Self-Portrait Through Multiple Windows
My interest in photography started in 1996 when I decided that I was tired of career-related classes and wanted to study something totally unrelated to work. My choice of study was art and I started with a Black & White Photography course open at the local community college. I bought a used camera (film back then), found I was hooked, and took all the photography classes available at the college. Then life and career intervened and I had to put photography away for a long while. I waited until retirement (2013), enrolled in new photography classes with a new camera (digital now!), and have been shooting ever since.
I believe photography, like all artistic endeavors, should tell a story. It should interpret aspects of our environment from simple illustrations of life moments to abstract interpretations of color and emotions. Sometimes, the story is apparent; sometimes the story is complicated; sometimes the story is open to many interpretations.
Selva Negra
The daughter of parents from Madrid and the third of six siblings, from a very young age she learned to negotiate and set limits. Skills helped her in her professional adult life to make a career in the business world. After a long career in the communication sector, she decides to return to her creative roots and resume painting as a means of expression, which later leads her to the need to write, plots that she develops from a point in the south. from Spain. Currently, she is completely dedicated to giving free rein to her imagination through painting. She transmits in each painting of her her emotions and her state of mind trying to give a little color and joy to the world around her.
Through my art, canvases I manage to express my deepest thoughts and emotions, trying to capture everything that would be impossible to express with few words. That is why cubism, as I like to call the style of my creations, is a freestyle with a wild and indomitable soul, but at the same time a healer where the greatest reward is being able to reach my audience and transmit the accumulation of sensations so special that it contains.
Sensory
Joanne Chase-Mattillo was born in the beautiful Midwestern University town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. While the natural surroundings of her childhood were inspiring, the beauty of nature surrounding Los Angeles was the impetus for her entrance into the field of photography. Joanne began vigorously studying photography and other art arenas to hone her skills as a visual artist. In 2000, she graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA). She is now a full-time artist.
In addition to color and black and white film, Joanne shoots digitally and employs the techniques of infrared imaging and enjoys creating 3D anaglyphs to be viewed with red/blue lenses. As an extension of photography, she has branched out to do videos and has a YouTube Channel, THE VIDEO ART OF JOANNE CHASE-MATTILLO. Along with nature, Joanne frequently photographs female and male subjects at themed studio shoots. She often uses photographs of models combined with images of her nature photography to create unique photo montages.
Joanne has exhibited throughout California, nationally, in Korea, France, England, Switzerland, Scotland, Greece, Spain, Germany, Japan, Belgium, Holland, Taiwan, Brazil, Dubai, and Italy.
As a photographer, I am constantly in search of iconic imagery. The craftsmanship and perfection of classic Hollywood cinema have always been an inspiration and a goal I seek to achieve in my photography. While enjoying the technology of the present and how it has enhanced photography, I am very drawn to recreate photographs that reference the best of the past. It is my intent that the viewer of the images I create will be taken out of the everyday present to a magical place where, at any time, they would dream of going. Whether photographing people or nature, I strive to honor the best and the beauty of all that I have an opportunity to capture with my camera.
Summer days are the dream moments of the year that are looked forward to in dreary seasons. The beach, pool, lakes, and oceans draw all to embrace the sun and beat the heat. When we think of summer, we embrace all that the warmth of the sun brings.
Sentinels Of Drum Mountain
Kai Fujioka is a mixed-media artist from the San Francisco Bay Area who specializes in landscape and abstract painting. Kai received his bachelor’s in visual arts from UC Santa Cruz and his work has been shown in Manhattan on the West Coast, and has been published internationally.
While experimenting with various painting techniques, Kai frequently captures the audience’s attention with striking color combinations and opposing forms. Many of Kai’s works center around the exploration of his Japanese American identity, heritage, and culture.
My artwork is more of an ongoing exploration of my identity than of individual images. I want to explore the complex histories and family experiences that have culminated in my being. In my latest series, I retrace the footsteps of my Japanese-American ancestors during WWII and their persecution in internment centers throughout the United States. These facilities were situated in the most inhospitable locations in the country. Through my landscapes, I want to share both the desolation and desire for freedom that was felt looking out beyond the barbed wire fences.
Serena
Joe is a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He received both a Bachelor of Science and a Doctor of Dental Medicine degree from Tufts University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in endodontics at Harvard University in 1972. He subsequently moved to San Francisco, established and maintained a private practice, lectured internationally, and was a clinical professor at the University of California School of Dentistry from 1972 until his retirement in 2015.
Joe’s art can be seen on his website (where one can subscribe to his newsletter, Joe Green’s Wonderful World of Art), and is represented on lagunaart.com and Marinopenstudios.org.
Joe is a member of the Marin Society of Artists, the Laguna Plein Air Society, the California Art Club, and a member of the Marin Open Studios Boards of Directors.
Joe has dedicated his time to his long-time love of oil painting and is the recipient of numerous awards for his paintings in oil on canvas. Joe seeks to share special moments in time in his portraits, figures, and landscapes. He is particularly interested in portraying the joy found in cultures not yet influenced by modern society.
Serene Sunset
I was an artist from an early age, experimenting in drawing, charcoal, acrylic painting, and mixed media in grade school through high school. However, I largely put art on hold while I pursued a finance career. After retiring and moving to Colorado, I attended a soft pastels art class in February 2023 and rediscovered a passion for art. Art has become my “next act“. My primary medium is soft pastels, but I enjoy watercolors as well.
