This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, April 25 & 26, the artist colony at the former Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard is having their Spring 2015 Open Studios event. Over 140 artists will be showing their work at the shipyard this year, and an impressive number of those artists are your Bernal Heights neighbors.

With special thanks to the folks from the Shipyard Artists for pulling all this together for us, here’s the 411 on the badass Bernal Heights artists to look out for this weekend:

Kathleen Finney
Mixed Media

Kathleen Finney lives in Bernal Heights. She is a third generation San Franciscan, who lives and works in the City. She studied at California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute and UC Berkeley Extension. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally.

Her process is a building up and tearing down of form and line that is secured by deep muted blues, intense black & translucent white; punctuated with rich jewel tones. While her work conjures a type of mysterious landscape, they can also be considered aerial observations; incorporating geometric complexities with spontaneous mark-making.

With the use of diverse media, Kathleen Finney conveys a sense of complex history and illusive memory, without giving way to any specific narrative. This intuitive approach to the surface, while unsettled & mysterious, enables a continuation of an unending visual journey and intellectual examination.

 

Bob Armstrong
Acrylic painting, Carving, Mixed Media

Bob Armstrong lives in Bernal Heights. Bob paints the beauty in the textural richness which he sees: in beehives and honeycombs, in aged lacquer boxes, in the charred bark of tree trunks, and in aboriginal marks. The patterns and geometry of nature provide the structure for these paintings, and color is their lure.

He has fallen in love with wood, and the carving that it invites. It is the inspiration for his carved paintings that explore the textural variety of nature. Some of his works are influenced by Japanese art and by the California Arts and Crafts movement, with their shared insistence on grace and compositional beauty.

 

Linda Larson
Oil painting, murals

Linda Larson lives in Bernal Heights. She is a painter and muralist, working on the Clarendon Elementary School Mural Project. In recent work, Linda has been inspired by her surroundings, new and familiar. The desolation of the abandoned shipyard at Hunters Point, where she has her studio, marks a striking contrast with the spontaneous bursts of natural beauty. Wild flowers and vegetation battle through the concrete. Linda is inspired by the tenacity of nature itself. She paint with oil on panel, applying paint in thin transparent glazes using many traditional oil painting techniques. LInda use brushes but also cotton buds, tissue, sandpaper and fingers to remove as well as apply paint. Each painting emerges through many layers, every transition representing a new perspective. These detailed pieces speak of her unique impression of the world she sees around her.

 

Alan Mazzetti
Acrylic painting

Alan Mazzetti lives in Bernal Heights. He takes an iconic approach to his paintings – abstracted, minimal shapes evoke rather than describe the subject. Color and texture suggest narrative and emotion. Common to both the abstracts and the landscapes is a theme of Transition: He likes to imply a sense of journey – of movement through time and space that utimately arrives at an unexpected destination. This journey is implied in the selection and treatment of the subject as well as the process of creating the painting. Transitions occur between natural and constructed elements, between curved and linear shapes, between structured and intuitive mark-making. His personal experience of the subject becomes universal, culminating in a new way of seeing the subject for both himself and the viewer.

 

Carrie Ann Plank
Encaustic, Mixed Media, Printmaking

Carrie Ann Plank lives in Bernal Heights. Her work revolves around researching web based information systems and pulling from these sources to find images that can be divorce from the original context and reassemble based on her own criteria- based on shape, form, complexity or other determiners. The compositional elements are selected based not on the intended usage but purely on shape and design. The prints usually began with an organic shape derived from her own sketches from life or photography.

Plank is an artist working in the mediums of printmaking and painting. She exhibits nationally and internationally. Plank’s work is included in many private and public collections including the Fine Art Archives of the Library of Congress, the Guanlan Print Art Museum in China, and the Iraq National Library in Baghdad. Recent and upcoming noteworthy shows include American representation at the International Print Art Triennial in Sophia, Bulgaria, the Liu Haisu Museum of Fine Art in Shanghai, China, and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Guangzhou, China. Recent residencies include Druckwerk in Basel, Switzerland, Mullowney Printing in San Francisco, and the Venice Printmaking Studio in Venice, Italy. Additionally, Plank is the Director of the Printmaking MFA & BFA Programs at the Academy of Art University.

 

Jon Wessel
Collage, Mixed Media, Painting

Jon Wessel lives in Bernal Heights. Jon’s work is influenced and inspired by the contemporary urban landscape (street art, billboards, graffiti abatement) as well as more traditional painting styles rooted in Abstract Expressionism. His medium incorporates found flyers and posters with acrylics and graphite. Although nonrepresentational, his work addresses issues of notoriety, time and revisionism.

 

Jane Woolverton
Ceramics, Mixed Media, Painting, Sculpture

Jane Wolverton lives in Bernal Heights. Her fiber sculptures are made from recycled plastic six-pack holders. After finding a bag of them in her studio, she decided to either make something with them or get rid of them. She began experimenting and It was an exciting time. After painting each holder, Jane tied them together and hung them up on a rod. This piece was in black and white and the shadows created against the white wall were wonderful and fascinating. Next, Jane used colors, tying the holders together and making two or three different and separate panels. When hung on rods against a white wall this created a different feeling as the colors fused together.

In all her art pieces using recycled plastic holders, she has endeavored to create a transformation, allowing the material properties to evolve into a different understanding.