I have mostly been working with digital photography and image manipulation, but have recently started branching out into drawing and painting. My graphic design background (it's how I pay the bills!) is also bleeding through into my work. I'm concentrating on a series called "Lottery" which will include digital media and mixed media (and a little painting if I can get my act together). Another artist who has signed up for Open Studios, Takashi Fukuda, will also be sharing my space to show his pieces.

Jonathan Fischer is screen print based artist living and working in San Francisco. He received degrees in engineering and philosophy of science before learning to screen print with a garden hose and a 60 Watt light bulb at a Mission District arts collective.  Gradually developing a process that crosses boundaries in materials and media, Jon Fischer implements freeform screen printing techniques inspired by his experience painting and drawing. Typical pieces are made on large pieces of wood, paper, and raw textiles, with  attention devoted to building up surfaces with washes, textures, and coatings before an image forms.  Consequently these works end up being as much about surfaces and materials as they are about images.  

Typical pieces are produced in small editions of unique variations that may be displayed together.  This mode of repetition draws attention to the consequences of variation, mistakes, and random chance acting to create wildly different results from the same stencils. This speaks to a question that underlays modern printmaking: what is the meaning of reappropriating mechanical reproduction in an era when mechanical reproduction already makes almost everybody’s belongings, food, and entertainment? Can something beautiful and interesting emerge from the disruption of technological precision?  These works aim to resolve into an image from afar but  offer something very different as one approaches. Up close, the illusion breaks down & the image is exposed for what it is: goopy materials vigorously applied in regular patterns.  

Recent projects have included a series of screen printed motion pictures and “Character Profile,” a group show Fischer curated at Root Division in San Francisco. In April, he will be exhibiting new work at Sanchez Art Center's Left Coast Annual in Pacifica CA, juried by Jenny Gheith (SFMOMA).  In addition to his regular studio work, Fischer regularly pursues partnerships with community-minded organizations on public screenprint projects including signs, parklets, and murals. Fischer currently holds an appointment as Associate Professor of Engineering Technology at the California State University Maritime Academy, where he was awarded the 2014 Outstanding Teaching Award.

Linda Fries has composed her new series "Local Color/Local Earth" entirely of earth pigments found in the San Francisco Bay Area. She collects soils during the rainy season, which she then dries, grinds by hand with a mortar and pestle, and finally mixes with the sap of a tree to make the paint. The earth pigments are never combined to create new colors. In fact the variety of colors you see all occur naturally. The beauty of these colors combine with subtle images from nature to create a vibrant, organic art form.

My Studio in San Francisco is based in an area of postindustrial decline, populated by architecture that is on the periphery of people’s vision, hidden either by design or by obsolescence, abandoned and forgotten.

My work has always been informed by my immediate environment, where I live, work and go has a direct impact on the subject matter I am drawn to. After moving from London to San Francisco in 2001, I became fascinated by structures displaying a sense of strength and energy, but ignored, threatened by the passage of time to ultimate defeat by corrosion and decay. My work is concerned with depicting how these giant structures appear, not through a sense of romantic yearning for the past, but by responding to location and documenting how they appear to me, now, in the moment.

As an artist who works primarily on paper, Printmaking is the perfect vehicle for me to explore these themes of atmosphere and corrosion. The Monoprint process enables me to create images that are clotted and heavy with dark ink. I use deeply saturated colors and textures not only to reveal the surfaces of the structures but also to permeate the emptiness around them. The physical nature of, and energy involved in making large format Monoprints imbues the work with the frank monumentality of its subject matter. Each step of the process, from drawing the image onto the plate, scouring and gouging, inking, and finally, wiping the surface for printing, suffuses the final print with a textural, tactile, physical quality difficult to achieve in other media, creating the perfect balance of color, texture and line.

Drawing is a crucial and integral part of my practice and I always carry a sketchbook, making quick pen and ink sketches or swift watercolor studies of my subject matter. This direct engagement enables me to emphasize the essence of the moment both physically and intellectually. Making use of the sketches when I make my prints allows me to stay true to that initial response, the gut feeling I experienced when I made my initial drawings. Only in that way can I hope to stay true to the emotional reaction of that specific time and place.

artifacts and extractions from the perceptual mind-stream

I am fascinated by structure and change as it manifests itself around me: in nature, caused by human intervention, and the seemingly random. Structure and change can be experienced through comparison, movement, and by paying attention to the passing of time. As such, my subjects range from large scale natural and everyday environments to studies of small scale details.

Photography focuses my attention, draws me into the present, and allows me to perceive more intensively than otherwise. The camera lets me capture and share this experience, by freezing or blurring movement, by stretching or compressing time, by pointing to obscure detail. To stop and connect with the present moment has become the rare occasion for many. This way of living diminishes the capacity to perceive the subtleties around us. My images are meant to both reflect this transitory quality, as well as offer counterpoints to it.

I work to sustain that first glimpse of an image through the process of producing a painting.  The many layers of paint are used to first break down an image, then to rebuild it.  The result is somewhere between representation and abstraction: when a painting expresses what I cannot with words.  I can communicate in a language of my own making.

I started painting as a way to record and study places.  This evolved naturally from my work as an architect.  I attended the University of Michigan where I received degrees in Architecture and first started painting.  I currently live and work in San Francisco.

TAMA GREENBERG's Artist Statement

“My artwork (paintings and monotypes) is composed of 3 elements with varying emphases: texture, color, and image. My basic medium is acrylic paint. Texture comes from the paint application and collage.  Imagery swings from cerebral landscapes to figurative to organic forms to abstraction. I combine predominantly bright colors with contrasting dark or muted tones to achieve a more complex effect, with transparent layers of unmixed paint used to create more intense colors. Color is very personal. I generally use colors that please me.

But I also approach art as a child, playing with color and shapes spontaneously, much like a large doodle, without a specific subject in mind.

Art to me is pure pleasure, the process being as important as the result.”