Carolyn has been painting, drawing and sculpting since she was a child.
Graduating from University of California Irvine with a BFA Fine Art and Art History, Carolyn believes her nature themed pieces bring a healing quality, as well as a sense of well being, harmony, and tranquility through her subject matter and use of color. 

Having been commissioned to do an Asian themed art piece Carolyn fell in love
with Gold and Silver leaf as a medium. She now works almost exclusively with the medium.

The physical process begins with coating and sanding the canvas until it becomes a silky surface. Then she smooth’s on a traditional red paint, lays the gold or silver leaf, and coat it with layers of varnish.

Using the finest quality sable brushes, Carolyn paints layer upon layer of paint and varnish developing the image until it culminates in a moment of light!

Carolyn's biggest inspiration is her granddaughter who paints anything and everything she can imagine.

“ Inhaling the scent of a water lily at the age of eight in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens was, I believe, the first time I experienced intoxication. The combined beauty and overwhelming fragrance imprinted in my mind forever,” says LA based artist, Stephen Schubert.  Have you ever sat around a table of great, simple food and wine and felt transported? Or gotten lost in a soft focus dream? This is what Stephen likes to explore in his work; finding out where we find ourselves. His process is mostly unconscious.  

Captivated by themes of transitions and transformations, his abstracts are created on elevated birch panels with a technique that includes placing up to 15 layers of paint. His approach includes dragging a spackle knife, board or other found object over the wood surface, then applying a topcoat of resin. But it doesn’t end there; Stephen then begins the process all over again. The result of this labor intensive process? A phenomenal vibrancy, great depth of color and surprising imagery. 

Stephen has a love of foreign cinema. He’s been fortunate to attend film festivals around the world, which provide him with stimulation and inspiration from watching different perspectives on screen as well as from the cities and towns in which the festivals take place.  

No stranger to television and film sets, his work was prominently featured in the Steve Carrell film, “Dinner for Schmucks.” Prior to becoming an artist, Stephen began his career acting and was the spokesman for Lincoln Mercury, Macy’s and guest anchored on the E! Channel. He was also seen on a classic Seinfeld episode.  
Specializing in custom work, Stephen loves collaborating with designers and on projects for high-end residential, hospitality and health care design.  

Chris's work was chosen to be on the cover of Constructivist Foundations.
Constructivist Foundations (CF) is an international peer-reviewed e-journal focusing on the multidisciplinary study of the philosophical and scientific foundations and applications of constructivism and related disciplines. Congratulations Chris!

Pushing the boundaries of light, color and design, Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases, which, in recent years have garnered notable international recognition.  The artist’s recognition is as much identified with the process of controlled paint-pouring and canvas manipulation as with the gem-like veils of transparent and translucent color which have characterized her work since the early 1980s.
Art Tour International Magazine has awarded Ridgeway “Top 60 Contemporary Masters 2017” and in 2016 she received the prestigious Leonardo DaVinci prize in Rome, Italy. In addition she won the Oxford University Alumni Prize at the “Art of the Mind” exhibition at the Chianciano Art Museum in Tuscany in 2012. She participated in the inaugural London Art Biennale in January of 2013 and at the Gagliardi Gallery in London in April 2013.
Trained as a watercolorist, the artist’s love affair with water media began as a youngster growing up in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York (only a few miles from Canada) where she was surrounded by the beauty of nature.
Informed by this early experience, she has traveled the globe, studying, painting, teaching and exhibiting her work, while embracing the customs and colors of the diverse cultures of Africa, Australia, Europe, Asia, Mexico and South America. Ridgeway’s formal art studies at Russell Sage College, New York School of Interior Design and the Art Students League gave her the basic tools in the use of materials and technique. Her personal style, however, was a long time in development.

