art 32 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY february 9-15, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com The small but mighty galleries of the Carmel Art Association are always full of interesting art, with pieces coming from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of work by their current and past members. If you’ve always wanted to visit, but somehow haven’t, the time is now. Two multi-artist exhibits, one featuring 11 abstract artists and the other a Valentine’s-themed exhibit of Monterey County’s best youth art, are worth your attention. At the outset of For The Love of Art, a county-wide high school student exhibition, CAA provided each artist with a 14-by-14-inch panel as the surface for their art. That brings a certain rhythm to the physical collection which is also fully available online, along with statements from each high school artist. The exhibit is a wonderful world where mermaids, Egyptian hieroglyphs, cherry blossoms, puppies, faces and soap bubbles coexist with the effect of striking contrast. This year, students from 18 high schools are participating in For The Love of Art, among them Castroville resident Adilene Vasquez Alvarez from North Monterey County High School. Her submission, “Vencer El Sol” (Defeating the Sun), turns heads even in an art-filled room. That is due to the colors as much as the composition. In her piece, workers are picking strawberries at the foothills of the mountains, but then there is a door in the middle of the field, behind which a young girl with a backpack is walking into her bright future. Much closer, in the foreground, we can see hands offering strawberries in a celebratory gesture. “There is no correct way to do art,” says Vasquez Alvarez, whose parents moved to the U.S. from Mexico when they were teenagers. The landscape for “Vencer El Sol” was taken from her own summer experience of picking strawberries in Watsonville. It tells the story of “overcoming obstacles to follow my dream of battling a scorching sun that lies over my parents every day.” A high school senior, Vasquez Alvarez has been taking all available art classes since elementary school. She’s planning a career in education, but she’ll also continue with her art. Another piece that attracts a lot of attention this year is “Wrong Bus” by Milo Pennington from Pacific Grove, made with ink pens and colored pencils. It shows the inside of a moving bus. Two halfsea lions, half-humans are staring, in lazy poses, at a passenger sitting opposite them—a very worried, gigantic green dinosaur with a fish face. Sea lions seem shocked to see him there, and it’s clear the giant himself finds the situation uncomfortable. “I’ve been drawing my whole life, but seriously since I was a freshman,” Pennington, now a senior at Pacific Grove High School, says. He took part in the contest a year ago with “a giant frog in the swamp,” he says, but he feels he found his calling with colored pencils that he used to create “Wrong Bus.” His plan is to study animation and illustration in college. CAA is working to include schools from throughout Monterey County in the exhibit to showcase the diverse range of talent that exists. “This year we have more schools from South County,” says Grace Wodecki of CAA, herself a graduate of Monterey High who was featured in this very exhibit not so many years ago. “This year’s works are amazing. This exhibit really gives student artists their first gallery experience.” Meanwhile, in the opposite wing of the building, Big Sur abstract artist Heidi Hybl gathered 10 abstract colleagues from the CAA’s members with an ambition to show how vast the spectrum of abstract can be. From simplifying the form, as is the case with smooth, curvy sculptures by Chris Sawyer, where you can recognize what inspired the pieces (animals), to completely non-objective art by Robert McIntyre, who starts with paint, the color, and reacts to it. “Abstract painting is a roller coaster in paint,” McIntyre, also an architect, said in the artist statement for the exhibit, titled Clearly Abstract. Sawyer stated that his pieces—alabaster forms of snails and elephants—“attempt to capture the essence of the subject as opposed to the detail.” “There’s a certain freedom, when you are trying to make the thing look like a thing,” Hybl says in front of her three big pieces, oil on canvas, one of them titled “Energy Flux,” another called “Sound Shadow.” They burst with blue, reminiscent of a Big Sur view, with the Pacific as a constant horizon. For Hybl, light is a subject matter. “I get up in the morning and I feed chickens. And I see the light coming slowly over the hillside.” Another artist, Anne Downs, started her career with watercolors and moved from representational art to abstract. These days she gets up at dawn, drawing her inspiration from that time of the day. Her art is still about light shimmering on water, but looking at her pieces one couldn’t tell it’s the ocean. “Obviously, I’m not trying to represent a thing, more like feeling, or direction,” says Dennis Peak in front of his acrylic works, two of them titled “Stories We Tell.” They are symmetric labyrinths with sharp borders and a dominant color always playing against white. “I feel this is kind of how I am in the world, how I navigate, go a little one way and change directions,” he says. Peak moved from sculpture to abstract painting, but he was blown away by abstract art when he saw Picasso’s “Girl Before Mirror,” years ago. The other six artists who are part of Clearly Abstract are: Ann Artz, Kathryn Greenwald, Peggy Jelmini, Craig Lauterbach, Noro Partido and Robin Sawyer. Abstract art, Hybl wrote in her artist statement, “allows me the freedom to explore what I sense but do not see.” Clearly Abstract and For The Love of Art exhibits are viewable 10am-5pm Thursday-Monday. Opening receptions happen at 4pm and 6pm, respectively, on Saturday, Feb. 11. Free to attend. Carmel Art Association, Dolores Street, Carmel. 250-3347, carmelart.org. Art for All With two multi-artist exhibits opening, now is the best time to visit the Carmel Art Association. By Agata Pop˛eda “There is no correct way to do art.” Heidi Hybl (standing) and Ann Artz are two of 11 artists in the Clearly Abstract exhibit (visible behind them). Below: “Vencer El Sol” (Defeating the Sun) by Adilene Vasquez Alvarez from the For The Love of Art Monterey County high school students exhibit. Both exhibits are now on display in Carmel Art Association. Daniel Dreifuss courtesy CAA
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