Art Center Ukiah: ARTISTS

We currently have openings in artist memberships. Contact us if you are interested.

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Ursula Partch Member
Textiles and weaving

Ursula is constantly moved and inspired by the patterns, textures, colors, and moods of the natural environment and how they transform themselves throughout the day and the year, as seen in water, fire, clouds, animals, plants, and rocks.

Her goal is to foster strong connections between humans and their environment and therefore, she chooses plant and animal fibers as her main artistic medium.

She uses mostly shibori dyeing, weaving, knitting, and sewing techniques to interpret the natural world and bring it closer to us. In addition to mountable art pieces, she creates one-of-a-kind garments, accessories, and items for use in the home. See Ursula's website here.

Elizabeth Raybee Member
Mosaic

Elizabeth is a mosaic artist and teacher. Schooled as a painter and printmaker, she has taught Painting, Drawing, Batik, Business for Visual Artists, and Mosaics. Mosaic has been her primary medium since 1988.

In 1995, Elizabeth moved to Mendocino County and began presenting summer Mosaic Workshops at her studio in Potter Valley. She has been a guest lecturer and visiting artist for such varied groups as the San Francisco Open Studios, Oregon College of Art and Craft, the Sanchez Art Center and the University of Sarawak, Malaysia.

Elizabeth’s work has been widely exhibited, including the San Francisco Crafts Museum, the National Jewish Museum, Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Grace Hudson Museum. Her commissions include the San Francisco Arts Commission, Willits Skate Park, the City of Ukiah, and dozens of private homes. Her work has appeared in Bay Area newspapers, on the cover of ARTWEEK, in a few TV spots and was published in four books of contemporary mosaics.

Alex Murray Member
Scratchboard, India ink on clayboard, acrylic painting

Alex's interest in wildlife stems from growing up in Alaska, Nevada, and Northern California. His main subject interests are wildlife and western art. The mediums he works with are scratchboard, india ink on clayboard, and acrylics. Scratchboard allows him to bring out the realistic detail in his subjects. Scratchboard is a form of direct etching where the artist starts with a masonite panel coated with white clay and then topped with a layer of black ink. A sharp tool is then used to scratch away the black ink to expose the white clay below, leaving a black and white image.The image can then be colored. He makes his art work from his ranch in Northern California.

Tim Hayes Guest
Sculpture, painting

Fun, whimsical and daunting images play with the imagination in Tim’s art. His artwork has bloomed into recognizable pieces with his uncanny talent for color combinations and sculpture of the past. Tim is a long time Ukiah resident — his parents owned the local well-known Hayes Music store on State Street across from the Corner Gallery.

Cynthia Myers Member
Art glass and architectural glass

Cynthia Myers creates exquisite sand-carved art glass in her studio on the beautiful Mendocino Coast of California. The designs feature floral and animal themes. Each image is etched accurately with meticulous attention to the intricate details of the design. With an eye for subtlety and detail, Cynthia employs a shadowing technique that gives her artistry depth and dimension. All pieces are hand blown, individually drawn and sandblasted, signed and dated.

Cynthia has developed an ever widening reputation for her sand carved glass vases with their decorative exteriors and their innovative cut-away rims. Her work is featured in collections and galleries in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Her designs are etched onto glass of a wide range of colors and shapes — bowl, vase, and compote. The designs feature a diverse range of plants and animals, such as blue heron, roses, dogwood, turtles, grapes, egrets, clematis, and fuchsias.

Ree Slocum Member
Photography

Ree grew up in Northern Wisconsin freely roaming the woods and creeks near her home. Following animal tracks, listening to birds, getting to know the plants and flowers, and discovering other secrets in the wilds were passions that continue today.

After pursuing photography as a photojournalist in the early ‘80s, Ree picked the camera up again in 2002 … the digital age had finally produced cameras capable of making the type of images she’s passionate about. Her studies of flowers invite us to visit the rich micro worlds around us…places we seldom experience in our busy lives.

Often Ree enlarges her fine art flower studies up to 20x30 inch sizes so we can experience the detail found in the heart of a bloom. She enjoys working with natural light and f-stops to create her images, sometimes touching on the ethereal.

