco. Taking inspiration from Vija Celmins and Robert Bechtle, she continues to explore public spaces in her work, such as a series based on a closed paint store across the street from her house:

"It was such a nowhere place - people would throw garbage over the fence, plants grew up through the asphalt, but around the edge of the space there was still a lot of activity"

Lately, Newton has moved beyond the urban landscape to the American landscape. Inspired by how the works of Thomas Moran, Frederic Church, and Winslow Homer promoted domestic tourism, Newton is working on a series of highway rest stops:

"I am thinking a little bit about [tourism and creating ideas about traveling], a little bit about people's expectations from public spaces, a little bit about the artificiality and standardization of these places that are in the middle of another place."

Watch the Arteaser Calendar for future shows with works by Sarah Newton

Noah Dasho

One of my first fine art purchases was a print by Noah Dasho at the annual Fort Mason Holiday Print Sale. Years later, I met him at the Bay Printmakers Open Studios. We met after work downtown one evening for this Arteaser interview.

Originally from the Bay Area, Noah Dasho began spending his school years in North Carolina with his mother. They lived near a wildlife refuge, which fed Dasho's early interest in birds: 

"When I was probably six years old I wanted to be an ornithologist [...] I had every bird book there was [...] Roger Tory Peterson was someone that made field guides and he painted every single bird there was, and John James Audubon as well, the naturalist. I would just look at the way that they could draw every bird under the sun"

These detailed bird drawings were more akin to Dasho's own creative pursuits, despite his father's preference for practicing music:

"My dad was a musician and he always wanted me to play an instrument, and I just never took up any instruments, but I've drawn since I was little and I guess always kind of considered myself an artist from a young age" 

Dasho continued art into high school, where he was first exposed to printmaking. These early attempts, however, were not encouraging:

"I did a couple lino-cuts in high school art class and absolutely hated them. I just couldn't get what I wanted. [...] I just remember trying to rub a linoleum block with a wooden spoon in high school and being incredibly frustrated [laughing]" 

Dasho returned to the Bay Area for college at UCSC, where he ultimately majored in Art and Economics:

"I've  always done art, but didn't think I would study that in college. I started trying to take art classes and couldn't get into any unless I had that major. Then I [thought], 'I can do two majors in four years.' So, I did it"

Despite his earlier frustrations in the medium, Dasho found himself back in a printmaking class in college. This time, however, he connected with the technique:

"In college I had no interest in photography, so I took the printmaking course because it fulfilled the same elective. Once I started doing it, I just fell in love with it [...] I love detail and I love line. Printmaking just gave a line that I had never seen before, especially etchings"

The process and precision work of printmaking appeals to Dasho. He enjoys a high level of detail and the patterns it can create:

"Whether it was feathers on a bird, I used to meticulously draw every feather - it was sort of the pattern. And lately I've been doing scales on fish and sort of the patterning of those and different things in urban landscapes. I'm really drawn to those kind of details"

Extending the notion of patterns beyond the image, Dasho is interested in the reproduced nature of the print itself. He reflects this by replicating images within a composition:

"Everything starts with line. I'm incredibly interested in pattern as well. Within that I really like that there's a sort of a nod to the fact that you're creating multiples and I like to do small groupings of things [...] like little flocks of birds"

Dasho doesn't confuse detail with realism. Replication is just one of his stylistic traits:

"I like to kind of flatten shapes a little bit and kind of change the perspective in a lot of my prints. I want do something a little bit beyond just straight photographic [images]"

His early stylistic influences came from traditional printmaking artists:

"I think the reason that I got into printmaking was definitely Japanese woodblock artists [...]  it's the composition, the flattening, the styling, and the colors, sort of the scale [...] I love the big sky and the intricate, yet stylized detail"

Dasho has branched out and now takes inspiration from urban graffiti artists like Barry McGee, Andrew Schoultz, and Evan Hecox:

"Currently, I'm extremely into urban art, and I'm into people who have strong line, strong pattern [...] and also their use of color and imagery"

The defiant nature of urban artist is exciting for Dasho, but he is challenged to reconcile his passion for traditional printmaking: 

"I kind of want to get out of that [traditional] box a little bit, but there's something so beautiful and contained that draws you in about printmaking. It's not really something you view from a distance, it's something that you walk up to and inspect, at least for me, and I hope that my audience has that same relationship with it, that they can go in and see the craft and the detail"

Noah will be participating in the Fort Mason Annual Print Sale from December 5-7. He also has a few works on display at the Falkirk Cultural Center through the end of the year.

Phillip Dvorak

In anticipation of this month's Open Studios, I visited Phillip Dvorak at his apartment where he works. We chatted as we passed through rooms filled with Mexican masks, skulls, and neat stacks of drawings and etchings.

As a boy in Southern California, Phillip Dvorak pursued his archeological ambitions by digging for bones behind his parents’ house:

“I was convinced there were dinosaurs buried in my backyard”

When he wasn’t digging for T-rex, Dvorak was always drawing. Even at an early age, his grandmother encouraged his artistic habits, enrolling him in figure drawing classes in the Hollywood Hills:

“It was all adults and I was just this little kid”

It wasn’t until junior college, at the suggestion of an instructor, that Dvorak began to consider pursuing a career based on his artistic talents. He considered design, but ultimately studied illustration, in which he saw more opportunity for creativity.

