SMAart Gallery & Studio was founded in September 2012 and opened its doors at 1045 Sutter Street in San Francisco.

SMAart offers gallery exhibits, studio rentals and ceramic classes.  While the center primarily caters to ceramic artists, artists of every media are welcome.  Founder Steven M Allen opened SMAart to fulfill a longtime dream of having a gallery, a place to teach art to the community, and a place to create art in a creative open environment surrounded by other inspiring artists.  

Conveniently located in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood with access to several major bus lines.  SMAart is also positioned in the heart of the Lower Polk Art Walk offering participating artists access to a burgeoning art scene.

Story of a Comeback: In 2006, I was in a car accident and experienced chronic migraines. These subsequently lead to a diagnosis of fibromyalgia in 2009. At this time, it was as if I was caught in a long, dark tunnel. The tunnel was the dealing with the debilitating pain. I almost thought I wouldn’t be able to do art again.

 To my surprise, there were steps at the end of the tunnel that led to a new place. The first steps started by my working with fused glass. This was something I could work with because of the small and more easily contained nature of the work. I was finding meaning and new strength through the journey as I slowly made my way through the darkness. I found renewal and new energy because of the art that was finding its way back into my life.

The Color of Healing: Turquoise has always been a favorite color of mine. It seemed to always find its way into my art; turquoise glass, and touches of it here and there. It’s a strong color that I’ve always been attracted to. The fusion of blue and green color has always had to be a part of my work. It’s a feeling of centrality and balance. This old favorite became a symbol of the healing light, the healing touch and a force that kept me going through adversity. It’s like my life becomes right somehow when turquoise is present. It continues to find its way into my art, whether in a subtle hint of the color or as a strong and obvious presence.

The New: Paintings and Drawing: I began to work with my old figurative drawings as a way to get back into painting because with fibromyalgia, it was too painful to hold gourds. I realized I could paint easier and play with color. It was more pleasurable for me. One of the few things, I could still do was keep experimenting with acrylic inks, Luna-papers, ice [glitter], colored inks, color-changing nail enamel, acrylic paints, gloss gel medium, gel pens, and different sizes of glitter. In working with paintings and drawings, I start with color and move to the design. The patterns and textures come as I carefully follow wherever the color wants to take me. The colors of the paints and drawings reminded me that one can’t have light, happiness, and growth without pain and darkness. As I embraced and accepted the pain, I found a new light that brings joy as it dances before my eyes, upon the frames, on the walls in front of you. My vision is that these paintings and drawings may provide similar inspiration and lightness for other women who have worked with their own versions of healing and courage.

Bay Area–based artist Woody Miller colors outside of the lines, having worked on everything from murals and corporate logos to travel paintings and t-shirt screen printing. He is inspired by the paradigm of a city and illustrates San Francisco street scenes. Since receiving his B.A. in Illustration from the Academy of Art in 2001, Woody has been selected in shows up and down the coast of California, including the city's STUDIO Gallery, Gallery Saratoga, and San Jose's Kaleid Gallery.

The wonder and mystery witnessed in the smashing together of humanity is what often draws one to the 'city'.  Each city, each village, every town, has it's own thumbprint created by the people who travel through and those who call it home.

Through painting, Woody's aim is to reflect the paradigm that is a city - the mingling and weaving together of various cultures, different bodies, all manner of food, beauty, style, and religions, to form a new identity. It is this coming together that creates a new city, with new character.

People often ask me if I like to do puzzles, or tell me I’d make a great dentist (based on the intricate poking, prodding, scraping and filling that I do in my work).  I used to feel that working on mosaics was a way to bring order to chaos, by rearranging a multitude of tiny pieces together to form cohesion.  Realistically, for me, it’s none of these things.  Rather, it’s the possibilities that can come from a variety of pieces and materials.  It both astonishes and entices my mind.  Something about discovering an unknown combination or design that doesn’t exist in the world, is intoxicating.  This is how I feel when I am creating mosaic art.

Mosaics are not a fluid art form; they don’t blend into one another like oil paints, or mold into figures with soft lines that gently curve.  They are rigid and abrupt and can be unforgiving.  However, it’s the adventure to create these illusions, with proper coaxing of the medium, which I find intriguing.  I work with ceramics, glass & stone, like a linguist when they are interpreting.  I feel like I’m giving a voice to materials in a new and expressive way so people can visually understand what the gathering of pieces have to say.

ABOUT ME     

My background is fairly diverse. I grew up with a WWII veteran father who was a radio operator during the war. With the classic DIY mentality of that age, my father built everything he thought up and as soon as I could hold a soldering iron, I was right there with him, grinning, watching the sparks fly and smoke come out.

