On Thursday, October 3, 2019, artist Virginia Kamhi will perform a public art demonstration at the Santa Paula Art Museum starting at 2:00pm. The demonstration is open to the public and admission is free. As she paints a seascape, Kamhi will talk about pastels and her techniques and answer questions about the painting process. The finished painting will then be raffled off at the end of the demonstration to one lucky member of the audience, with each attendee receiving a free raffle ticket. The demo is being held in concert with the Santa Paula Art Museum’s current exhibition On Location in the Santa Monica Mountains and Seashore.

A fourth generation Californian, Virginia Kamhi was born into a family of many artists. Her grand uncle was Santa Paula artist Robert Percy Smith, and her roots take her back to Santa Paula, where her grandparents and great grandparents lived in “The Oaks” neighborhood. California’s landscapes and seascapes are embedded in her soul, and she seeks to capture the rhythms and poetry of the land and sea in her pastel paintings. Kamhi studied art at Cuesta College and Moorpark College and graduated from UCSB. She has studied pastels extensively with numerous master pastel artists, among them Richard McKinley, Albert Handell, Liz Haywood-Sullivan, Lorenzo Chavez, Desmond O’Hagan, Alain Picard (to name just a few), and Ojai artists Jannene Behl and Bert Collins. She has participated in numerous group and solo shows in Southern California and the Central Coast. A much awarded artist, Kamhi has been juried into many international pastel exhibitions. She loves to paint plein air and has been a demo artist at plein air paint-outs for the Allied Artists of the Santa Monica Mountains and Seashore.

IMAGE: Churning Sea (detail) by Virginia Kamhi, pastel.