Born in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, Ridgeway’s education preceding her four-decade art career began with graphic design at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York. Professional designer with Reuben H. Donnelley Advertising Corporation was her first position. Next came the School of Interior Design Art and the Art Students League, both in New York City. Studies continued abroad: painting, exhibiting, teaching, immersed in the cultures of Madagascar, Australia and Chile.
Returning to the United States, her fine art and professional careers continued. Visual arts specialist for the Maryland National Capital Park & Planning Commission and Executive Director and CEO of Very Special Arts an educational affiliate of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, were amongst her positions.
1970s- Acclaimed Abstract Expressionist painter Paul Jenkins, saw a light in Ridgeway and closely mentored her over several decades. Forty years hence, her signature technique of “Layering Light” on large-scale, luminous poured canvases and metal sculptures has been perfected.
Mid-1990s-current Ridgeway has been creating and residing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Global exhibitions include 80+ museums, universities and galleries, including: Palais Royale, Paris, Embassy of Madagascar and London Art Biennale.
Mayo Clinic and Federal Reserve Bank are amongst Ridgeway’s many permanent public placements.
The artist’s paintings are featured in many books, among them: “International Contemporary Masters 2010” published by World Wide Art Books, “100 Artists of the Southwest,” published by Schiffer Books, “Masters of Today” and “100 Famous Contemporary Artists” both published by WOA Publishing, Stockholm Sweden.  Ridgeway has also penned several books about art and process.

Hanson Gallery Fine Art welcomes Jaline Pol to the Gallery for a Holiday Exhibition beginning December 9th  2:00 to 6:00

Jaline Pol works exclusively with a palette knife which renders a three dimensional relief, giving the illusion of sculpted paint. She masters thick layers of paint on the smallest to the largest of surfaces, from the leaf of a flower to the vast expanse of meadow. One is attracted to the tactile nature of her works and this often provokes a desire to 'pick the flowers'.

The event will be sponsored by Hanson Spirits. 

RSVP to 415 332-1815

Born and raised in South Beach, Florida, Randolph has lived and studied in Paris and New York, finding motivation for his work in his immediate surroundings. His paintings and murals have contributed to the collections of a global clientele and have been represented in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. 

Randolph paints landscapes, seascapes, portraits and still life works of art inspired by the beauty and diversity of Sonoma County, where he resides and maintains a studio on his family ranch.  The California Dreamin' series highlights the world class California Wine Country with it's exceptional vistas and the notion of a quieter lifestyle where time seems to slow down and the hustle of the big city is left behind. Johnson's work makes you stop and think about an existance where vineyards, ranches and farms meld together in a perfect setting creating a lifestyle envied by many.

On a spring day in Sausalito, CA, Gail Morris is hard at work in her studio overlooking the San Francisco Bay. A hazy blue sky peeks through windows that stretch along the north and west sides of the warehouse space. A stunning view of Mount Tamalpais greets visitors, and in the middle of the 800-square-foot studio sit two easels. On one rests a landscape inspired by rural Sonoma County, featuring a stream slicing through lush grassy fields. A thin strip of low-hanging fog hovers close to the ground. The second easel showcases a large-scale, more abstract scene that evokes a strong, harsh southwestern light on walls and buildings. She refers to the painting as one of her “deconstructed works with man-made underpinnings.” 
The paintings represent the two differing styles in Morris’ current body of work, which has evolved organically over the years. When Morris first started painting seriously in 1996, her inspiration sprung mainly from the early California Impressionists and their portrayals of atmosphere and light. Back then, Morris’ paintings tended to be tighter and more realistic in the vein of William Wendt and his contemporaries.
But gradually, using bigger brushes and creating countless quick plein-air sketches, Morris says her style shifted into something looser and more contemporary. Today her works straddle the line between realism and abstraction. A quintessential Morris painting evokes the mountains, fog, fields, skies, and seas of Northern California in a spare minimalism often punctuated with layers of vibrant color. Christi Bonner Manuelito, a partner at Bonner David Galleries, which has represented Morris since 2004, says, “Gail has a unique linear view of nature and combines it with an emotional expression of color. She captures the essence of the land, removing details that are not important to her eye.”

