The Water’s Edge: Paintings and Prints by Michael Guerriero, Jim McVicker, Kathy O’Leary and Walt Padgett, comprises works by three long-time Humboldt County landscape artists. Padgett is a long-time artist and teacher from Grant’s Pass, Oregon.
All four have exhibited extensively throughout the United States. The First Street show conveys a sense of place, where water meets land in Northern California’s and Southern Oregon’s watersheds, rivers, bays and coasts. The works demonstrate how the region’s landscape artists convey the complexity of important eco-systems when creating high-quality art.
The images are not those of a tourist or casual observer. They are elaborately colored and imbued with the humid light specific to Northern California and Southern Oregon, whether expansive or close up. The quartet focuses on the integrity of the region’s ecology, not as a political issue (although by implication they warn of its fragility and argue for its preservation), but as an experience—as the artists’ home.
The second exhibit is At Bay: Installation by Lori Goodman, who is a Humboldt State alumna (’90). Her art emerges from observations made during numerous hikes through the Eureka Wildlife Sanctuary, whose beauty and ecological complexity she believes are under-appreciated locally. With this exhibition, Goodman seeks to draw attention to the sanctuary while making a cohesive gallery installation.
Her approach is to extract and then amplify visual elements from the sanctuary, interpreting the habitat with a sculptural presentation that employs many sizes, shapes, and colors of handmade papers.
Creating sculptural elements of various sizes, from just a few inches to well over fourteen feet high, Goodman employs bamboo, sticks, reeds and other organic materials, but principally kozo, an extract from the bark of the Japanese mulberry tree. It has been harvested for thousands of years in Asia and can be made into extremely strong paper. A completely renewable fiber, kozo is usually grown on hills around rice fields. Goodman, who moved to Humboldt County in 1973 and earned her master’s in sculpture at HSU in 1990, employs the fibers at her studio to create handmade paper. Using large cauldrons, she cooks the fibers until they are soft, then mashes them into a pulp with a wooden beater, adding dye as desired.
After the material has absorbed the dye, it is rinsed well and combined with a formation aid that allows the fibers to float. They are poured into a wooden form to dry and coalesce into a single sheet of paper.
From amplified yellow-green grasses more than 14 feet high to large, squat paper blobs of marsh mud, Goodman’s simulated indoor marsh puts viewers in a diminished perspective, guiding them to reexamine how they see and think about the wildlife sanctuary. The naturally inspired forms and materials enhance the ecologically responsible motivations in her works, provoking viewers to change the way they perceive and affect the environment.
Supplementing the First Street exhibit, Goodman will display outdoor pieces along the waterfront path east of the Adorni Center. She has previously exhibited her art professionally in New York, Oregon, California, Switzerland, Belize and West Africa.
The Water’s Edge and At Bay are on exhibition April 5 through May 18. A gallery reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, April 5th during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.
First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5:00 p.m. at 422 First Street. Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead. For details, dial 707-826-3424 or visit the gallery’s Web site.