I pay close attention to the speed of change in my life. For me it happens at once too quickly and not fast enough. I learn about myself through what I make, photographing my experience of change. How it can be both universal and personal, or small and monumental.

So I photograph the things I want to hold onto and the reflected transitions of the people in my life every day. Mapping my experience through others. Photography gives me the language and the time to examine my ambivalence. Exploring these uncertainties gives importance to the transient as well as constant aspects of my life, and creates a constant dialogue, in my life and community, about the importance of the state of not knowing.

Drawing is the "Lucy" of art.  It is the source of all two dimensional expression.  Drawing is the precursor of all written language. If you want to see how an artist thinks look at her drawings.

I believe in the craft and trust the ingenious expression that only drawing can convey. Fascination with the human condition as shown in the everyday movement, weight, tension, ease and torque of the body is my constant and continuing inspiration. All the art I make, drawing, painting or collage, is an exploration of how the spirit inhabits the body.  What does it mean to be human? Can I portray it with a few strokes in only a few minutes? The exploration is lifelong, endlessly fascinating, always challenging.

Nature is my palette; a bird on the feeder, the profile of a mountain and the flowers, animals, lights and shadows that surround me -- all conspire to inspire.

With my new series of paintings of raining scenes in San Francisco, I have invented a way to amalgamate representational with abstract. Representatioal is figurative and abstract is arbiturary on the canvas. Representational is what I see as I look around me.  It is visual and is the combination of shapes and colors of things of my environment.  Abstract is what is in me as I feel, remember, imagine, think and foresee. It is so much more than the visual perception. I am stuck in the middle between representation (what is aound me) and abstract(what is in me).  My reality I create in my mind lays in the balance between representational and abstract as the idea that the phenomenological experience of self and world is one continuous whole.

The new series of paintings liberate me from both representational and abstract by letting me see them putting up with one another on my canvas from a distance while I am painting and also after completing the painting. As those are being painted and eventually have gotten stucked on the canvas I break free from them. I am not any more in the middle between those. Therefore the distance open up between the painting and me. The distance transcends me. It takes me to another level where to contemplate those.

With the newly found distance, I have understood what is elemental in my painting is the surface of the bubble in which I am. Now I see representational and abstract happen in the outside of the surface over there and are on the surface. Those are intensely pushed away with the surface metaphorically and are integrally adhered to on the canvas. Meanwhile the bubble paradoxically involves me with those, regardless of the distance between me and the surface of the bubble causes me to be with. It is certian that there is no way to get out of the bubble as you live but you stay in it. It is the conceptual liability of life. It is my abstract realism.

Born and raised in Portland Oregon. He graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from the University Of Oregon in 1980. In the summer of 1982 he became extremely stimulated from a visit to the New York Museum Of Modern Art and realized he was an artist. David moved to San Francisco and took various classes at the San Francisco Art institute over the next several years. McGraw is mainly known for large welded abstract figures. Lately, David has utilized mixed media including found objects to further his vision of Bauhaus inspired ‘” Total Art”.The artist lives and works in San Francisco and Sonoma County.

Mike Scagliotti is creator of Oddly Gone Comix, a philosophical comic strip about relationships and magical dimensions. He exhibits his original comic strip art along with a series of abstract paintings.

Many things in the world around me delight my visual sense. These entice me to create art as an expression of that appreciation. I try often to let the art take me where it wants to go. I often don't remember making the art when I see it again after a few months. Photographs integrate more fully with my direct life experience and document many of the things around me that capture my interest and hold some "beauty," in spite of, or in addition to, their generally perceived beauty or lack thereof.

I make art to bring the feeling that I get from being outside, in the natural world, inside.



The paintings and sculptures I create are inspired by organic forms, science, and rhythms and patterns found in nature. My process is intuitve, leaving me open to the exhilaration of discovery. A common theme that surfaces in my work is a feeling of lightness and balance; a place of contemplation. The paintings and sculptures are calm, slow, quiet. Objects float. Lines meander. Color is either soft or minimal.



I am a scavenger, a seeker, a collector. During my daily walks in the natural world, my eyes are constantly on the lookout for ideas and objects to use in my work. Morning dew drops on a leaf. Rocks split in half by nature’s forces. Driftwood and stones lying on the beach. These are some of the things I use as fodder to create. Being in nature fills the deepest part of me. I feel alive - my senses heightened - yet at the same time, completely peaceful.



The tactile quality in my paintings and sculptures is achieved through a combination of deliberate experimentation, fortuitous accidents, and an understanding of the inherent qualities of the materials with which I work. Gravity, the resist between wax and water, the introduction of organic materials, and my own hand drawing, erasing or scratching back into the surface are some of the techniques used to create the range of textures found in the work. The excitement that comes from experimentation, exploration and discovery is one of the most salient reasons I’m drawn to create.



Consistent with compositions in nature whose quiet rhythms give pause, my paintings and sculptures aspire to evoke a similar response.