Susan Spencer and Michael Wilson Member
Collective assemblage

Michael Wilson and Susan Spencer create collective assemblage works through their studio, Art Avenue. Michael studied art at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and was greatly influenced by the "cool school" artists of the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. He went on to open The Ground Floor Gallery in Pasadena in the early 90's and fondly recalls those days when, "There were 400 of us artists living in 6 square blocks of Old Town, Pasadena!"

Largely self-taught, Susan attributes her strong sense of design to the influence of her early instructor and mentor, Italian contemporary artist, Mario de Ferranti. Together Michael and Susan continue to surprise viewers with their ever-changing works mirroring the West Coast assemblage movement.

Adriana Dakin Founding Member
Pottery

Adriana’s Horsetail Studio creates handmade servingware with designs inspired by nature, aiming for “rustic pottery with elegant designs”. Horses are Adriana’s favorite animal friends, so they are a running theme on the pottery. She aspires to draw and sculpt designs with the bold confidence that her grandfather drew pencil animal caricatures resembling Asian characters. A coffee table book at the gallery show the inspiration behind the pots.

Adriana is a communications strategist, serves on the Advisory Board of Young Women Social Entrepreneurs in San Francisco, and the Sun House Guild Board at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah. She has a Masters degree in Public Policy from Harvard University, a Bachelors degree from Wesleyan University in History and Russian, and credits clay for closer friendships during international study trips.

Minnie McQueary Founding Member

Watercolor, oil, acrylic, and ink

Minnie has always found ways to give back to the local community of Mendocino County and to artists everywhere who cherish the positive effects of art. Through dedication and a true love for the arts, McQueary has been an inspiration in the artist community with masterful paintings along with private art instruction and techniques for over 40 years. Recent classes she has taught include a "Fun Art" series for young artists.

Minnie has performed numerous commissions for art enthusiasts throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. In 1997 she won Best of Show and Blue Ribbon for her "Hummingbirds at My Apple Tree" at the Redwood Empire Art Fair, Mendocino County Art Fair, and Cloverdale Art Fair. See more of her art here.

Laura Fogg Member
Art quilting

Laura has been a mural painter and seamstress for many years, and has recently begun to combine the two media and go in a whole new direction — art quilting. She uses a “painterly” collage style in her art, with landscapes as her primary focus. Much of her inspiration comes from the beauty she enjoys on a daily basis in Mendocino County.

Laura’s work has been shown both locally and nationally. Many pieces have been juried into major shows, and a number have been prizewinners. Her work has been published in calendars, magazines, and books. She lectures and teaches art quilting classes throughout northern California. For the last 30 years, Laura has been teaching blind people how to get around with a white cane. Maybe it is this all-day focus on lack of sight that makes the world such a visual treat for her. Everything in her landscapes is cut freehand and allowed to move around as she machine appliques pieces onto the layers below. She works fast as a means of achieving a more dynamic outcome.

An art history major at UC Berkeley, with a minor in art, Laura also has a Master’s degree from CA State University-San Francisco. She is mostly a self-taught quilter. More examples of her art can be seen on her website www.fogwomancreations.com.

Lory Lance Member
Jewelry

Lory began designing jewelry over thirty-five years ago when she traveled among the nomadic tribes of East Africa. The imaginative and ingenious ornamentation each tribe created with materials from the barren lands they inhabited profoundly affected her.

Lory creates wearable art that reflects that ethnic genius and is suitable for western tastes. Her pieces are one-of-a-kind with designs composed of precious and semi-precious stones, ethnic and antique beads, sterling silver, antique buttons, whimsical found objects, and much more. She seeks to impart the sources of the materials and their social, anthropological, and legendary history. She believes jewelry needs to be handled and examined for its texture, intricacies, and drape.

Robert Pappas Member
Glass

Robert, owner of Glass Mountain Designs, has been a fulltime art glass professional for 27 years. After receiving a bachelors degree in Fine Arts, he started teaching at the college level. His art glass windows and custom lighting can be found in hundreds of homes, several churches, and restaurants nationwide as well as some in Europe.

In 1997, he started producing many styles of glass for lighting which as sold wholesale to several lighting companies. As a result of this production, there are about 14,000 light fixtures out there with glass made by Robert. Some are very simple and some are very complex. He seeks to bring beauty into everyday lives of others. He has lived in Ukiah for 6 years.

