Monday, February 26, 2024

Barbara Lawrence and Sherry Petrini in the Maurice Del Mue Galleries

I’m still organizing art exhibits in the Maurice del Mue Galleries of the San Geronimo Valley Community Center, Marin County, every month.

 

For whatever reason, I ‘ve become lax about posting those monthly shows on this blog. (We’ve had some really good one’s in the last year).  To attempt to correct this a bit here’s what we’re currently showing: The work of Valley artists, Barbara Lawrence and Sherry Petrini.

 

                                                If this Chair Could Talk


Barbara Lawrence is an award-winning artist and teacher, working in pastels and oils, specializing in our local landscape and our natural and manmade environments. 

 

                                                              Red Hill

Barbara writes of her work “I started making art before understanding what I was doing. Art was just part of life since the beginning, watching my father make his living as an artist. As far back as I can remember, I only wanted one thing: be an artist too. Once I purely painted for beauty, serenity, and the love of nature, inspired and driven by these powers to put color on canvas. Over time, my reasons to paint have deepened.  I now not only attempt to capture the essence of the moment to share the changing qualities of the life and environment surrounding us, but I now also work as an historian, documenting this moment in time.”

 

                                                     Old St. Marys


Bumper Crop
(Aside from the admirable painting of chrome in the bumper, check out theself-portrait in the reflection)

  Barbara has an art studio/gallery in the Art Works Downtown building on Fourth Street in San Rafael.


 

Waiter

Sherry Petrini, exhibiting in the Valley Room, received her MFA from the SF Art Institute. She’s exhibited in numerous shows with the Community Center including the annual Spring Art Show as well as other galleries and venues throughout the Bay Area. 


Staircase with Figure

Red Desk

Trumpet Player

Sherry writes of her work: "Trying to escape the bleakness of my early life and the restrictions caused by a serious disability from before memory, I create in my paintings environments where I can encounter the creative, rich life of the spirit. Without my consciously intending to do so, many of these recent works are set in Europe where I traveled many times in my young adulthood to assert my independence. I work quickly, delineating forms with simple lines. The pictures are also touched by the dilapidated charm of darkness and humor caused by the tension between aspiration and unavoidable accident".


Amsterdam

Artwork copyrighted by the respective artists


Monday, February 19, 2024

RIP Fred ‘Lee’ Berensmeier


Photo by Donn DeAngelo


On January 29 of this year, we lost Fred ‘Lee’ Berensmeier, one of the most respected artists in the San Geronimo Valley art community in Marin County. I found Fred to be a soft-spoken gentleman who was always supportive of artists and their creative endeavors (not surprisingly he was a life-long teacher). He was 91 years old.



Fred was part of the San Geronimo Valley Community Center’s annual Spring Art Show from its beginnings (which pre-dates are ‘official” counting of 34 years) and the co-founder of the environmental education center, Wilderness Way, with his wife Jean who died on March 15, 2023. 




Fred was a master printmaker and served as head of the printmaking department at City College of San Francisco from 1968 to 1993. He was equally adept at linocuts, serigraphs and collographs often combining the different printmaking approaches and bending a lot of ostensible ‘rules’ along the way. 




He not only participated in our annual Spring Art Shows, our annual printmaking shows and numerous solos exhibits but exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, the Brandts Klaedefabrik Museum, Denmark, the DeYoung and the Smithsonian.


To honor his life and work the Center will host a memorial exhibit of Fred’s work in the first week of May, just preceding the Spring Art Show. This brief exhibit will conclude with a memorial service that weekend on Saturday, May 4that the Center.



Thursday, February 1, 2024

We’re Still Hanging in There!


Molly’s latest paining

We sorta stumbled out of the gate at the beginning of the new year but we’re neck deep in 2024 now. I had Covid--Christmas through New Years--and have been playing catch-up ever since. Molly, thankfully, didn’t get it.

What passes for our New Year’s (non-Christmas) card was even later than usual. 

A happy and sane new solar cycle to everyone.

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Flamed Out: The Underground Adventures and Comix Genius of Willy Murphy


Flamed Out:The Underground Adventures and Comix Genius of Willy Murphy



Molly and I went to the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum on Sunday for the presentation and book signing of Flamed Out: The Underground Adventures and Comix Genius of Willy Murphy by authors Nicki Michaels and Mark Burstein. 

 

Mark Burstein during the presentation at the SF Cartoon Art Museum. I didn’t get a shot of Nicki Michaels.

 

Nicki was the wife of Willy; Mark has authored and edited numerous books including the biography book on cartoonist Dave Sheridan, various Pogo collections and scads of books pertaining to Alice in Wonderland. (The third co-author of Flamed Out is the late underground cartoonist and close friend of Willy, Ted Richards).


Authors Nicki Michaels, Ted Richards and Mark Burstein. Photo from the book.

 

Flamed Out: The Underground Adventures and Comix Genius of Willy Murphy is about as thorough and comprehensive as one could want. I’m pleased someone finally gave this greatly talented cartoonist his due.   Here are a couple of examples:


Willy’s cover from San Francisco Comic Book #4, 1973
 

From the San Francisco Sunday Paper 1972 

Here’s a remembrance from the Artists in Print publication Graphiti from 1976:





Flamed Out is published by Fantagraphics. You can find it at their website, other online sites-- or even better--your local bookstore.


Tuesday, November 21, 2023

The Bread and Puppet Museum, Glover, Vermont

Molly and I, on a recent trip, wound up visiting the Bread and Puppet Museum. 


The Museum is an overwhelming and inspiring site.



The Museum is crammed with decades of puppets from countless performances of social and political commentary.


For a sense of scale, take a look at this shot Molly took of me walking among some the puppets.


Artist Peter Schumann founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963 in the Lower East Side in New York City. 

 



Schumann’s creative style has been described as “a mix of Romanesque, German Expressionism, Cycladic Minimalism and Potato-Nose Naturalism”.





The Museum was established in Glover, Vermont (about 20 miles south of the Canadian border) in 1975 in a former dairy barn built in 1863.














Peter’s wife, Elka Schumann kept the books and managed the finances and was considered the “glue” that held the troupe and museum together. She died in 2021.




Peter Schumann, 89, remains active.



Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest, nonprofit, political theatre companies in the country.



Our friend Sheri.


You can also purchase prints, art, posters, chapbooks and booklets at the museum.





More info at:  Bread and Puppet