My painting ranges in sizes and subjects from still life and portraits, to landscapes, plein air and studio fine art. The collectors are domestic as well as international. My landscape paintings vary, capturing the beauty of Nims, Florence, Venice, San Francisco and Middle Eastern architecture. My work is a direct result of my constant change in being, it embodies an identity that can only be brought to life within the painting process.

The subjects I choose to paint have personal effects on me immediately within the first look. By studying them, I aim to compose them in a way that will make others see exactly what had attracted and moved me from the start.

I'm a Panamanian-American fine artist based in San Francisco, California. My work portrays the hidden worlds in the universe and in our minds.

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.

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.

My art is a poetic exploration of my ideas…an extension of my inner self, allowing me to express myself in ways I can’t easily articulate.  I went through a drastic change in what I thought was my path, before finding glass.  I seek to express that need to be true to self, through my work.

My signature is a technique I developed for weaving glass, which allows me to create large scale sculptures by melting glass in the flame at a table top torch.   I built upon this idea, and have personally developed many of the techniques used to create my intricate, lampworked glass sculptures. This process of weaving, and making components, can take up to 3-4 months, for a large scale piece.  I often combine flameworked glass with pate de verre, in a casting process I learned from the Higuchis.  By working with colored glass powders and frits, I use a painstaking process of layering color, to create a cast leaf or nest.   I have since pioneered an approach for casting and attaching pate de verre components to my lampworked glass sculpture.  I also create much of the subtle color in my work through a process of blending and mixing color, and pulling cane… much like a painter would on a palette. In fact, I view the flameworking and pate de verre process as being very similar to painting. My unique use of color and careful, yet gestural sculptures are a symphonic exploration that continues to lead me in new directions.  It is this exploration, and the freedom therein, that drives my desire to create. 

Technique merges with narratives in my work, to express metaphorical bridges between nature and human beings.  Through the delicate, glass nests, flowers, branches, and leaves in each piece, I seek to depict the cycle of life:  growth, discovery, change, and renewal.  Inspired by the storytelling tradition of woven tapestry and basketry, I see myself weaving with glass to connect the viewer to the story of the natural world.  I bring glass to life, using its fluidity and fragility to express the beauty, vulnerability, peacefulness and decay found in nature's story.  In pieces like "Choice", "Renewal", and "Becoming", I consider the tension between inner strength versus timing and circumstance, and their impact on choice and personal growth.  My eggs, buds, and flowers are key elements that evoke this notion of rebirth, becoming, and transformation of self. 

Exploring the evolution of family artifacts

Sara is mesmerized by visual delights; the color of light going through a prism or the way colors run together when one puts them on the paper; a beautiful brocade pattern; a marvelous dream. She paints in an attempt to take visual notes of what she finds intriguing.

Having worked as an artist for 3 decades, Melissa Shanley's history spans many mediums; however, recent years and recent works bring her to focus on various forms of fiber art sculpture.  Images have also been finding their way to her again through photography. 

Melissa was exposed to the shape, feel and grains of fine wood at a young age by her parents who were restorers of fine antique furniture and worked from their apartment.  This influenced Melissa’s need to create tactile, fiber art and sculptures: work which can be felt even when it is not being touched.  As a child before a Van Gogh painting in a museum in Paris, Melissa told her mother she wanted to make art which made others feel the way this painting made her feel.

Throughout her life, she experimented with various standard and unconventional materials.  At Scripps College, she was exposed to fiber art and the process of wet felting.  She was also immediately drawn to copper wire and has been working with both ever since.  

At the Claremont Colleges, Melissa was also greatly influenced by the artist and Pomona College figural art professor, Charles Daugherty.  He taught her to not merely see and draw the figure, but to explore the line which came off the figure and out of her charcoal-- to follow the line, not the image.  This sense dramatically altered her perception of what she was seeing and how it was translated to the medium in front of her. 

The concept of "nest" emerged for her in the 1990s.  It was at that point that she began to incorporate egg shells and other found objects into her fiber sculptures.  Again, natural texture-- which the viewer can feel without actually touching-- holds importance in her work.  

That texture, however, often has its own natural limitations of size.  Fiber and objects which can produce that exquisite texture and line are of limited (and often tiny) size.  To increase the size of her “canvas”, Melissa is currently exploring the use of 5' to 15' eucalyptus bark with its intense natural undulations and color variations in an effort to surpass the size limitations of most natural fibers and textures.

Until the natural problem of intense texture in small quantities can be solved, however, Melissa endeavors to find other ways to bring the viewer in closer and to spend time with that texture.  One of the ways she has found to do that is to photograph the fiber sculptures.  The images of the fiber sculptures-- capturing light not found in all settings-- magnify and highlight the sensual texture which Melissa strains to bring to the viewer.

It was in this process of photographing her own work that Melissa returned to the use of photography in its own right.  Over time, she began to use the camera in daily life as her "sketchbook".   Thousands of images later, the world of texture, fiber and structural sculpture, as well as the importance of the line, re-emerge for Melissa in two dimensional format in her photography.  She also found that her early exposure to wood, grains and structure came out in her photographic images.  The beauty of line and of texture are magnified and concentrated, again bringing the viewer closer to question what they are seeing.

A new style of image also became prominent in her work at this time of photographic exploration.  Because she often had her sketchbook/camera with her, Melissa found she was capturing colorful, unusual, sometimes fun and often odd anomalies of daily life.  The resulting images often stop the viewer, producing emotional responses-- which is ultimately the goal of all her work.  

Most impressions are captured in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Europe, where she spends most of her time.  She ultimately feels successful with her photography when she hears a viewer laugh or question what they are looking at.  Knowing they are trying to decipher a sensual, tactile state they are inspecting and, ultimately feeling, she feels she has succeeded in bringing the viewer in close enough to interact with the subject.

Although her photographic images will not be mounted for viewing at SF Open Studios 2013, the images will be available in digital format for review and can be ordered, purchased and scheduled for free delivery within the San Francisco Bay Area.