Shown January, 2024, at Upstairs Art Gallery, 306 Center Street, Healdsburg, CA 95448 open daily 11-6, (707) 431-4214 . The Small Works Showcase presents Marsha Connell’s A Walk in the Woods, watercolor paintings that dance with rhythmic colorful strokes expressing the intriguing shapes and forms found in nature, from trees on Sonoma County’s rolling hills to the riparian habitat of a Sierra Mountain stream. These plein air pieces, that fit in a daypack, are like postcards from her many walks and hikes.
Shown January 2024, at Upstairs Art Gallery, 306 Center Street, Healdsburg, CA 95448 open daily 11-6, (707) 431-4214 .
The Small Works Showcase presents Marsha Connell’s A Walk in the Woods, watercolor paintings that dance with rhythmic colorful strokes expressing shapes and forms found in nature, from trees on Sonoma County’s rolling hills to the riparian habitat of a Sierra Mountain stream. These plein air pieces (that fit in a daypack) are like postcards from her many walks and hikes.
The special series of 11 inch square watercolors is presented in natural wood deep frames, “floated” on a black ground that highlights the deckle and torn edges of the papers. Walk the stairs slowly and watch the exhibit unfold; then several larger watercolors continue the themes on the wall at the top.
For prices and availability, double click the art to open the gallery viewer. Then click on the ( i ) in the lower right corner to bring up art details.
To purchase by credit card, phone (707) 431-4214. Shipping is available.
Summer Lake, 7Rain Song, 1Rain Song, 1Mountain Songs 1-4
Wildflower Walk (SOLD)Flyway 1Open ArmsCaples Creek Weavings, 2EdgyDark ShallowsPrevailing WindSwirl, 1Storm in the Park (SOLD)Caples Creek Weavings, 1Walking a Sierra Creek, 1Sierra Granite, 2Painting with the KidsRed Orange SwingersDancing in the WoodsWalking a Sierra Creek, 2WoodedGreen Still WatersRockfallWood Lake Conversation
An informal catalog of some of the paintings on exhibit at my Art Trails Open Studio gallery. To purchase by credit card, phone 707-331-0105. Shipping is available.
Night Garden, $3000Lagoon-Summer Light, $3750SOLD – Rivermouth 3, $3500SOLD – New Mexico Winter 4, $650SOLD – New Mexico Winter, $450New Mexico Winter 2, $250Lakeside Autumn 9, $825Lakeside Autumn 8, $825
Lakeside Autumn 6, $850
Turn of the River,
$2850Waterlight 4, $3500The Layers Beyond, $950Under the Golden Gate, $450Unseen Fence, $1500Mountain Songs I-IV, $875 – FramedFog Rolls Up Gualala River, $650Marina at Last Light, $690Supernal, $1500Whirlpool, $600 – FramedAwash in the Mystery, $675 – FramedSpiral, $675 – FramedPond in Bloom 8, $1500Deb’s Cottage Garden – Sun, $1500Pond in Bloom 9, $1500Salmon Sunset, $450SOLD Wood’s Lake 6, $850 SOLD Wood’s Lake 5, $850A Camp Above a Lake 1, $2500Tomales Bay Estuary, $2850Mariposa, $425SOLD – Summer Grasses, $1500Morning Fog Rising, $1500Figure in Lavender, $1650
It’s always a pleasure to host old and new friends at an open studio in my home gallery, with images from my collections and fresh from the easel . . . drawings, paintings in oil, watercolor, pastel, and prints. Fortune cookies and good conversation! I look forward to seeing you! Oct 7 & 8. 10am – 5pm, 2180 Beverly Way, Santa Rosa Personal attention for those who want time to ponder additions to their collection include private appointments, time payments, trying artworks in your environment, special commissions. Contact me : marsha@marshaconnell.com
A theme for musing: The past speaks to the present. . . All I ever needed to know I learned in figure drawing. . . (SEE BELOW THE IMAGE)
ALL I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN FIGURE DRAWING by Marsha Connell
Be courageous! Stay focused.
Be ready to respond to shifting forms and problems.
Follow the rhythm, warm-ups to extended poses, like scales before the symphony or stretches before the big game.
Try different processes, from outside in and inside out: gesture, contour, mass.
Go ahead and scribble, or crawl as slowly as an ant climbing a mountain.
Be curious! Be humble. Be inspired by other artists. Learn from them.
Integrate “rules” that help you. Try them on. Or save for a rainy day.
Discover how the figure forms the ground and ground forms the figure, feel the charge between positive and negative space.
Seek balance and teeter on the edge of imbalance, organic and geometric, light and shadow, composition and detail, lost and found edges.