The painting QUIET AFTERNOON represents what Morris terms her more traditional work these days. A stream meanders through a field toward a vanishing point in the distance, complemented by layers of a pale-to-navy-blue sky. AROUND AND DOWN as well as ST. LUCIA WATERLINE [see page 84] are what Morris calls prime examples of her “deconstructed” landscapes—each featuring many shades of the same color and a great deal of distressing to create the final image. Morris distresses canvases with sandpaper, steel wool, X-Acto knives, and rags, leaving faint impressions or “underpinnings” behind. Describing both her more traditional as well as her deconstructed works, Morris says, “I see the sky as an element that pushes down on the earth. So rather than going back to a vanishing point, I see the landscape as elements stacked one on top of the other.”
Indeed, Morris’ early interest in California Impressionism has been replaced by styles more reminiscent of the color-field painters and abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko. The flat-planed perspective of artists like Rothko and, closer to home, Californian Richard Diebenkorn, are among her important influences today. Morris says half-jokingly that her attraction to flattened perspective may stem from being farsighted in one eye and nearsighted in the other. “The flat perspective has always interested me because of my vision; it’s the way I see things,” she says.
When creating new works, Morris is fond of alternating between the traditional and the more abstract. Hence the two easels. For example, if she has been painting larger abstract pieces, she “reels” herself back in and journeys to nearby locales to do pastel sketches. “Wolf Kahn referred to it as keeping yourself from going into never-never land,” Morris says. “You always need to go back outside to the source of your inspiration if you are a landscape painter.”
While Morris is often inspired by the California terrain, as well as scenes from northern New Mexico and Hawaii, she has traveled widely to far-flung destinations around the world. She brings a treasure trove of memories and photo references of global landscapes to her artistic table. She grew up in a string of cities across the Midwest, including Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, attending six schools by the time she was in seventh grade. When it came time for college she studied painting at first, but a professor told her she wasn’t going to make it as an artist. Become a teacher, he advised. So Morris shifted to art history as a major while at Webster University in Missouri, and to satisfy her creative nature, she took up photography. Through a boyfriend who was a tour manager, she was eventually hired as the official photographer for the Joe Cocker Band. Soon she was leading the vagabond life, traveling abroad to cities such as London and Amsterdam.
The photography gig lasted three years, but finally, growing weary of life on the road, she settled down in Amsterdam. While there, Morris managed an ethnographic art gallery and continued to sell her photographs to magazines and newspapers. In the late 1970s, she returned to the United States with thousands of slides and negatives in tow. One day soon after her return, she deposited a 35-pound suitcase full of slides on the desk of an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Impressed by her work, which included 3,000 images of the Dogon people of Mali in West Africa, the editor took Morris under his wing and began publishing her human-interest stories in the paper.
A move to San Francisco in 1980 marked a period of major transitions and milestones in both her personal and professional life. Once ensconced in the City by the Bay, Morris began working in the film industry as an executive producer and met her future husband on a film shoot. After the birth of her two daughters, she decided to work part-time as a location scout for movies and television commercials. The work catapulted her across the country to scenic back roads in search of the best places to shoot car and truck commercials. “I took hundreds of photos of these locations and also stockpiled them in my brain,” Morris says. “This is when I developed a real appreciation for the western landscape.”
In 1995 and 1996, she lost her best friend and her father, both of whom were artists, signaling yet another artistic turning point. Morris had not painted since her college days, but she suddenly felt the need to as part of her healing journey. For the next several years she took workshops with both Michael Workman and Wolf Kahn. There was never any doubt that her subject matter would be the landscape. “I like nature untouched by man,” Morris says. “I rarely put anything man-made into my landscapes—the exception being a little wooden fence or perhaps a dirt road on occasion. I do, however, have a fondness for barns.”
She sold her first painting in 1997 and 10 more to a San Francisco law firm that same year. Two years later she was garnering attention and acceptance into a number of regional and national shows and winning top prizes.
In the opening lines of the 2003 book Horizon Lines: The Paintings of Gail Morris, her former teacher Wolf Kahn wrote, “The landscape paintings of Gail Morris are spare and elegant. Economical divisions set off the near from the far spaces. Color relations are abstract and resonant. These pictures are evidence of a sensuous and celebratory response to nature and to life in general.”

