JANET SELF Presents transformations: The Creativity of Change (April 2025)
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About the artist: Janet’s passion for fostering community arts and creativity began with her founding a nonprofit organization dedicated to these goals. She started the Art@OddFellows series in Mendocino, which she led for 12 years, organizing 135 exhibits that showcased thousands of local artists, including youth and children. The series attracted 14,000 visitors annually and became a central hub for community engagement. Janet also spearheaded the Children’s Banner Project, which took creativity into the streets and schools with murals, classroom projects, and special events.
Her project, The Ocean Upwelling, focused on highlighting the coastal ecosystem while engaging youth through art, science, and activism, in partnership with the Noyo Center for Marine Science. Beyond her leadership in these initiatives, Janet is also a mentor, advisor, and ally to other community artists, exhibit leaders, and youth interns. |
In addition to her work in community arts, Janet explores a wide range of artistic mediums, with a recent joy being ceramics. She loves to take old art pieces of hers and reinvent and transform them, bringing fresh perspectives and life to her past creations. It’s this constant drive to innovate and transform that continues to fuel her passion for both personal and community growth through the arts
Oma Art -sharing Joy! A Gift from me to you aimed to foster kindness, connection and joy!
ART OF CONNECTION April 2025 at Flockworks’ Cobalt Gallery, Fort Bragg.
Art is signed and numbered. This is an experiment about connectivity. Choose your Art, then email me with the number, where you’re from and did this make you smile? Your kind help is appreciated.
Janet Self, Artist
Robert Ross Presents KIMONO (May 2025)
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Artist Statement: I graduated from The Cooper Union in New York in 1965, intending to return to NYC, get a loft, and “be an artist.” I visited a friend at the Mendocino Art Center during that summer, changed my mind, and moved to the North Coast. Here it is six decades later, and I’m so grateful for my youthful spontaneous switch. I know for sure that relocating to this area gave me the opportunity to learn my work, learn what’s natural to me, without being subjected to the trends and competition of the Art World. It’s presented obstacles to a wider audience, but I’m lucky to have established my work as a personal practice of learning. And this move allowed me to raise my family in a beautiful environment among a complex, accomplished and supportive community. And to continue life with my wife in a setting that nourishes us. I think these are greatest gifts. I’ve painted in oils, watercolor, acrylics; printed editions from wood and linoleum blocks and etched metal plates; made collages and freehand papercuts; and continued to practice calligraphy. |
But there’s none of this work that’s been more influential in my development than drawing. At 85 I’ve filled scores of sketchbooks, made thousands of figure studies.
I draw in order to refine the organic flow between my eyeball observation, my intuition and my hand, and more basically to know what I’m looking at. My eyes are organs of pleasure. I find beauty everywhere -- the half-lit view of a dumpster up an alley; the shaft of light falling on unexpected portions of a houseplant; the endless variations of human anatomy; the ubiquitous letterforms in my environment.
I think it is these continuously available observations which feed my appetite for non-representational work. Really, the ‘abstract’ part of, say, a portrait is the person, the re-presentation of a person. Abstract because that’s the part that’s not really there. What’s actually there is the paint, the
composition, the color, the palpable brushstrokes; that’s the “realistic” part.
More at robertrossstudio.com
LEE ALTMAN PRESENTS ACROBAT THRESHOLDS (JUNE 2025)
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Artist Statement:
I studied poetry at the U of W in Seattle during the sixties with Elizabeth Bishop and later with Galway Kinnell in Portland, both Pulitzer Prize winners who influenced a descriptive narrative voice in my own writing. Recently, my wife and I published two books of my poetry with my visual illustrations, called Ruins of Index and O Tender Path, Salt Poems. Both will be available during my gallery exhibit. With early-age encouragement from my Grandmother Artist, I went on to study the visual arts with a focus on painting and printmaking. After graduating from Stanford University in 1976, I stayed to teach drawing and printmaking for a year during Nathan Oliveira’s sabbatical. Soon after, I started assisting other artists in |
printmaking, such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Gradually, I started teaching at different schools in the Bay Area, and settled in at Saint Mary’s College where I taught a variety of subjects such as Sculpture, Drawing, Art History, Filmmaking, Printmaking and the Great Books in seminar classes.