Experiment. Change your perspective.
Explore realistic color and expressive color.
Be flexible and spontaneous. Be methodical.
Use a lot of materials. Share. Be generous and kind.
Clean up together. Listen. Rest.
Observe how the landscape of the body that is subject meets the landscape that is body meets the body that is artist meets the inner landscape.
Trust your own voice, your own journey. Let go of judgement and the critic and move on.
Open your mind and heart to expression, to not knowing, to grief and joy, to repairing pieces of a life interrupted.
It’s a practice, like music, yoga, tennis, prayer . . . that is strengthened by drawing in community, by parallel play, study and work.
Really, all I ever needed to know I learned in figure drawing!
“And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”
(with thanks to Lisa Beernsten’s recent comment after drawing from the model , silently next to each other, for two hours, “Parallel play is so satisfying!” and Robert Fulghum’s All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)
OIl paintings on my wall at Upstairs Art Gallery, 306 Center Street, Healdsburg, CA. A Sonoma County artist owned gallery. You can visit me and my work Sunday September 17, 11-6. Open daily. Meet a different artist each visit.
Artists: Patrice Wachs, Bill Kane, C.K.Itamura, Dominique Pfahl, Gen Zorich, Jill Keller Peters, Marsha Connell, Serena Hazard, Teri Sloat, Jean Paul Lorentz, Curated by Vicky Kumpfer
Are you hungering to return to the joys of plein air painting in a unique location? Would you like to practice seeing more deeply with brush or pastel in hand?
Come paint with me during the glorious wildflower season at Pepperwood Preserve on Saturday May 1. Seeking vaccinated painters beginning or experienced. Class will be entirely outside with Covid guidelines followed. This will give us the camaraderie and intimacy of being with just a small group of people while spaciously arrayed in the landscape.
Pepperwood Preserve is over 3000 acres located above Safari West between Santa Rosa and Calistoga. We will be headquartered on the hillsides near the Bechtel House.
You’re welcome to paint in any media at any size. I plan to demo some approaches with oil and with pastel. I also paint in watercolor and acrylic, and find drawing and sketching a profound way to connect with nature. My intention is to support and encourage you in directions of your choice. Use any art materials you already have. But please read my supply ideas list which will come with registration confirmation, for reminders of how to prepare for a day in the landscape and for thoughts on how to expand, or to limit, the supplies you own or bring.
Aztec Dahlia Gardens, 36 x 36″, oil on canvas, SOLD, giclées available
Art Collectors: you can now visit artists and buy art from the safety of your favorite armchair or get your mask and hand sanitizer to visit in person.
Please help test this virtual project by going to my online gallery https://sebartsvirtual.org/artists/connell/. 6 paintings at a time will be available directly from the SAVOS shop during September. Kindly share this news with friends who might enjoy the healing comfort of art, to visit online or to own, or who are simply curious. Let me know how this new site works for you.
My physical studio will not be open, but more images including oils, pastels, watercolors, drawings and giclée prints will be accessible via my website, Facebook, text, emails, phone, and Zoom. Please contact me any day this month (10 am – 5 pm) and I can help you navigate this virtual landscape. Links are at the bottom of the email.
Also my art is on the walls at Upstairs Art Gallery, Center Street next to Healdsburg Plaza, and Gallery at Corricks, 637 4th Street, Santa Rosa.
Limited outdoor appointments may be available to pick up art from my studio or to see a piece that calls to you in person. We will observe current Covid safety regulations as listed on the SAVOS website. Looking forward to in-person hugs in 2021!!
Each SAVOS artist’s page will show if their studio is open virtually or physically. There are about 137 of us! https://sebartsvirtual.org/
Check in on the website for virtual events, panel conversations, demos, videos. On Tuesday, Sept 15, at 1:00 pm, I will be on a virtual panel with other SAVOS painters to talk about our artistic processes, motivations etc. Please join us! You will need a zoom account. Join live
Wildflower Heaven, 2, oil on canvas, 30 x 30″, available on SAVOS website
Gathering paintings and collages and poems for an exhibit at Upstairs Art Gallery Feb. 24-Mar. 24.
Discovering connections and stories in my own artwork, how collage making laid ground for constructing Murder of Crows paintings. What Vanitas symbols can you find?
Artist reception and short poetry reading with my daughter Reba on Sunday afternoon March 10, 2-5 pm. You’re invited!
Upstairs Art Gallery, 306 Center Street, Healdsburg, CA 95448
Poetry reading with Marsha Connell and Reba Connell, 2:30-3 pm.