John Richards Member
Woodwork

John was born in New Mexico in 1937, and was raised bi-lingually in a Latin neighborhood with a Spanish mother and English father. All his life, he has worked in woodworking (30 years) and as a machinist (19 years), making components and raising his family of four children. As a young man, he moved to California in 1960 looking for a job, ending up in southern California. During the Apollo moon-landing program, he worked as a machinist supplying airplane and missile parts to Navy carriers and corporations. He moved to the Ukiah area around 1972, working as a cabinetmaker, and started his own company in 1986.

John loves to experiment by combining his woodworking and machine shop skills in intricate ways. He especially loves making his beautiful abalone pens. He gets his exotic woods from around the world, and local wood primarily from burls – black walnut, oak, redwood, maple, and buckeye. He enjoys the beauty of the different kinds of wood he works with, such as rosewood, purple heart, paduak, ebony, and blood wood. He inlays abalone, mother of pearl shells, elk and deer antlers, and ebony and ivory from recycled piano keys for his pens.

John crafts his boxes made out of wood and epoxy. He creates a mold, assembles the wood burl parts, and very slowly fills the mold with epoxy. When dry, he slices the lid off, designs the inside pockets by hollowing the sections out by hand with routers — the deeper, the more difficult. He then re-polishes the box, designs the outside, and attaches hidden barrel hinges so that the design of the box is emphasized. He sometimes inserts abalone, pearls, and gemstones such as garnet, amethyst, malachite, lapis lazuli, and ice flake quartz for a sparkle on the inside.

Elliot Little Founding Member

Photography

We live in a beautiful place.

Elliot enjoys capturing the beauty of Northern California and producing images that celebrate it. The opportunity to explore the colors, shades, and textures on many different scales in the “digital darkroom” has greatly enriched this activity.

After an initial start in photography when he first came to California from the East Coast forty years ago, Elliot let it go in the whirlpool of the late 60’s.

During his time in Ukiah he has experimented with juggling, acting, and singing, but constantly had an eye on the natural beauty of our area and a desire to express his appreciation of it. Returning to photography about ten years ago, he soon started riding the increasingly exciting waves of digital photography in a celebration of the wonders surrounding us.

Susan Blackwelder Founding Member
Watercolor and oil painting, pastel, drawing, clay sculpture

Susan has always loved to draw. She particularly enjoys capturing the likeness of her subjects, which often include the faces and figures of both people and animals. She also enjoys a multiplicity of art materials — painting in oil, pastel, and watercolor, and sculpting in clay. Her work shows a sense of fun. Known for her expert ability to capture the likeness of her subject, she has numerous commissioned works to her credit.

Susan is continually expanding her techniques and has most notably studied with Nancy Teeling Baltins, Bob Comings, Paula Gray, Wayne Knight, Tony Couch, Judy Betts, Dale Laitinen, Jane Burnham, Erin Dertner, Barbara Nechis, Christopher Schink, and Mac Magruder. Susan has built a clientele for her art and her works are held in both public and private collections.

Cassie Gibson Founding Member

Textiles

Cassie has enjoyed the process of creation since childhood. As an adult, she has worked in several mediums: 3D soft sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, silk screening, and painting on fabric. In the last 20 years, she has concentrated on using silk dyes for painting on silk and velvet and devore (the burnout process). Recently, she took a quiltmaking class at Mendocino College and began to stitch on her paintings.

Her ideas come from nature, family and social issues. Once she has the idea, the work frequently seems to flow as do the dyes on silk. She is blessed to have the time and the opportunity to create.

Cassie has studied with a variety of well known artists over the years. At Mendocino College she studied with: M. Wayne Knight, Holly Brackmann, Lolli Jacobsen, and Elizabeth Ross. At the Surface Design Conventions, she studied with Peggy Juvee, Betsy Sterling Benjamin, and Wendy Huhn. At the Mendocino Art Center she studied with Susan Moyer, Kerr Grabowski, Jason Pollen, Lisa Gray, Suzanne Punch, Natasha Foucoult, and others.

Tom Johnsen Founding Member
Painting, photography

Tom was born in Alameda in 1941 and started painting in earnest when he took classes at Sonoma State while earning a studio degree. He is curator of the Ukiah Players Gallery since 1993 and an art teacher at Potter Valley High School. He has acted in plays since 1977 and creates sets for the Players Theater in Ukiah.

Katie Gibbs Founding Member

Steel sculpture

Katie, who hails from southern California, attended architecture school at Cal and Harvard. She then moved to France for a new life raising three boys, with Legos and crafts replacing drawing and sculpture. She studied urban design and worked with a community design team while in France.

