san francisco
(Los Angeles, US)
Jeremy holds a BFA (2001) and MFA (2003) in Drawing and Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is an interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles. His most recent work was shown at the Helen Day Art Center in Vermont and Ever Gold Gallery in San Francisco. Jeremy spends his free time with his 5 year-old son, watching 70’s television, and listening to heavy metal.
Henry Lewis is a San Francisco-based painter/tattooer/graphic designer. In his studio is where Henry sits and paints and smokes cigarette after cigarette, ostensibly for hours and hours every single night, after he leaves Everlasting Tattoo.
Henry's been working almost exclusively in oils over the past year, and has become incredibly adept with the medium. Theres something about oil paint that you cant get with any other paint; it has to do with luminosity. The layers all build on each other and when handled with some skill, the canvas fairly glows. Its also a very subtle medium and difficult to master.
(1990, San Francisco, US)
Sonnenberg’s photographs are sophisticated, poetic, and rebellious, all at the same time. Like the best documentary and street photographers, she captures a brash world and its characters with a style all her own. Her pictures are bold and unmistakably honest. Even when her scenes are obviously posed, the camera is merely incidental to the moment depicted. Perhaps the most important thing in her photographs is the collective experience she captures. When she turns the lens on herself, she becomes her alter ego, Teen Witch — a tagger running wildly through the streets, partying, and sometimes posing for introspective self-portraits. Above all, her photographs incarnate her relationship to the camera.
She shoots almost exclusively with cheap cameras because she tends to break them. But while her shooting process may be overtly careless, her attitude has become integrated into her craft. Unlike most photographers, Sonnenberg shoots entirely with film, and she develops and prints all her work herself. She maintains a small space at Hamburger Eyes, a do-it-yourself photography and darkroom collective in San Francisco’s Mission District that holds exhibitions and offers photography classes to the community. She’s been known to spend all night meticulously printing color photographs with the most basic technology. The results not only are highly composed, but also have the indelible mark of her hand.
Watch Andrea's interview by Vans:
(1978, Berkeley, US)
Through a steady career that has incorporated sculpture, photography and installation, Ala Ebtekar has continually returned to his initial passion of drawing and painting. The artist’s practice is informed by history, Persian mythology, science and philosophy, which he juxtaposes with contemporary and pop-culture elements – the works eventually exhibiting a collision of the past and present in a deconstruction/reconstruction of time and space.
He created his work with neither external themes nor the attention to proper anatomy and perspective. Ebtekar works entirely from his imagination and creative ability. It’s entirely fitting that Ebtekar found early artistic inspiration from the worlds of graffiti and the modern tradition of qahveh khanehei painting, as his work has encompassed comparable populist sensibilities spanning continents, celebrating the stories and lives of heroic everyday people across time.
Watch Ala Ebtekar's interview by KQED:
(1976, Tokyo, Japan)
Akira is an artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. When not creating in the studio, his professional time is spent between exhibiting artwork and teaching painting/drawing. He is a faculty member at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he has taught Fine Art Anatomy and Fashion Illustration. Akira has shown at a variety of venues, mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area, including pop-up shows at the Academy of Science, live painting at the West Inn’s New Year Gala and other similar forms of contemporary exhibition.
Like the art itself, his professional practice stems from his ideas, beliefs and values. Akira's paintings are like tomes for the great spiritual teachers of the past, and also cleverly link contemporary culture with beautiful skills in portraiture. His work is relevant, moving, and powerful – truly spiritual, not upholding any outrageous or inhuman experiences but rather honoring the timeless power of what is here and now.
Watch Akira's Art Opening at The Emerald Tablet:
