Artist Laurelin Gilmore showcases the beauty of everyday with unexpected imagery

Sacramento has always wanted to be a primary market, but as far as attendance at art and music gatherings go, has been a tertiary market at best. In the last decade, however, artists like painter/sculptor/illustrator Laurelin Gilmore have managed to eke out a living doing what they love most: working full-time on art. Not only is Gilmore an artist on the rise, she has won several awards and the approval of many fans and venues alike.

On any given day during the traditional Monday-through-Friday work week, you can find Gilmore holding court at Verge Center For The Arts (625 S Street, Sacramento), working on her craft. Because her rent is manageable, she is able to have a space away from her home in North Sacramento, where she currently resides with her husband and 8-year-old daughter who she says is “a better artist than I was at her age.”

“Being an artist is not a self-sufficient entity and my husband does need to work,” Gilmore recently said in a telephone interview. “However, it is my full-time job and I spend about five hours a day in the studio and have 24-hour access to come and go as I please. It’s great to have somewhere to go and create if I feel the desire late at night. On weekends, I usually spend my time with my family unless I have a show somewhere.”

For the uninitiated, Gilmore’s work is highly colorful, whether she’s doing drawings, paintings or three-dimensional sculptures.

“I have been drawing as long as I could hold a crayon,” she says. “It’s really hard to quantify how many drawings or handmade pieces I’ve made over the years, but drawing was my first love. Up until 1998, I was strictly a pencil, graphite, chalk and charcoal artist.”

Gilmore says it was “just kind of a natural extension from hand drawings to expand and add texture and form” when she began painting.

“I’m still an advocate of drawing in its primitive and primary form, however.”

However, there is one medium that Gilmore doesn’t excel in. “I don’t do very well with colored pencil,” Lauren admits. “Using a colored pencil creates too fine of a line. If you cover a large area with colored pencil, you lose immediacy in the piece and it takes much more time. Rather than drawing a sky with colored pencils as a medium which can take hours, painting is far more expressive and, similarly, more colorful to view.”

In her artist’s statement, Gilmore says her subject matter “can be somewhat varied, but the human figure has always been my touchstone. My goal is to record on the paper or canvas as well I can the beauty of everyday through realism, surrealism and fantasy. My art looks at the place where separates meet, and explores through fantasy the experience of the would-be fence sitters as go-betweens, translators, and bridges between perspectives.”

Gilmore admits the collection she’s preparing for her show in September is one she’s “most excited about and terrified of creating.

“This is the most personal art I’ve ever made,” she says. “I am painting my experience as a person living with vitiligo…a skin condition that turns patches of skin white. I am using as models a couple of people who also have the condition and using myself as well to explore it as something beautiful and strange and strangely beautiful, I guess. Reactions span the spectrum, so I look forward to engaging viewers in a discussion on the topic that is motivated by seeing me and mine in a different light.”

Gilmore’s 20-plus-year tenure in the Sacramento Valley has garnered her fans, accolades and an appreciation for the Sacramento art community. She earned degrees in Fine Arts and Library Sciences from Sacramento City College and soon put down roots.

“Since I once lived in San Francisco, I always thought I could someday return there,” she says. “I have lived in Sacramento for over 20 years and it’s very affordable. In San Francisco or the Bay Area, there is a lot of competition in the artist community. Here in Sacramento, however, it feels much more like a tight-knit community.”

Her tenure in that community begins with her very first sold drawing at a Sacramento City College art show (for which she still holds the $20 check “for posterity”), and continues with a stint at Gallery 2110 inside the Sacramento Art Complex, as well as entries in prominent shows. From 2012 to 2014, Gilmore had a studio space at Gallery 2110, where she earned commissions from several walk-ins. Though she loved the exposure, the downside was the 2nd Saturday traffic being able to see “things that were still in their creative womb,” she says. “I would often have a couple of easels up and people [would] see pieces in their infancy.”

Gilmore’s Self Portrait with Olivia drawing, of herself holding her infant daughter, was accepted to the 2007 California State Fair and sold. In 2013, Gilmore’s Coiled painting won Best in Show at the Sacramento Fine Art Center 2013 Animal House exhibit. “This is no small thing since there were some incredibly talented artists showing there,” she says.

Gilmore is looking to geographically spread her wings, and is on the hunt for more shows. But she’s calculatingly realistic about the prospects. “Last year I told myself I wanted to show in Los Angeles and New York and I did manage to get the former done,” she says. “I also want to do New Orleans and New Mexico. Basically, I’ve been looking for shows that I can drive to since you usually have to pay a fee to be curated, the gallery takes a percentage of any sales made, and it costs a lot to ship to out-of-town galleries. I decided I would only do shows that I could drive to unless there was something amazing like an international offer or something major that I couldn’t pass up.”

Making a living is a struggle when you’re a local artist, and for the most part, you either sell at one of your residencies or through constant word of mouth in the artist community. Gilmore, however, is optimistic about using cyberspace to boost her sales and maintain a semi-steady flow of income. She plans to open an online store connected to her website (Laurelingilmore.com) and branch out to other social media sites including Twitter.

“I’m not as active on the internet as I should be and stopped blogging a while back,” she says. “And while I do believe in artists telling their own experience, I just never really kept it up. Social media from my Facebook page has been a great way to get the word out, however, about shows and pieces I’ve done.”

For those who chose the uncertain path of being a full-time artist, it always helps to have a support system whether family, friends, or colleagues in her field. When pressed whether family has encouraged and acknowledged her chosen path as a legitimate one, Gilmore was quick to reply.

“It’s one of the questions many people ask me,” she says. “The fact remains that nobody ever told me to stop. My mother, husband, brother and two older sisters were always supportive of my endeavors and never questioned me. Additionally, I am still very close with the former owners of Gallery 2110 and they are great allies to have.”

Of course, no monetary value can take the place of human interaction and experiences. And while Gilmore has not become a millionaire overnight, it is her love for the art that has made a difference.

“Personally, I think my greatest triumphs have come from interacting with art lovers,” she says. “At the Sacramento Art Complex, I was so privileged to be able to meet and converse with so many people who had personal experiences relating to my art. There was a little boy who used to come in every single month with his mom and ask me questions about new work, old work, whatever. I really looked forward to seeing the two of them.

“One woman told me that my painting, Jelly Ballet, has been used to inspire conversations about body image and body gratitude in her circle of friends. People told me they could see themselves, their loved ones in my work. I absolutely love hearing the stories people come up with around these creatures I’ve made. It means they inspire a thought process that goes in weird creative directions for people, and what else could I ask for?”

See for yourself at Gilmore’s upcoming show at Little Relics (908 21st Street, Sacramento), featuring shadow boxes and paintings. Opening reception is Thursday, April 9, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. For more info, visit Laurelingilmore.com

Artist Susan J. Silvester finds a nurturing home in Sacramento

A blue-faced bunny girl clutching a limp, stuffed toy launched an entire series of artwork for Susan J. Silvester that she—and a growing number of fans—adores for its dramatic reflection of her dark, feminine voice.

Animals, imaginary lands, costumes, facial expressions and unusual body forms combine to represent Silvester’s self-proclaimed creepy genre.

The audience doesn’t really know if these forlorn, timeless beings are humans in fuzzy costumes or part human, part animal.

“They are sort of the same,” Silvester says from her home in Sacramento, where she does her digital work when not painting in her Verge Center for the Arts studio space. “I didn’t know that was going to happen but I’m a big fairytale and sci-fi fan (I love Dr. Who), so they’re human but they’re not. It’s creepy. It’s sort of based on medieval costumes that I saw and I learned how to sew. I do them kneeling a lot, so it’s an odd pose, because it’s kind of religious but kids do that a lot.”

Silvester’s first solo show, at Gallery 2110 and the Sacramento Art Complex, will be available to view next month and represents a psychological realm, another space that has to do with deep emotion and feeling. Think Pan’s Labyrinth meets 16th century portraiture.

At first, the art seems so sweet and delicate, and it is, but then it also conjures up feelings of entrapment and childhood confusion.

“I have a female voice, but then, I am a female,” says Silvester. “I just see that in the work, it expresses me. Even though these [faces] are not me they are me, because they are aspects of my personality, pieces of me.”

The first bunny girl was a result of a bad review she received while working on her master’s in painting at Sacramento State.

“Basically I got slammed in my review at school, and I got sad so I decided I’m going to draw people how I want to, and so I did,” she says. “I like people as animals. But it’s faux fur, it’s not real. I’m a vegetarian.”

The campus trees, squirrels and overall environment worked as a muse, as did Silvester’s more than 30 years of experience that ranged from Web design to art fabrication and replication animation.

Some of the particulars of these jobs are incredible. Silvester has built massive fiberglass sculptures for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, created objects like children’s toys for comic strip Family Circle and designed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website.

Her artistic ability and dark humor came in handy when she worked on Pee-wee’s Playhouse and the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios. Perhaps more impressive, however, was her work as an art fabricator in New York—her home state—for leading pop artists Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Wesselmann, Marisol and Lynda Benglis.

“As an artist, especially in New York, you just survive,” she says of the experience. “That was all sort of dark and wacky, so my work is still playful and dark.”

While working on the Back to the Future ride, Silvester decided to go back to computers and stop making large models as she had been for sets and other artists.

“I probably created enough toxic waste to last 100 million years,” she says. “I made a set that was 30-by-70 feet out of that foam that never breaks down and it was huge and disgusting. There were these huge bugs that came out of it. It was horrible. I said that’s it, I’m done with this, and then transitioned into computers. It was a good call.”

