It Brings Back a Sense of Wonder

By Stephanie Benedict

 

Linda Merchant is a featured artist in High Hand Gallery’s current show, Spring Forward.

Pile o' Ducklings by Linda Merchant

The most surprising thing about Linda Merchant is not that she’s accomplished in several painting media and has won several awards at art shows. It’s not that she’s a teacher at heart, who makes YouTube videos of her work for the world to see, and teaches classes in realism at High Hand Gallery. It’s certainly not that she is a very patient person. You can tell that from her paintings: exquisite gems of highly realistic, classical technique. No: the most surprising thing is that she never went to art school.

Here’s what Merchant herself says:

“When I was a kid, I was always drawing. My parents bought me a drafting table and watercolors when I was about 9, and so I used that for several years. I think I realized what could be done with paint not long after that. We frequented a restaurant that had an arrangement with a local gallery to display prints by famous artists, so while the adults were talking, I’d be in other booths around the restaurant with my nose an inch away from these prints by Robert Bateman, Carl Brenders, and others, just examining the brush strokes. This was before the Internet, so that and the art brochures the gallery put out were my exposure to wildlife art. The quality of these paintings seemed so impossibly real, and I wanted to figure out how to do that…

“Most of my painting experience actually comes from techniques I’ve learned on the Internet. I never went to art school, but what I did do is spend years reading and studying art online. Many artists post works in progress or video demos, and this free information is invaluable to the learning artist.”

“I love watching people’s reactions when they realize my painting is not a photograph. I think what realistic painting does is it makes people stop and take a second look at the common things they are used to. When people realize the colors and variations in an object were all put in with paint, and that representation looks 3-dimensional, it causes them to take a look at how light falls on an object, or how reflected light interacts with the environment around it, or how fur or feathers ruffle in the wind. I think it brings back the wonder of seeing.”

Interlude, Egret, by Linda Merchant, is featured at High Hand Gallery through April 29.

Merchant only recently moved to the greater Sacramento area, and already she is making her mark. Her painting Pile o’ Ducklings took 2d Place in 2011 Lodi Sandhill Crane Festival. “I think we have a very vibrant arts community here, which I’m happy to be a part of. And, as a wildlife artist, it’s important to have access to the natural environment. If you haven’t experienced what you’re painting, you won’t be able to depict it accurately. The nice thing about Sacramento is that we’re within driving distance to so many great wilderness areas, and so it’s easier to get great references for wildlife paintings.”

Spring Forward runs through April 29. Join us for Artful Sunday on April 15, 2:00 to 4:00 pm.

Artful Bra Show is coming!

A quick reminder—Artful Bra IV is coming May 19.  We’re hoping you’ll make a bra to donate to this event, and that you’ll attend.

Kat Oliver's Artful Bra will be auctioned at the fourth anual Artful Bra Show on May 19, 2012

If you are making a bra—and we hope you are—they’re due at the gallery Thursday May 10 or Friday May 11 (10am–4pm). That’s in one month. (Yikes!)

More details and tickets are available on our Events page, or at the gallery.  We hope to see you there!

Meet Shermm

By Stephanie Benedict

 

Sculptor Sherman Moore or, as he prefers, Shermm, is the third of the featured artists in High Hand Gallery’s current show, Spring Forward.

 

Sherman Moore's sculpture is on display at High Hand Gallery. Photo by Maria Soto.

When you think of the term “artist,” what do you think of? Someone kind of Bohemian, right? In his or her own world, wearing brightly colored clothing, maybe not too organized. That’s the stereotype, anyway.

And what do you think of when you think of an accountant? Straight-laced, conservative, very organized. Numbers.

But could you image an accountant who is also an artist, who makes beautifully flowing statues, mostly of the human form, out of marble or alabaster or bronze?

Meet Shermm. Art is a second career for Shermm. Before he was a professional artist, he was an accountant. Though he says he was constantly drawing as a child, “the schools in the Midwest where I grew up had no art classes, so art fell to the back burner of my life. In the 1990s my career as an accountant was not fulfilling an inner need, so I started going to sculpture workshops to tap into my creative side. Sculpture was an art form I was drawn to and I have been pursuing ever since.”

“I really enjoy seeing my work rising from the stone,” he says. “I see art as a permanent part of mankind’s journey on this planet. And stone, while it’s here forever, is constantly changing, so making of art from it seems most appropriate. I like the three-dimensional aspect of sculpture, which allows one to walk around it and absorb it under different times of the day and times of our lives.”

Shermm’s sculptures derive from events in his life and the lives of others. “When I think of a feeling I want to capture, I run it through my mind repetitively, constantly refining. I move through the construction of the idea.” In this “dream-like process,” Shermm also balances practicality with vision: How big? What techniques? Which tools?

Sculptor Sherman Moore at work

Then comes the actual sculpting. “I start a piece with some rough pencil marks on a stone and then start to rough out how it will be. During this process, I will move to a new direction or come up with changes as the work develops. The end piece is driven by the interaction between the material, my mind, and my sculpting techniques.” And what Shermm ends up with, well, some might call magic.

Shermm’s sculptures are featured in Spring Forward, which continues through April. The gallery is now on summer hours, Tuesday–Saturday, 10–4:30, Sundays 10–4. And don’t forget to check out our Events and Classes!

