San Francisco: Two Artists to Watch
My recent trip to San Francisco to explore its vibrant art scene introduced me to the work of Vanessa Marsh and Philip Buller, two artists to watch, both represented by Dolby Chadwick Gallery.
Their styles and processes are completely different but each is producing compelling work guaranteed to attract interest.
VANESSA MARSH
Vanessa Marsh, a California bay-area mixed-media artist, creates highly reimagined portrayals of the landscape juxtaposed against magnificent night skies. Her process is grounded in both painting and photographic techniques, although she does not use a camera.
Each of her artworks in her series “Falling” captures the cosmological awesomeness of our universe as we might see it from earth. The night sky is our view of history, the starlight we see an intrepid time traveler. It has guided ancient pilgrims and mariners, led to speculation about God, and drawn scientists and adventurers to attempt to pierce its mysteries.
In the foreground of such works as Arches 2 and Horizon 6, Marsh has hand-drawn stark black silhouettes of imagined rural and urban landscapes, incorporating both natural and manmade elements. Their opacity serves to emphasize the immensity and matchless beauty of the night sky dominating both pieces. Her methodology includes drawing, painting, and darkroom techniques that result in remarkable photograms. Working intuitively and experimentally, her skies emerge filled with layers of bright stars, rainbow flights of Milky way contrails, and glimmers of celestial bodies. Vanessa Marsh brings us her inimitable view of infinity.
PHILIP BULLER
At first glance, as I attended a recent exhibition of Philip Buller’s work, my mind said, “abstract, bold, interesting.” As I looked closer, I realized that his paintings are actually expressively figurative. As you can see here in Human Patterns and in Ice, Buller takes human and architectural elements as a beginning point and then leaps boldly into beautifully crafted abstract design and pattern. Our eyes skitter across the canvas, fixing on a bicyclist or skater in motion here, a building there, all of which morph into waves of repetitive refractions or echoes of color that excite our brains.
Buller only recently began working from found photographs featuring crowds of human activity. His paintings evoke a sense of that energy and, like an innovative jazz riff, draw us into the rhythm and liveliness of each composition. In addition to introducing printmaking techniques into his paintings, the artist uses a fast-drying alkyd painting medium that requires long hours at the easel energetically wielding a brush and swiping sections with a squeegee while the paint is still wet. The results are often startling, interpretive, and suggest an unfolding story.
DOLBY CHADWICK GALLERY
Both of these artists who caught my eye have exhibited widely and have works in public and private collections. Both have had solo exhibitions at this airy, spacious gallery founded by Lisa Dolby Chadwick in 1997. The gallery represents an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists working in traditional and hybrid media, including oil painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Their mission is to exhibit articulate, visceral, and provocative new work and to support its artists in the development of their creative processes and visions.When next in San Francisco, stop by Dolby Chadwick to see the work of these two artists and many others and tell them “Rosemary sent me!”