My mission for my art is to Do Good (through) Art by creating inspiring art and by donating 100% of the net proceeds of all sales to charity. I often take inspiration for my art from my travels, whether it be hiking in the mountains around my home in Colorado, throughout the US, or across the globe. My pieces often include landscapes that highlight sunsets, clouds, and the interplay of light and shadows. That said, I have diverse collections including landscapes, sunsets, water (oceans, rivers, lakes), National Park-inspired works, birds, animals, and flowers. My primary medium is soft pastels, but I also do watercolors and colored pencil pieces. So join me in Doing Good (through) Art.
Serenity
Sylwia Herbst is an American artist who has always had a passion for visual arts throughout high school and college painted large murals and studied figure drawing, charcoal, pastels, printmaking, watercolors, oils, and acrylic painting on canvas which ultimately became her favorite medium. Along with art she studied classical music and began winning awards and medals for both.
Against the advice of both her art and music professors, her chosen career at the time became Finance, in which she attained a Master’s Degree at The American University in Washington DC.
She later returned to her love of acrylic painting and worked mostly in a realistic and impressionistic style. Later, she transitioned into expressionism and became fascinated with the style of creating works of art spontaneously without planning or sketching out the scene first. She used her imagination, mental images, and feelings to create the work.
She was drawn to this type of painting because it felt like an open doorway into other worlds and universes and the paintings themselves felt alive with the energy that came from this.
The result is works of art that are often colorful and flowing. She uses acrylic paints with a thinning medium but never water or other additives. Sylwia often adds lines and detail with a pellet knife or acrylic markers and rarely uses a paintbrush.
Her work has been described as dreamy and uplifting and now hangs in many collector’s homes and offices.
Sylwia hopes to ignite the viewers’ imagination with her work as much as it ignites hers when she paints. She currently lives and paints in Palm Harbor, Florida.
I am an American artist who is most known for using contemporary expressionism to create works of art that depict inspiring visions from my imagination.
I am motivated by the notion that our creativity and mental health are significantly impacted by our imagination, daydreaming, and internal reality, in contrast to objective reality. I investigate the sensations and emotions of the human spirit in my paintings, as well as how the wavelengths and energies of color affect our physical and emotional well-being.
I believe that through art, we may overcome despair, anger, hatred, and fear. I strive to portray a sense of freedom from these unwanted emotions and create uplifting sensations of calmness, joy, aesthetics, and serenity.
Serenity
Subodh Maheshwari was born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, North India where she learned folk art and classical music. She passionately believes: “In the threshold of my life, my present is the window to the past and a key to the future”. She acquired her degrees and studied art at Agra University, California State University of Fullerton, and the University of California Irvine. Subodh has won numerous awards, including the Regional Fellowship Award at UCI in 1986, the Bharat Gaurav Award in India in 2015, and the 60 Masters Award in 2017, 2018, and 2019. She is also registered in Marquis’s “Who’s Who in America”, the standard in biographical information. Her paintings have also won awards in a variety of categories including landscape, open, all women, nature, elements, seasons, and abstract.
Subodh is a diversified artist who enjoys telling stories through her artwork, whether it is through landscape, flowers, or abstract art. Her art is a fusion of Eastern symbolism and Western composition, influenced by 16th and 17th century Rajasthani and Mogul art, and accented by poetry, passages, and phrases in Hindi, Sanskrit, and English. She admires Georgia O’Keeffe for her floral influence, and Frida Kahlo for her courage. Whether it is the serene beauty of nature, her spirituality, or the current political climate, she finds inspiration. Having a life shared between India and America, she sees the beautiful similarities, like love which transcends all borders. Highly individual in her style, her works are described as emotional, mysterious, personal, spiritual, and humorous.
Serenity At Daybreak Banjul
Karen Safer is a photographic digital artist, writer, and poet with a musical bent. As a native Angelino, she was given a camera and crayons at 3 and exposed to dominant California motifs: light, palm trees, the ocean, music, and vernacular architecture that helped define and influence her left-handed aesthetic. Fortunate to begin a life of travel as a pre-teen, shaped her love of the exotic paired with an eye for the formal, accidental and unusual and the “beautiful” that jiggled the lens/frame of her eye; subsequently, she has traveled and photographed in over 230 countries (and territories).
She received a master’s degree in art while studying at CSULB and UCLA. Her career includes design and architecture firms; she is the principal of ArtFocus International. Initially, she began painting and printmaking alongside the study of art and architectural history before wholly embracing photography with influences from Mesopotamia to Vermeer/Matisse to Atget to Cindy Sherman. She has been n 8 solo shows in numerous juried and group national and international exhibits, and private collections have received awards, and is a member of several art organizations. She is a self-described “romantic soul” with intellectual cravings, currently residing in Playa del Rey, CA.
A photographer has the whole world – big or small – to capture.
I got a camera and some crayons as a kid,
journeyed along a path in life – far from what I’d expected,
moved from youth to middle age,
did some work, had some fun, got high, got low,
and just continue doing it – never tiring of the next visual surprise.
– Life is still a mystery, after all.