Although her style has changed somewhat since the publication of the book, the quote could easily apply to her work today. Her canvases are color-saturated, featuring multiple layers of thin, diluted oil paint, and she is dedicated to subtracting any element that is “fussy,” all in pursuit of keeping a work “spare and elegant.” Throughout her painting career she has celebrated nature and elements such as water. Wherever she goes she seeks out vistas with streams, creeks, wetlands, rivers, and oceans to sketch or photograph as reference material. These days Morris, an avid swimmer and scuba diver, is intrigued with capturing the many stunning shades of water, such as the aqua in the shallow waters of Hawaii’s Big Island and the pinks, purples, and grays at sunrise and sunset.
No matter what style describes her work, it suggests a sense of place while evoking an emotional response. Interestingly enough, although Morris’ canvases are vibrant, viewers also find them “calming,” says Manuelito. They seem to get lost in time and submerged in the color harmonies and compositions. That suits Morris just fine—as long as calming doesn’t mean boring, that is. “I love landscape and what I paint, so if someone stands and stares at a painting, or if someone wants to buy a painting because they are able to look at it over and over again and see something a bit different each time, then I feel like I have communicated what I feel and love, through my art,” she says

In the eyes of Giuseppe Palumbo
 “Giving breath to a fistful of clay or pulse to a crucible of molten metal defines art for me. I strive to add the intangible that words inadequately describe soul."


Sculpting is the natural progression of decades of designing and building architectural projects. The components that make each successful remain constant: concept, proportion, aesthetic, execution. 
To arrive at these, the natural world is a source of inspiration and knowledge of proportion.
With a foundation in classical objective training my interest is not to replicate an object or being but to create a spirit or archetype felt as well as seen. I am curious by the unheard voice beyond the academic, believing that true knowledge is a subjective process from within.

"My paintings reflect the poetry that I see in the moment when light falls on a subject and creates a profound depth of color and mood." Born and raised in South Beach, Florida, Randolph has lived and studied in Paris and New York, finding motivation for his work in his immediate surroundings. His paintings and murals have contributed to the collections of a global clientele and have been represented in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Randolph paints landscapes, seascapes, portraits and still life works of art inspired by the beauty and diversity of Sonoma County, where he resides and maintains a studio on his family ranch.

"Color and light form the very core of the art of painting. Gail Morris takes these principles to unexpected places. Her paintings can be both precise and expressive and her control of the medium is astonishing. Snapshots of dawn, dusk or radiant sunlight etch themselves into our souls. They nest there and become memories-unlived but permanent and personal."
—GUILLERMO DEL TORO, WRITER/DIRECTOR OF THE OSCAR-WINNING FILM, "PAN’S LABYRINTH"

Internationally recognized Bay Area artist Archie Held is now showing his work at Hanson Gallery.
Archie's work is included in many public and private art collections. He works primarily in bronze
and stainless steel, and water is often used as a central element to further compliment his designs.

Untangled                                                                                                                                                                                             
 
Unlike most abstract work, there is a rare uniformity and subtle depth in the series titled: Untangled  

This series represents the natural uniformity that can occur by chance, if only for a moment. This new series serves as a counterbalance to the chaotic and active String Theory Paintings.

Untangled uncovers the moment of uniformity that naturally occurs in a time and place. It’s hard to imagine such a thing in an environment of random chance and movement. Given time and perspective, it’s inevitable. Uniformity provides a sense of comfort. The feeling that things are in order as they should be.
 
A departure from the irregular tangle we push through in our daily lives.
That is the intention with these abstractions.
From a distance, these paintings appear simple and uniform.
With a closer look, the energetic colors seem to push and pull as they
vibrate above and beneath the surface. Explosive moments jump alongside cascading opaque and translucent tones. 

The developing colors along the lines in the foreground and background begin to bleed...
Eventually these colors will again inevitably become tangled by chance.
 
Chris Hanson