Back in California, her new job led her to a new material — steel. She designed bridges, and began welding pieces from scrap metal, eventually investing in a plasma torch to cut shapes in steel plate. She designs elements of décor such as gates, sculptures, and wall ornaments in steel.

She is joined in her work by her son Marc Gengoux (see separate description about his work).

Kathie Godec Founding Member

Graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, ink, soft and oil pastels on paper

Kathie has been an artist all her life. After graduating from Ukiah High School, she earned her B.A. at San Francisco State College as a Diversified Art Major, graduating in 1969. Diversifying her major allowed her to work in all forms and media. After graduating, she worked in the art department at a San Francisco printing company and in the graphic arts field until the 1990's. In 1993, she enrolled in the Certificate Program in Landscape Architecture offered through UC Berkeley Extension and graduated in 2000. She moved back to my childhood home in Ukiah in 2003.

Kathie’s artwork is a product of location, vocation, and personal esthetic. Her artistic expression runs from rendered realism to abstract expression, in various media, on paper. In the end she always comes back to her love of the "line" in all its forms. The quality and beauty of line as a simple but controlled mark on paper allowed her endless forms of expression, both timeless and deep.

Jeanette Carson Founding Member
Stained glass and watercolor

Jeanette can’t remember a time in her life when she was not creating some type of artwork. After college she worked as a commercial artist in the Bay Area and then moved with her family to Ukiah, where she opened a graphic arts and leaded glass design business, in operation for 30 years. For the last six years, she has also been painting in watercolor.

Jeanette has chosen to work with stained glass and watercolor for personal reasons —it allows her to create art that enhances the experiences of people, and expresses her feelings of all that is beautiful and optimistic in the world. Because these mediums have similar transparent qualities, they can lead beyond the immediate and out of the normal.

In creating her art, she uses designs that include the mind but do not isolate it. In a society that values reality, she wants her work to show something positive, fresh, and open.

Susan O. Gordon Founding Member
Acrylic painting

Susan creates abstract, non-representational paintings using acrylic paints on large canvas surfaces with dramatic colors. She began painting in 2003 — “I arrived late to the art party,” she says — with the intention of painting small portraits. However, after a lifetime devoid of drawing, painting, and the formal arts, she took a brush to canvas and experienced freedom with big canvases, big strokes, and bold colors of oranges, reds, and blacks.

Then Susan wanted to really feel what she was painting — to connect directly from her heart, arms, and hands to the canvas. She put down her brush, dipped her hands in the paint, and touched the canvas — it was electrical. She found myself returning to the canvas more and more frequently. Susan is the founder of Art Center Ukiah.

Red Wolf Founding Member
Aluminum honeycomb mixed media

Red Wolf works on sandwiched honeycomb aluminum aerospace panels. He finds that scoring a highly reflective groove pattern into the aluminum substrate enables him to have a degree of control of the path of light rays entering and exiting the painting. He has been experimenting with materials for many years and utilizes several combinations of thin films, particles, and coatings to create and control structural colors at various wavelengths.

Structural color in nature is seen in numerous places. Good examples are found in many of the feathers of tropical birds, butterfly wings, and tropical fish. These colors are generated optically by the refraction of light rather than by the absorption of light, which is typical of pigmented paints. Red Wolf sees himself as a painter and the work that he creates as paintings. While he does paint with a large array of pigmented paints and dies in acrylic and oil emulsions, many of the paintings have an element of color that is generated structurally. To this end, his technique of painting takes on elements of the assemblage of a mixed media process. See more on Red Wolf's website.

Marc Gengoux Guest
Sculpture, painting

Born in the Alps in France and without formal art training, Marc feels free to experiment with many types of media. He creates from the soul and often works to music, expressing the sounds and texture of the music in his own art. He works in oil or acrylic on canvas, wood, or cardboard — whatever is at hand. He also sculpts in wood and steel and sometimes mixes media.

Marc has exhibited in numerous galleries in France, most recently at Galerie Cupillard in Grenoble. Marc lives in Le Sappey en Chartreuse in France, with his wife and two daughters, and is the head of the history department in Lycee de Graisivaudan in Meylan, France. He often spends the summer in Ukiah with his mother, Katie Gibbs, a founding member of the gallery.