My wife and I lived for 20 years in Benicia, both of us commuting to teach at various colleges and exhibiting in the Bay Area, as well as in national and international venues. We moved to the wonderful North Coast from the Bay Area about five years ago, to establish a new home and studio in Fort Bragg. After living in an artist colony in a gritty industrial area on a deep river port, we were able to start a new life of healthy peace and quiet in Nature.
My background in painting and printmaking is showcased at Cobalt Gallery, in my bringing together two different series for the first time — Acrobats and Thresholds — a metaphor between figures and abstraction. Everyday we step outside into the abstraction of Nature, hopefully with the agility of acrobats and find ourselves absorbing and affirming both qualities with gratitude.
More at paintsong.com
My wife and I lived for 20 years in Benicia, both of us commuting to teach at various colleges and exhibiting in the Bay Area, as well as in national and international venues. We moved to the wonderful North Coast from the Bay Area about five years ago, to establish a new home and studio in Fort Bragg. After living in an artist colony in a gritty industrial area on a deep river port, we were able to start a new life of healthy peace and quiet in Nature.
My background in painting and printmaking is showcased at Cobalt Gallery, in my bringing together two different series for the first time — Acrobats and Thresholds — a metaphor between figures and abstraction. Everyday we step outside into the abstraction of Nature, hopefully with the agility of acrobats and find ourselves absorbing and affirming both qualities with gratitude.
More at paintsong.com
Linda Grebmeier Presents Play Things (July 2025)
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Artist Statement: My journey had been a circuitous route along the western states: younger years in Palo Alto California, educational degrees in Washington, teaching in Oregon, then back to California where I’ve painted and taught at colleges, served in administration, and exhibited locally and nationally. I met my husband in California, who interestingly was raised in Washington, and we discovered mutual friends in both states. We’ve lived in the Bay Area and North Bay, then spent 20 years in an Artist Community on the Benicia waterfront. Now settled along the North Coast in rural Fort Bragg, we truly enjoy walking to our studios surrounded by redwoods, fox and deer.
Making visual images is my preferred language to express my instincts and emotions. My imagination has been challenged by Painting |
Masters, rural landscapes, industrial transport ships, decayed factories and now toys. I first studied sculpture in college then shifted to painting and drawing. Spatial relationships and recognizable forms became meaningful to me. Three dimensional form in space generates powerful negative space that supports positive shapes — intertwined, each as compelling as the other. But more important to me is the painting process itself — brush strokes, color, value, composition — as it opens an emotional gateway from my initial response to a subject and offers unexpected paths.
My Play-Things series (still life paintings of toys and objects) began right after completing my Yuba series that revealed light filtering through a decayed factory prior to its demolition. Seeing tools and debris cast aside, remnants from a century of human activity, evoked a ghostly feeling to me. That promptly led to a renewed appreciation of the playful toys and figurines that my husband and I have collected over the years.
Dialogues emerge between: the toys, the light, the shadows. Sometimes a simple attitude between figurines take precedence. At other times cast shadows take on a physical presence larger than the objects. Occasionally, a subtle dark irony surfaces in contrast to the joyful toys. Each painting leads me in its own direction, at times successful and always in a process of discovery.
More at paintsong.com
Tibisay Guerrero (October 2025)
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Tibisay Guerrero was born in Venezuela in 1959. Graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in Filmmaking & Painting in 1985. In 1996, she obtained her MFA degree in Pictorial Arts at San Jose State University. Currently resides in Fort Bragg, CA
ARTIST STATEMENT: Thematically, my work exists in the juncture between nature and civilization. Art history, politics, religion, humor, horror, our basic biology, become texture layers forming interference patterns that invite the viewer in detailed looking and search for meaning. |
Hopi Breton (November 2025)
work-in-progress for Land Blanket, Mendocino County
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Hopi Breton is a Bay Area artist and a faculty member in the Art Department at Diablo Valley College where she heads the sculpture program. She holds a BA from Loyola University in New Orleans, and an MFA from Montana State University. She has a strong technical background in metal fabrication, metal casting, and moldmaking, and works in a variety of media.
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