The Art of The Art of Real Food

Cauliflower by Paula Amerine, one of the illustrations in The Art of Real Food

Did you happen to see the Sacramento Bee last Wednesday? The featured article on The Art of Real Food, by Placer County authors Joanne Neft and Laura Kinney?

Well, what the article didn’t tell you is that the illustrations in the book was created by—High Hand Gallery artist Paula Amerine! The lovely images of all those lovely fruits and vegetables were done by our very own Paula.  Congratulations.

Paula and author Joanne Neft will be at our neighbor Mandarin Valley Candles on April 21 from 2:00 to 4:00 to share the artwork and the book.  We hope you wil stop by.

High Hand Artists Featured in Sacramento Talent Magazine Online

Check out Sacramento Talent Magazine!  Several High Hand artists are featured artists in the March issue:  Terri Goodman, Debra Hosler, Sherm Moore, Kat Oliver, Maria Soto, and Unni Stevens. Thank you to Francesca Homan of the Steven Homan Jazz Band, who played at our February Artful Sunday. Francesca writes for the website on a regular basis.

“Also, Encaustics Smell Good”

By Stephanie Benedict

Elegy, an encaustic painting by Charlotte Cooper.

“I love things that melt and shift and refract color,” says artist and teacher Charlotte Cooper, whose work is currently featured at High Hand Gallery. It’s one of the reasons she paints in encaustic. Encaustics are gaining in popularity again as artists become more aware of the potential hazards some of the other painting media can pose.

What are encaustics? “It’s simply beeswax, tree resin and pure pigment, painted in a hot, melted state. Encaustic medium carries the color beautifully, with clarity and vibrancy,” Cooper explains. The techniques are ancient, and the tools and materials have been used for centuries. “I love that.”

Cooper teaches encaustic painting at the Learning Exchange in Sacramento. “I love that people start out holding their hands out in front of them and going ‘Uh, what do I do?’ and emerge three hours later, slightly wild-eyed, saying ‘I have to DO this!’ I love seeing what people do. In class, they often take off and do work that surpasses anything I’ve thought of or produced.”

Cooper has been working in encaustics for about 10 years. She loves its immediacy, the vibrancy of the color and the translucency. “Also,” she says, “it smells good.”

And though an encaustic painting is made of wax, it won’t melt, Cooper assures us, “unless your house burns down—or you leave it in the car on a Sacramento summer day.”

You can see Charlotte Cooper’s encaustic paintings, along with her metal wall art and sculpture, now through the end of April at High Hand Gallery in Loomis. Hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00–4:30 and Sunday 10:00–4:00.

Spring classes at High Hand are now in full swing. And we have two special events coming up, so save the dates:  Artful Bra is May 19, and Artfest 2012 is June 23 and 24.

Ancient Media for Modern Times

By Stephanie Benedict

Spring Forward features the work of Charlotte Cooper, Linda Merchant, Sherman Moore, and Cindy Rubado. Photo by Stephanie Benedict

It’s such a truism that we’re always looking for the newest thing nowadays—the newest iPad, those new coffeemakers that make a single cup in moments, the latest colors in house paint or shoes. But sometimes old-fashioned is what we really crave: the sound of a wooden bat smacking a baseball out of the part, or the taste of real pound cake.

The four artists featured in Spring Forward, the new show at High Hand Gallery, blend together not just old but ancient art media with modern techniques to make fresh new works to satisfy both desires.

Spring Forward features the work of artists Charlotte Cooper, Linda Merchant, Sherman Moore, and Cindy Rubado. Sculptor Sherman Moore works in stone and bronze, as in “Stone Age” and “Bronze Age.” Glass, Cindy Rubado’s medium, has also been around for millennia. Charlotte Cooper paints in encaustics (melted beeswax and resin). Encaustics are known to have been used since the third century CE. Even Linda Merchant’s oil paints, the youngest medium represented, have been used since sometime between the fifth and ninth centuries CE in southwest Asia.

Of course, our artists have things much easier than artists of 2,000 years ago! No need to collect sand to make their own glass. Modern artists can purchase oil paints in handy tubes (a 19th Century invention) and cakes of encaustic. Electric kilns can precisely control temperatures for fusing and shaping glass. And air tools allow sculptors to rough out marble sculptures much more quickly.

And the works that create are utterly fresh and new. Whether it’s Charlotte Cooper’s abstract encaustic paintings, Cindy Rubado’s kiln-fired fused glass, Linda Merchant’s realist animal paintings, or Sherman Moore’s sculptures of the human form, you’ll find the newest and the most ancient melded together.

Join us Sunday, March 18, from 2:00 to 4:00 for the opening reception of Spring Forward, where you can meet these artists, along with the other painters, sculptors, jewelers, potters, fibre artists, woodworkers of High Hand Gallery. Spring Forward runs through the end of April. The gallery is now open summer hours, Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00–4:30 and Sunday 10:00–4:00. We hope to see you there!

Works by Sherman Moore and Linda Merchant at High Hand Gallery. Photo by Stephanie Benedict

Don’t forget to check out our Classes and Events pages for upcoming, well, classes and special events.