At the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, from which Nicolette Reinsmith recently graduated, her Bay Area peers were mostly urban and moneyed, unlike Reinsmith, who describes her family as “lower middle class.” When she told fellow students stories about Humboldt County, they were baffled. They barely knew where it was. “They thought […]
Painting
Posted inArts + Scene
Annette Makino’s Life in Collage
Annette Makino has been an artist all her life but it wasn’t until 2010 that she became interested in incorporating haiku into her artwork. For her birthday that year, her Arcata friend and fellow artist Amy Uyeki gave her a book of senryu, a poetic form structurally similar to haiku but with more humor and […]
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Ruth Arietta’s Illusory Interiors at Morris Graves Museum of Art
Ruth Arietta paints both outdoor and indoor scenes, but it’s the paintings of domestic interiors that showcase the particular strengths of her approach. In these works, densely patterned surfaces negotiate new relationships with the rectilinear volumes set up to contain them. Sometimes they abide within the constraints imposed by floor tiles, window casements, picture frames […]
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‘Given These Songs’
Brian Tripp, the storied Karuk poet, artist and ceremonial singer, is in hospice, receiving care provided for people who doctors think are in last months of life with an incurable disease. In many cases, hospice care is cause for abject sadness from the patient and their family. For Brian, it was reason to invite some […]
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Photos: Redwood Sky Walk Grand Opening
Beginning with a traditional Wiyot blessing by former Tribal Chair Cheryl Seidner and ending with the red ribbon cutting by Eureka Mayor Susan Seaman, the weekend-long grand opening of the Redwood Sky Walk began last Friday morning under the redwoods on the newly paved path at the Sequoia Park Zoo. Over a decade long in […]
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Last Look at Outer Space’s BIPOC Art Show
If you’re in Old Town today, swing by Studio 424 and peer through the windows for a last look at the Outer Space Arcata’ Phantom Gallery Exhibit “All Colors Are Beautiful,” an assemblage of work by 18 local BIPOC artists curated by Taylor Snowberger and Julio Cesar Torres. The window gallery space was donated for the […]
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He Shoots, He …
For serious sports fans and weekend warriors, what happens on the field has far-reaching significance. The games we play and watch can become an organizing force in our lives. Sports divides and unites. Love of a game can be passed through generations. Sports can even become the sole topic of discussion between people with no […]
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North Coast Night Lights: Art Utility Boxes of Eureka: Marine Life Triptych
Wintertime has dampened my nighttime roaming and kept my photography a little closer to home of late. But as a famous photographer once said, though I can’t recall who it was, and I’m afraid I must paraphrase, “You can find plenty of beauty to photograph right in your own backyard.” That idea has stuck with […]
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The Painting on the Wall
At the block party for the second annual Eureka Street Art Festival, more than a dozen artists hailing from points ranging from Bayside to Buenos Aires were steadily moving toward completion in front of ebullient crowds. Many had been working in public all week — spraying, brushing, gridding and stenciling, shimmying up and down ladders […]
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Trade Routes
Piante Gallery shows work by painter Harry Blumenthal, sculptor Marilyn Andrews and jewelry designer Scott Mitchell this month. Blumenthal’s expressionist paintings are up front as you enter the gallery. Painted improvisationally with loose gestural brushwork, they’re largely populated with animals and their creaturely subjects prance or slink through brightly colored, vaguely Fauvist landscapes that all […]
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Our Town
The plein-air paintings in the All Things Arcata exhibition hold up a mirror to the city of Arcata, and the city looks good in this light. There can’t have been many occasions on which the streetscapes of a town of 18,000 have been so lovingly, meticulously documented. In plein-air (“open-air”) painting, popularized by the Impressionists’ […]
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The Basket and the Blade
I have reiterated tendencies, certain go-to forms,” Robert Benson said. “It’s like with any artist: You get caught up in your own style. With me, it’s the tension between angles and curves.” The trope has been evident “forever” in art made by Indigenous people of far northwestern California, as Benson, a Tsnung’we elder, observed. In […]