Featured Artist – Brian McDonald
My paintings, inspired by cartoons and dream logic, deal with issues of aggression and anxiety, which are especially relevant given the recent economic and political climate. I feel we live in a society where aggression has become not only socially acceptable, but also a necessary trait for survival. Contemporary, capitalist, urban America has pushed competition – for jobs, housing, sex, $, parking spaces – into an intense daily struggle. It is survival of the fittest, where you are either the hunter (full of aggression) or the hunted (full of anxiety). Quite often we are filled with both, which is what these paintings explore. At the same time, a rather dry and dark humor underscores the mood of my paintings and pokes fun at the absurdity of modern life.
Music is a tremendous influence on my work as a painter. I am fascinated with the spatial, temporal, and structural components of music. I work with dense layering of paint and collage to create a network of intertwining patterns, stories, and colors which suggests movement, history, and rhythm. As structural and spatial patterns emerge, this dense layering of paint and collage is woven together into a unified composition. I see many parallels between the structural rhythm of music and that of life. My paintings are an attempt to understand and to capture the movement, the structure, the patterns, the rhythm, the history, and the interconnectedness of life.
To veiw Brian McDonald’s Art go to his website at:
SillyDilly.com
About the artist:
Jean Cherie is enthusiastically jumping into the Art community of San Francisco! Since moving here from Southern California a year and a half ago she has completed several commissions. One is a four foot statue of “Our Lady of the Holy Eucharist”, which is presently at the Catholic Basilica in Washington, DC, on it’s way to a Basilica in Africa. Another commission, a two foot tall “bronze” statue of a horse and rider was a central prop for a production of Chekhov comedies by Expression Theatre Ensemble.
Kytha Gernatt, co-owner of City Art Gallery, is a resident of San Francisco. Born in Marietta Georgia Kytha has been painting for over 20 years. Her artwork has shown in the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, in the San Francisco International Airport and in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art complex. She is interviewed in the latest issue of Churn magazine. Ms. Gernatt has taught painting, silkscreen printmaking and has run non-profit art programs for the last 10 years. Kytha’s personal history, as eclectic as her artwork, includes playing drums in the punk rock band the Butthole Surfers, serving on the board of directors for Unity Church of San Francisco and traveling and working with the Butler Brother’s Amusements Carnival. For more of her story and examples of her work ask for a copy of her book “The Chicken Who Would be King.” From the artist: My work is a blending of Abstract Expressionism and Surreal Representation. I make art not as a decoration but as documentation. My work tells a story that is both whimsical and provocative, warm and unsettling, childlike and serious. My painting process is a balance of creative channeling and conscious determination. I never plan a painting but rather hold onto the feelings that are compelling me to paint. Each piece begins as a big scribbley mess of color and I sculpt, with paint, the images that appear to me within this chaos. This begins a dance between what to develop and what to tuck away in the image. So each piece’s evolution is much like a dream and it’s ultimate meaning is an act of discovery for me as much as any viewer. To veiw Kytha Gernatt’s Art go to her website at: 
The artistic interest in Vera Costa’s work is in the organic theme and in concepts of internal/external, body/spirit and relations between human and universal energies.
Albert Chi Hwang was born in 1979 in Oakland, California, the son of immigrants from Taiwan. An only child, he began drawing extensively from a very early age. Drawing has always allowed Hwang an escape from the boredom of solitude and has enabled him to convey his thought patterns more directly than any other medium. He considers drawing the “underlying thread” of all the visual arts.
My mother introduced to me art when I was five years old. Since that time I have pursued my passion for painting.
Michael Addario has always been interested in photography. It must be in his genes because his Grandfather was a photographer in Philadelphia in the 1930s and would take photographs of families having picnics in the parks. In those days cameras were the size and look of an accordion and the film was silver emulsion painted on glass plates.