Thinking About Bonnard, Murder of Crows oil painting series
Press release:
The March Featured Artist, Marsha Connell, presents works that articulate an artistic evolution initiated in collage and leading to the “Murder of Crows” still-life oil paintings.
Connell had long been a painter and sculptor when her daughter, Reba, invited her to make a collage for shared communication while she was having her junior year abroad in Israel, a year that coincided with the first Gulf War.
The collages became an unexpected healing process, fueled deeper by a dream of war preparations that suggested she bear witness. The collage “letters without words” to her daughter grew into a series of 150 “Dream Vessels” that speak with a visual vocabulary, like Vanitas paintings, symbolically merging awareness of death and the passage of time with the beauty of life.
When words finally came, they emerged from the “dreaming in the day” dance practice of Authentic Movement. The resulting poems were often written in the presence of the collages and arose from a similar place of finding connections among discovered fragments. They accompany the Dream Vessels, but do not describe or explain them.
The arranging and rearranging of found images in collage-making, laid the groundwork for assembling and staging objects in the “Crow” series. “Spirit birds” and wings play a supporting role in the collages; birds star in the still-life series.
Thinking about Hokusai, Murder of Crows oil painting series
“Through this work, I found a way to bring hope together with darkness. Assembling these found images was like taking the broken pieces of the world and putting them back together.”
Both the collages and the crow paintings entice the viewer to look closer and follow a path of discovery. The paintings are also homages to other painters, such as Thinking of Bonnard and Thinking of Emily Carr. And there is humor, Connell confided, “The longer these crows were in my studio, the more trouble they got into!” evidenced by their activities and positions in the paintings.
Awakened in Art: Dream and art tell difficult political truths
Dreams of 1990’s Gulf War inspired Santa Rosa artist Marsha Connell’s ‘Dream Vessels’ series.
Like surrealism, the political-art movement opposing totalitarianism in the aftermath of the horrors of WWI, the power of art and dreaming in these turbulent times holds the possibility for social change.
Last week, less than a month before the 2018 midterm elections, a cadre of Northern California artists shared their art and held a dialogue to raise awareness about U.S. domestic and foreign policies in the month-long mixed-media exhibition “Wake-Up! The Political Power of Art and Dreams,” held at the Claudia Chapline Gallery in Stinson Beach on Oct. 28, that now continues online.
Works in that show included Flag of Death, created by artist and gallery owner Claudia Chapline, which graphically depicts the reality of U.S. foreign policy. Chapline says the piece came from a dream she had on March 11, 2006, the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “For me, the flag painting symbolises the discrepancy between American ideals and manifest American policy,” says Chapline.
Santa Rosa artist Marsha Connell’s “Dream Vessels” collage works, featuring landscapes spiked with light, were inspired by dreams Connell had a month after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. She dreamt that women writers, artists and poets were brought to observe preparations for the first Persian Gulf War when a voice boomed out, “The women soldiers will go first!”
“I felt a distress so profound there were no words for it,” Connell says.
A friend suggested the dream meant the artist was to bear witness, and the collages became her way to communicate and begin a healing process that ultimately brought her peace.
She calls the collages “Dream Vessels,” because each dreamlike picture contains a vessel. “The vessel offers the possibility of transformation, hope and reconciliation of opposites,” she says.
Joyce Lynn is founder and editor-in-chief of Plum Dreams Media. See works from ‘Wake-Up! The Political Power of Art and Dreams’ at plumdreamsmedia.com.
THE POLITICAL POWER OF ART AND DREAMS by Joyce Lynn, Exhibition Curator
For centuries, dreams have guided nations toward (or away from) their destinies. Dreams have revealed the divine plan for countries, cultures, and citizens. Think of Joseph’s biblical interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream proscribing public policy to prevent the Egyptians from starvation. Or consider the Roman philosopher Cicero’s Dream of Scipio imparting the essence of statesmen-like virtues.
These dreams and dreamers show the profound power of remembering, understanding, listening to, and expressing our dreams. Our nighttime dreams upend government, corporate, and media propaganda. Once inner wisdom is tapped denial is impossible; positive action manifests.
Such timely, insightful sometimes witty wisdom gleaned from dreams and depicted by artists can lead to personal and planetary well-being. Dreams give a picture of reality. Dreams enable us to see clearly, revealing hidden truths. When we listen to our own dream guidance, we the people can reclaim our power to govern for the public good.
Like surrealism, the political-art movement opposing totalitarianism in the aftermath of the horrors of World War 1, the power of art and dreaming in these turbulent times holds the possibility of social change.
