Sharon Strauss
Sharon Strauss has spent her whole life loving and studying nature. She took up metalsmithing a few years ago and started hanging out at the Craft Center, learning new skills like glass fusing, bronze casting and hand-building ceramics. She is grateful to the teachers at the craft center who have shared their wisdom in all of these endeavors. Nature has been the foundational inspiration for much of her work.
Jacob Brody
Longtime Craft Center instructor and photographic aficionado Jacob Brody is a special guest in this collaborative show. Jacob is displaying a farewell tour of sorts. He is off to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts and has been invited by Sharon and Ruth to display some of his photographs before he goes. Foggy, still morning captures of the everyday with a sensitivity to color. The photos are of a felted texture.
Ruth Santer
Fiber Art/Prints
All these pieces are inspired by the Valley landscape around us, both from the air and the ground, representational and abstracted, expressed in different media. When I look at art I always wish there was technical information about the work, so I am providing some here. Read on if you are interested.
Relief printmaking involves carving a block, either wood or linoleum, applying ink to the block, then transferring it to paper. I have studied and practiced many kinds of printmaking for years, but only started to experiment with relief printing recently.
Japanese Mokuhanga relief printing uses Shina wood blocks and very thin water-based colors that are applied to the blocks with brushes. The image is transferred to paper called washi made from mulberry and other plants by rubbing the back of the paper with a bamboo leaf covered tool called a baren. Western style relief printing uses wood or linoleum and the ink is thick and applied with special rollers called brayers. The image is sometimes transferred with a press to heavier paper, often made from textiles like cotton. I am using both techniques.
Images can be built by layering, printing multiple times on the same paper using different carved blocks, or the same block carved multiple times (reduction printing).
I have also sewn for many years, and created the large, pieced fabric image using silk and cotton. Some years back I was on a plane taking off from the Sacramento airport and I noticed an unusual design on the ground just north of the runway. It stood out sharply from the surrounding fields.
I decided that fabric was the right medium to realize the vision I had of making a large abstract piece inspired by that view from the sky. Two of the layered prints here are abstractions based on the same feature. Another print is a more representational image of farm fields and the coastal range, and one is a botanical illustration of a Paulownia tomentosa (empress tree) seed pod.
The hybrid pieces here are something I am playing with that also grew out of my fascination with the grid or quiltlike patterns of the agricultural fields, seen from above. Printmaking creates multiple similar images, and I have arranged and sewn some together, creating a reference to traditional American quilt patterns.
