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 ones 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. Mary’s

Bumper Crop

(Aside from the admirable painting of chrome in the bumper, check out the“self-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

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 4^that the Center.

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.