Art and dreams are conduits to truth, paths to healing and transformation. Art and dreams wake us to reality and response.”
“Wake-Up! The Political Power of Art and Dreams,” a mixed media exhibition, was an exhibition at the Claudia Chapline Gallery, Stinson Beach, California, during October, the month before the 2018 Congressional elections to create dialogue and raise consciousness about U.S domestic and foreign policy. It continues online to expand its reach at PlumDreamsMedia.com.
WAKE-UP! includes works derived from dreams by Northern California artists: Dream Vessels by MARSHA CONNELL; Flag of Death and other images of war by CLAUDIA CHAPLINE; works by artist-activist RICHARD KAMLER; FrankenBush, commissioned by PLUM DREAMS MEDIA; They Never Stood a Chance, an installation of remembrance and survival by JENNIFER LUGRIS; and a dream about Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal with God captured by NICOLE FRAZER.
WAKE-UP! is an activity of the 50 State Initiative of ForFreedoms.org, a platform for civic engagement, discourse, and direct action for artists in the U.S.
A percentage of sales from the exhibition will be donated to Bay Area peace candidates.
(While this online exhibition is being updated, contact Plum Dreams Media info@PlumDreamsMedia.com, 415-267-7620 for more information.)
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claudia Chapline cchapline.com
Info@cchapline.com
Flag of Death by Claudia Chapline
On March 11, 2006, the third anniversary of the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, artist, activist, and gallery owner Claudia Chapline of Stinson Beach, California, dreamt:
“I’m standing on a ladder painting a large (American) flag. When I awoke the next day, I sketched the flag in my journal, and then I made a small painting from the drawing/dream. The stars resemble exploding bombs, the stripes, missiles. A skeleton’s head emerges from the war machinery.
“For me, the flag painting symbolizes the discrepancy between American ideals and manifest American policy.”
The Claudia Chapline Gallery and Sculpture Garden has shown Northern California contemporary art since 1987, a cultural crossroads for visitors to the Pacific coast and to residents of Northern California.
A month after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, artist Marsha Connell dreamt that women writers, artists, and poets were brought to observe preparations for the first Persian Gulf War from the bottom of a hill. A voice boomed out: The women soldiers will go first!!
This view that appeared in a dream began a healing process that ultimately brought her peace.
A friend suggested the dream meant the artist was to bear witness. Before this dream, Connell felt artists lacked power to elicit change. Then she wondered, “Could I create art about the war, but not beautify the destruction?”
Connell cut up magazines and photos, made two collages and duplicated them on a color copier to allow travel as letters to her daughter in Jerusalem for her junior year. This shortly became an aesthetic choice as she discovered how the printmaking process enhances the visual unity of the images, montaged from found sources. When she contemplated her images, she says, “They shocked me. They moved me so much. There was a lot of darkness but also hope. They had hope for the world.”
Collages, dark landscapes spiked with light, became her way to communicate. “I felt a distress so profound there were no words for it,” Connell says.
Separation – collage/print by Marsha Connell
She calls the collages “Dream Vessels” because each dreamlike picture contains a vessel — a pot, a vase, a ship. In her poem, “Dream Vessels,” Connell writes: “The vessel offers the possibility of transformation, hope/reconciliation of opposites…Vessels poise/between her story and history, bridging nature and the human-made, bridging hope and forces of destruction.”
Warning – collage/print by Marsha Connell
“Somehow, through doing this, I felt I was finding a way to bring hope together with darkness,” she reveals. “As the work told me its stories, it was bringing more sense to the world. The collages were my healing. Gradually, I found my own center again and my own peace through doing this.”
Piano Rose ll collage/print by Marsha Connell
The Dream Vessels series took on its own momentum, now almost one hundred fifty images, printed in editions numbered up to twenty-five. Like intimately scaled murals, the collages incorporate stories about family, culture, history, and the environment, including the devastation of ongoing wars, oil spills, firestorms, the disasters of Three Mile Island and September Eleventh, as well as simple pleasures and life’s mysteries, dance, music, motherhood. They also function as homages and memorials.
Freedom Dance Blues – collage/print by Marsha Connell
The content emerged from dreams, and the process of creating them is like dreaming in the day, elusive and speaking in metaphor, gradually revealing layers of meaning to both artist and viewer.
Aztec Dahlia Gardens, 36 x 36″, oil on canvas, SOLD, giclées available 
Wildflower Heaven, 2, oil on canvas, 30 x 30″, available on SAVOS website
Dream Vessels #125: Metronome
Thinking About Bonnard, Murder of Crows oil painting series
Piano Rose ll collage/print by Marsha Connell
Marsha Connell Studio 