“Growing up, the idea of making pictures that would be in books or on an album cover--that was just the coolest thing imaginable. And I still like the idea of having my drawings and ideas published, and being accessible to lots of folks, as opposed to the handful of people who may go into a gallery and see my work.”

Meanwhile, bones - prehistoric and otherwise - continued to be a source of inspiration, in addition to the sexual surrealism of Hans Bellmer, the figurative drawings of R. B. Kitaj, and the corporal explorations of Kiki Smith. Although he works in a number of mediums, Dvorak considers himself primarily a draftsman of the human form.

“It seems like a simple thing--drawing the nude--and in a way it is. But to do it well is really very challenging, in a Zen sort of way: being in the moment, being aware, being patient. There's something so pure and sensual about it--nothing can be faked. I like that about it.”

In addition to his striking nudes and compositions of layered forms, Dvorak’s work includes abstract pieces that have organic, if not recognizable, shapes. They are often appear as delicate as the paper they are drawn on:

“I love doing abstract work because it just becomes about shape – shape, color line without being any object, it’s just pure drawing in a way. […] Just drawing a shape for the sake of itself or a nice line for the sake of itself. But being inspired maybe by something that you’re looking at.”

Many of his pastel and charcoal compositions explore intersections: between animal and human, beauty and the grotesque, and male and female. In a recent series, MexiCali, Dvorak conceptualizes another intersection- that of border towns:

“I don't think things are as black-and-white as some people would like, and the idea of creating images which try to break or blur some boundaries seems like a good one.”

In the last year or so, Dvorak has been exploring photo collages, assembling familiar subjects (bones, flowers, body parts) into bold compositions:

“I like chance and randomness and it’s a nice way to get images that you wouldn’t have gotten just by thinking of something and drawing it”

That quality of chance, rather than premeditation, defines the artistic process for Dvorak:

“Making 'art', at least for me, is more about the process--not knowing how it will turn out, experimenting.”

See more of Dvorak’s work during weekend two of San Francisco’s Open Studios, October 10-12.

Javier Chalini

I sat down with Javier Chalini in the lobby of the Palace Hotel for my first interview of the Arteaser Project. I’ll be the first to admit that the questions I had prepared were not the insightful queries of a seasoned interviewer. I had a list of relatively bland questions that were more along the lines of an extended profile. Having said that, the twelve minutes of recorded “interview” were still useful, but more in the context of the forty minute conversation that ensued. I’ll keep the tape running next time.

Raised in Puebla, the colonial city two hours from Mexico City, Chalini’s early exposure to art was the religious art that adorned his school, a former convent.

“I used to love the Prado prints […] and I enjoyed Delacroix […] I used to know several of my roots, like the muralists, Diego Rivero, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo”

With dinner table gatherings bringing together family in support of the old guard, Catholic right and the populist left, Chalini became a keen observer of human interaction. To paraphrase how this plays out in his art:

“I don’t do landscapes, I do people”

While his parents did not specifically encourage him to pursue the arts, museum books from his father were clearly an important level of exposure:

“I loved just to browse through the pictures and the photographs, I would spend hours and hours doing that, still not knowing that that was something I would like to do. It was just something nice to look at kind of put me away from the day, from everybody”

But despite his inclinations toward doodling, Chalini himself didn’t consider pursuing the arts until his twenties. After a couple years studying engineering he decided to switch to graphic arts at the nearby Universidad de las Américas in Cholula. With its scientific qualities, he gravitated towards metal plate etching:

“I [switched to graphic arts] because I wanted to do what [the other students] were doing […] I tried everything: lithography, photography, painting, silkscreen printing - all the graphic arts. [... E]tching, metal etching, which is the bulk of my work, […] at the beginning, as you know is very technical. Somehow that was a little challenge and maybe because I was into engineering maybe I was more guided to see that.”

Working as a graphics arts professional, Chalini developed under mentors at design agencies. Over the years, however, his focus has been weighting towards his art, which reflect his observations of human interaction using elements of mythology. Although some characters may be based on people in Chalini’s life, in his work they reflect more universal concepts of love, despair, and passion. On his favorite part of sharing his art:

“The discussion that [the piece] can generate. There is the visual aesthetic that talks by itself […].The piece has its own cosmography and sometimes the piece talks to me rather than me talking to the piece”

As Chalini describes it, the artistic process is one that may involve plans, but the success is in following an instinct from beyond that which is understood:

“In the image that I’m creating- painting, etching - it’s the piece [that is] leading not me; it’s the piece [that is] asking me what to do, what to draw, […] what to add. We get into conflicts sometimes; sometimes I get into big discussions with the piece because I don’t know what it wants sometimes. Sometimes I just need to let it go and just forget about it and then come back later and be more open and just be friends again.”

Chalini will be participating in the Fort Mason Open Studios on October 11-12 and his work will also be displayed at Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael from October 18 to December 13.