Current Exhibitions
“A Brush with Nature: Three Artists’ Perspectives”
On view January 18, 2025, to May 4, 2025
Sandy Fisher, Mardilan Lee Georgio, and Charlotte Mullich highly recommend joining your local arts organization. The three friends met through the Santa Clarita Artists Association and later formed their own modest alliance to trade advice and support one another. All three women began their professional fine art careers later in life after raising children, though Charlotte has been teaching art for many years and all were encouraged towards the arts from a young age.
While the three artists dabble in a wide variety of media, each finds herself drawn to a particular medium distinct from one another. Sandy favors oils. Mardilan prefers pastels. Charlotte is partial to watercolors. All three are traditional representational artists inspired by the beauty of nature but with singular perspectives. Exhibited together, the trio offers viewers a colorful crash course in the visual characteristics that distinguish their chosen artistic mediums and the unique sensibilities each medium and each artist can lend to a work of art.
Watercolor painting is widely regarded as an unforgiving vehicle, but Mullich gravitates towards its translucent and luminous effects. As a longtime art teacher, she appreciates the discipline required to wield waterborne pigments, which complement her illustrative style of rendering small flora and fauna. Georgio is attracted to the tactile nature of working with pastels, which places her body in direct connection with her medium, echoing her early years as a dancer. Using soft pastels gives her landscapes and seascapes an impressionistic quality she adores. For Fisher, her preference toward oil painting largely stems from her love of plein air painting. Painting outdoors replaced her affinity for hiking after a second cancer diagnosis necessitated a change in how she engages with nature. The slow-drying, reworkable medium is especially conducive to working in the field.
With three different mediums in hand, the intent of this small artist collective is one and the same: to showcase the value of the natural world in our everyday lives and inspire others to recognize, preserve, and protect it.
Click on any image to enlarge.
"Joanne Julian: Nature's Spirits"
On view November 9, 2024, to March 9, 2025
Joanne Julian decided early on to be an artist. Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, Julian inherited a strong immigrant work ethic and sense of discipline from her first-generation Armenian American parents. From her father, Joanne also acquired a fondness for gardening; from her mother, a love of art, dancing, and music. Julian’s first art lessons at age 12 included formative exercises in line and inspired her love of drawing.
Julian paid her own way through college and earned B.A. degrees in printmaking and sculpture and an M.A. in printmaking from California State University, Northridge. She later completed her M.F.A. in painting and drawing from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles. To support herself as an artist and single mother, Julian built a career as a college art professor, including 34 years at College of the Canyons in Valencia where she served as Chair of the Fine Arts Department, Dean of Fine Arts and Humanities, and later Gallery Director.
It was a colleague who invited Joanne to a demonstration of Sumi-e ink brush painting led by Japanese Zen master Keidō Fukushima. Already an avid collector of Japanese woodblock prints, Julian was drawn to the movement and expressionistic quality of Japanese brush painting and its deference toward empty, ethereal space. Julian now begins every artwork in her Oxnard studio with a meditation and a spontaneous brushstroke in ink or acrylic, around or above which she draws realistic natural forms in graphite or Prismacolor.
The ensō, or Zen circle, appears often in Julian’s work. In Zen Buddhism, the ensō can symbolize wholeness, enlightenment, and the totality of the universe. But for Joanne, the dance of two distinct art styles, spontaneous gesture and meticulous drawing, are what make an image whole. They are yin and yang, learned skill and intuition, restraint and freedom.
The art of Joanne Julian is an invitation to meditate on nature’s miracles, from birds, insects, and botanicals found in the garden to clouds, stars, and nebulae witnessed in the night sky. We are all part of nature’s plan and part of the artistic experience.