Silvester feels her digital work is almost more difficult than painting because she sees every flaw magnified.

“It’s really labor intensive and a lot of people don’t understand but this is all hand drawn,” she says of her digital work. Sometimes I’ll scan in my drawing but then I still have to paint it. I touch every part of that freaking piece. And when you flatten things (in Photoshop) then you have to fix it. I’ll still print something out and will see something and no one else will but I know it’s there. When I started painting, I kind of missed the ‘undo.’”

Silvester paints using mixed media, acrylics and oil. She has also recently incorporated her sculpting skills into her solo genre, sculpting bunny girls using clay and covering them with felt. If she completes the pieces, she may also include them in her show.

“I’m trying to show where I started and where I’m going so it’ll be interesting and help round out the show,” she says.

When she’s not in her studio or feverishly fixing every line and dot on her digital drawings, Silvester is teaching at the Art Institute, a job that has helped her go beyond “just surviving” as she did years ago in New York.

“Now I can do my art because I have that [the teaching],” she says. Silvester teaches color theory, drawing and design at the institute and also instructs senior classes at the Natomas Art Center in Folsom.

The art scene in Sacramento is also more her pace, Silvester says, after honing her career in both New York and Dallas.

“Since I moved here in 2001, the art scene has changed so much,” she says. “It’s expanded but it’s still a core group. I like knowing the different artists and seeing what they’re doing.”

She adds that attending school in Sacramento and having a studio at Verge has also positively affected her work and given her the confidence and feedback she needs.

“It has been a good place for me and we just kind of share ideas and critiques, so it’s really great for artists.”

Check out Gallery 2110 this July to see more of Silvester’s creations. A reception will be held July 13, 2013 from 6 to 9 p.m. Visit Susansilvester.com to follow her work.

Painter Mark David Manning tears into collage

For those who know Mark David Manning’s art, next month’s exhibit at Gallery 2110 is atypical.

Manning is a traditionally trained oil painter who uses both real life and imagery to portray a balance between man, nature and machine. His interests are environmental and political, stemming from his upbringing in New Zealand and his personal beliefs.

In one of his older collections of household imagery, a still life of a vacuum is no longer just an everyday contraption when it comes dangerously close to sucking up fowl eggs.

In another previous work, Manning has painted a beautiful woman who suddenly seems wild and distorted as her innards fall out of her and whales swim nearby against rich reds on the canvas. This oil painting, Anti-whaling, is one of Manning’s favorites, encompassing his environmentalism.

His latest body of work, Visual Odyssey, will delight and stretch the viewer’s mind in a slightly different way than Manning’s oil paintings have done with their strong messages.

Visual Odyssey is an interpretive study with more than 30 mixed media collages that are made from 99 percent recycled materials. Manning collected old photography, books and other odds and ends around his Midtown home and incorporated some oil into the final pieces.

“This is not something that I usually do. It’s not common for me,” Manning says. “This is a new direction I’m going for.”

The collages are all original and very different from one another, each telling their own stories, Manning says, but his inspiration came from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“[The collection] is about a transition from early man, from the earliest beginnings, to how much we have advanced, from hand tools to flying,” he says.

His favorite piece of the collection is one of the five larger collages, called Flight, and uses a ‘50s-style palate of blues, oranges and teals with unique shapes.

Manning says the immediacy of collage is what appealed to him, as well as the ability to use color and shape as he has done with oil for years. 

“Oil paintings, they’re very slow to build because it takes some time to get the right color,” he says. “Collage is more immediate than oil… You can flip through a book and find what you want. It’s more like painting a landscape, because you’re painting a lot faster. I like the immediacy of laying down the paper and tearing down the paper. It’s more raw than oil.”

Despite this newfound love, Manning says he will continue with oil painting and is already arms deep in his next body of work–a series based on Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory.

“I’m pretty focused, and I’ll keep on doing what I’m doing and exploring different ideas,” Manning says. “I’ve always liked the medium [oil] itself. Color is incredibly important to me, and oil intensifies the pigment.”

These intensities work well with his subject matter, whether he’s depicting animals in nature or something more abstract like in his last show The Supernatural, with juxtapositions of unrelated manmade and natural objects unconventionally placed for still life.

Manning sees his subconscious when creating art.

“I’m definitely an environmentalist, so the environment comes out in my work,” he says. “If something is bothering me in reference to something going on environmentally, or with respect of nature, or respect of animals, or man’s relationship to nature, it just comes out.”

His contemporary, sometimes crazy thoughts portrayed through his traditional painting style have been warmly received and supported in Sacramento thus far, Manning says. He only hopes gallery visitors will enjoy each piece of his newest exhibit and create their own stories from the images.

To see more from Manning, visit Visual Odyssey Dec. 1—29, 2012 at Gallery 2110, part of the Sacramento Art Complex at 2110 K Street.