Art Beat

When you visit a studio or a shared exhibition space, you’re often able to interact directly with the artist. The resultant possibilities abound. You might meet an established artist you’ve admired or meet an emerging talent. You could get dibs on new pieces before they appear in local galleries or see the workspace where the […]

It’s May and the Blue Lake Museum just reopened for the season — two good reasons to head inland, toward the sun. A copywriter working for the now-defunct Hotel Korbel, close to downtown Blue Lake, puffed the excursion in the 1920s: “Ho! For Korbel in the land of sunshine, fruit and flowers. While in Humboldt, […]

Whether or not you’ve spent much time thinking about the wizardly effects that can be achieved with pen and ink, you should catch Kaye Buchman: Around the Whirled at the Morris Graves Museum of Art’s Anderson Gallery this Arts Alive before it closes on May 7. Buchman’s large-scale pen and ink works are something to […]

Not long ago, I found myself in the recently renamed California Redwood Coast Humboldt County Airport, looking at art. Perhaps you haven’t given much thought to the airport as arts venue — me neither, until my delayed luggage turned into an occasion to contemplate works of art on display as part of the Redwood Art […]

David Zdrazil’s gnarled, earth-toned vessels stay close to the ground, while Shannon Sullivan’s sleek ceramic discs cluster like tethered balloons on the gallery walls, pushing back against their own intrinsic weightiness. The Eureka-based ceramics artists, who show new work this month at Humboldt State University’s Third Street Gallery, exhibit, live and work together — they […]

Elizabeth Berrien makes sculpture from tensile wire, crimping, twisting and winding silvery filaments around a central void. Her gossamer sculptures take the forms of living things — mostly animals and birds but also, increasingly, abstract natural forces. Berrien’s wire constructions may repeat the shapes of waves or diatoms. Scale can shift: Whales and stags share […]

A visual journal and a scattering of open letters kick off the Sanctuary’s 2017 exhibition season. Concurrent exhibitions by Luke Forsyth and Molly Schaeffer provide a chance to contemplate the evolution of second-wave feminist catchphrase “the personal is political.” Both artists are prepared to blur the boundary between public and private in some arenas, while […]

Winter break in a college town is a good time to seek out exhibition spaces that may fly under the radar during busier times. This month, I revisit the art on display at the Humboldt State University Library. Not everyone realizes that paintings, drawings and sculptures mingle with the books that populate the library’s three […]

Paul Rickard’s early morning painting expeditions favor the intrepid. “I like to go out painting before dawn,” he told me. “I end up scrambling down past the No Trespassing signs. A lot of times I have to go over and under fences, across railroad trestles … through mudflats, river channels. I’ve encountered quicksand and other […]

If you missed the annual open studio event at Arcata’s StewART studio spaces last week featured new and in-progress paintings, prints and drawings by Carol Andersen, Joyce Jonté, Patricia Sennott, Laura Corsiglia and Peter Lisle, don’t worry. The artists’ work is available for viewing by appointment through next month. Sennott’s studies of flora and fauna […]