Bradley Platz’ intricate oil paintings deal with the alternating nature of worship in the modern age. Using classical symbolic imagery from old world traditions and transposing subtle hints of modernity, his work might best be described as tarnished elegance. Ever present also are certain whimsical and subtle symbols that carry the viewer through his body of work as a reader through a story, or a craft on the sea.

Bradley is a San Francisco based artist and Co-owner of Modern Eden Gallery in North Beach.

June Li was traditionally trained in art and design in Guangzhou, China. She moved to Sonoma County, California in 1999 and, in 2006, earned her BFA from Sonoma State University where she began to explore more energetic and abstract work. While June is an established graphic designer, her true love is painting and she explores life passionately along canvas roadways. Brilliant colors and organic shapes, expressing beauty and spirit, are frequently found dancing together poetically within her work. Elements that are at once elegant and erotic take on many forms, often in silhouette or more aggressively and abstractly, as June

Painter:  conceptual figurative...abstract humanist...humanesque...an inclusive and expansive psychological pictorialist.

 Tronies traveling the uncanny valley into istoria....

 To the Situations  comes the spectator.  The spectator, like the artist,

must make choices.  The painter’s challenges are now the spectator’s.

I grew up in rural southern England. My youth was spent exploring and observing nature and the changing scenery, seasons and weather patterns of my home county of Wiltshire. The landscapes and towns of the county are rich in history and have fed the artistic hearts and minds of artists and writers such as Sir John Constable, J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Hardy.

Since moving to California in 2001, I predominantly paint plein air, directly on location, working in oils. Through the use of distinctive brushwork that varies from thin passages of color to thick impasto, I aim to capture the essence of the subject and my emotional response to it.

The work of Canadian artist, Tom Thomson, the American Western landscape painters such as William Wendt and Edgar Payne, and that of Post-Impressionist, Vincent Van Gogh are strong influences for me.

Virginia Barrett is an artist drawn to capturing form and color in nature, landscapes, and sculptural work from diverse cultures. Her series of mixed media painted poems celebrate a unique, spiritual relationship between the word and image. In addition to her visual work, Barrett is a published poet, author, and editor; her most recent books are: I Just Wear My Wings—collected poems of an aspiring mystic; OCCUPY SF—poems from the movement (co-editor); Mbira Maker Blues—a healing journey to Zimbabwe (travel memoir); and Radiance—poems from Mendocino.  Barrett is the founder and director of Sweet Sanctum, a salon-style art, literary, and performance space in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

I believe one of the first places we learn to define our selves and our worlds is in stories, those from books and those we are told by our families and our society. In my paintings I create characters in symbolic environments to explore our relationship with those narrative worlds. In my print series, Primer, I deal with narrative more literally, layering text from nursery rhymes and contemporary news articles to reveal common themes and questions running through these two very disparate forms of storytelling. And in my conceptual and public art project, Fear Not, I explore the impact stories have on our perception of risk.

My work is inspired mainly by the use of color, which means to me light, happiness, and pleasure. I seek to turn everyday life into a more textured reality. Creation is for me a way to stir up my emotions and let my imagination run free.
Acrylic painting and collage are my favorite media. I mix them together so that one is always enhancing the other one. Acrylic painting is a very gratifying work as you can play easily with colors; have them blend to create something unique and new. I use knife as a tool. Collage is more into adding a little piece to another to build very slowly the result you are hoping for. I love the contrast of these two different works.
When people see my work I would like them to feel happy, just happy.