Growing up I would spend hours every day making stuff up to build. Hacking and circuit-bending old surplus gear to the threshold of destruction, building something that held no “valuable” purpose other to satisfy my curiosity. Sometimes just to make smoke come out.

While I never completed any formal engineering training (electrical or otherwise) I taught myself what I needed to know to become a sound engineer, build and repair musical instruments, amplifiers and musician’s egos. This led me from Oregon to California in the mid seventies where many musicians roamed in need of such services. Not long after moving to San Francisco I joined forces with a partner, built a rehearsal/recording studio and shortly after was back on the road mixing live sound and rebuilding what was broken the night before.

Late in the eighties to gain some “consistency” and to “be home more often”, I took a swing at a “real” job which became another real job and so on and so forth until 2009 when a corporate stooge finally rubbed my last nerve. I pulled the plug and went back to making stuff up. I went back to school to learn welding, sculpture, metal arts, AutoCAD, Solid Works and I’m still going whenever I can.

MY WORK

Life seems overly complicated to me. It can conjure up vague, formless images as placeholders for ideas I don’t fully understand or care about. The work I create can go in any direction fleshing out these placeholders using any medium that suits my needs or is within arm’s reach. I often make jewelry, or giant fire breathing sculptures, or sound emitting objects, or things which either wave at or whistle with the wind. Occasionally I will explore an idea in different forms from small sculptures to painting to jewelry. Other times I will make a piece one way, one time only because it has satisfied my curiosity.

I create pop art inspired by the street art, signage, and graffiti in urban neighborhoods. Like a visual DJ, I sample and remix found images to create new ones. Drawing inspiration from my background as an illustrator, graphic designer, and textile artist, I use vibrant silk and black cotton to create a stream-of-consciousness vision of an urban place that is both real and imagined.

My process involves exploring city neighborhoods and photographing street art, signs, and architectural details. I assemble a collage via computer, make patterns, and design the pieces, which are then made of silk and cotton and stretched on a frame. My art reflects the experience of city life and serves as an historical record of a neighborhood, in that the places I capture are constantly in a state of flux.

My work repurposes magazine pages in order to isolate symbolic meaning and strengthen aesthetic elements.  Images originally born from our hyper-commercialized society are reclaimed, interwoven, recontextualized and secured with archival quality acrylic gel medium - creating a meticulous new meaning.  Drawing from the traditions of narrative and allegory in classical painting, political propaganda and religious iconography, it attempts to provide an account of the present tense through a retooled assessment of our supersaturated visual vocabulary.  By utilizing design elements to assess both instant and long term psychological effects of exposure to media sign inundation, the work is an examination of subconscious image recognition, as well as an identification of the benefactors of such a system.  Playful at times, this anthropological quality cooks up its own theories on literal associative understanding. These completely reborn images explore how memories and specifically visual associations sway the emphasis of meaning in storytelling. 

Do you like the work of Monet, Rauschenberg, Turner? They’re all fabulous artists of course but you only get to view one artist and one style at a time! But what if you could combine them all at one go? That’s what collage allows me to do. I can pull images from  a wide variety of resources and styles, add additional images or textures in acrylic, pencil or ink and create my own vision. A final coat of varnish protects the work and gives it maturity.

I was born in Ireland and travel extensively.  This, combined with my background in architecture and graphics, is what influences my art the most.  I love ambiguity and the juxtapositioning of objects and images, many bearing little if any relationship to each other. I love seeing text on images – Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit – none of which I can read. With my own  personal twist I often include words or sayings in Irish in my work with the meaning reflected in the title of the piece in English. Working on small panels makes me focus my ideas and to ruthlessly eliminate material which does not work. My subject matter usually deals with the human emotions of love, fear, nostalgia, etc. – but also with the issues of the day – war, peace and justice.

I use wood panels as they are strong but light and can easily be sanded down to start from scratch when things go wrong – which happens rather a lot.

I am intrigued by the phenomenon of vanishing cultures, ancient architecture, marks of graffiti, light and space.  I create pattern, linear designs, shapes and forms into my own visual language, which is intuitively based.  I use what I refer to as “visual symbols”, sometimes literal, yet mystical.  I often write on the surfaces of my work and, by layering the paint, I can disguise any imagery altogether.  I make surfaces that resemble weathered walls, frescos, cracked plaster or cement, and the reaction of time on paint.  I view my work with a continual sense of discovery and enjoy the complexities of interpreting that sense.

Through photography, video, and installation I explore anxieties and psychological patterns that manifest in my physical environment and my personal history.  My work demonstrates how internalized memories and external social feedback loops influence my experience of the world.  I replicate and expand upon unproductive cognitive processes, and impose narratives onto everyday objects to transform them into something unexpected.