INTRODUCTIONS

Introductions

Sarah Morejohn • Neal Novak • Paula Valenzuela January 10th – February 28th, 2023

Bryant Street Gallery is pleased to present Introductions, a three-person show featuring new gallery artists: Sarah Morejohn, Neal Novak, and Paula Valenzuela. We are delighted to showcase these artists and the fresh infusions of color, shape, and line that they bring to our walls. Introductions will be on view from January 10th to February 28th, 2023. Bryant Street Gallery and the artists invite the public to join us for the opening reception on Saturday, January 21st from 3-5 p.m.

Sarah Morejohn is an Oregon-born, Oakland-based artist whose practice is an exploration of wonder. Inspired by patterns in nature, Morejohn’s works are made out of dizzying flurries of flowers, branches, snowflakes, cells, and storms. They shift between phenomena, never quite one single thing, blurring the line between micro and macro.

Originally from Dallas, then Baton Rouge, and now Tucson, Neal Novak’s paintings reflect the landscapes and waterways of the Gulf South. Novak makes extensive use of layering paint in order to convey a particular mood. Peer into his fields of color to glimpse the shapes and lines underneath, the complex experience of the landscape shimmering through.

Paula Valenzuela is a Chilean artist who lives and works in Sausalito, CA. Her art explores the inner self and the meeting point between conscious and subconscious, reality and daydreams. Like Novak, Valenzuela’s process involves many layers of application. As a result, her nature-inspired forms echo landscapes receding into the horizon.

Introductions will be on display at 532 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301 from January 10th to February 28th. Stop by to explore nature, place, and self through the lines and brushstrokes of our new artists. For more images and information please visit the website at www.bryantstreet.com or email us at bryantst@mac.com.

Sarah Morejohn

My fascination of non-linear patterns in nature drives my work. I consider how our relationship to nature is mediated both by our objective understanding and our subjective imaging of it. I think of how wonder is important to our connection to the world.

In 2020 I began exploring drawing intuitively in a sketchbook. Drawing in this way, or really doodling, allowed me to go beyond trying to render or "copy" things I observe. It allowed me empathize and imagine a narrative or event that I wouldn't be able to witness otherwise. Bridging the gap between what I know and what I feel, the transparency in the making of a drawing through doodling is a way to understand my imagined relationship to nature. Engaging in this mode of drawing lets small decisions and chance affect the outcome of my work.

After experiencing a historic blizzard, I began making drawings based on snow crystals and their intricate structures. Snowflakes are not symmetrical; they are smushed together or broken apart by the time they fall to the earth. Perfect snow crystals are rare. I learned this as I grappled with the grief of having chronic illnesses, and snow crystals became a metaphor for the body. A perfectly functioning body is equally rare. Flaws and mistakes became central to the drawings, as I embraced them rather than abandoning them.

Imagining different registers of time the beginning bloom of snow crystals within clouds, the fall in a storm, and the aftermath I gather up microscopic and macroscopic relationships in my drawings. I think of how these things affect and depend on each other things break but the breaking creates new growth. Complex patterns and relationships give rise to the unexpected, catalyzing into the viewer to a state of wonder. I find that wonder is a salve to grief, depression, and worry. Wonder allows you to wander elsewhere.

Words have recently tucked themselves into the elbows of lines and secreted among passages in my drawings. While I began a dedicated sketchbook practice during the pandemic, I noticed a pattern of words that formed reassuring and bewildering phrases. Finding acceptance for what cannot change is a huge labor, and one that I seldom succeed at doing well. The words are the things I want the most, behind each leaf, cluster of raindrops, bit of frost growing bolder.

Although my work is shaped by my recent personal hurdles, my interest in nature and looking spans years. Learning about nature is difficult in this time of endless ecological problems and drastic climate change. Looking deeply and being immersed in details decenters the self and becomes restorative. My work is a search for connection through wonder.

I am a self-taught artist interested in conveying depth, serenity, and fluidity in my painting. Line, color, and shape inform my approach, but ultimately a painting for me only works when it captures a particular mood. I want my art to engage and even challenge the viewer, requiring them to retrace the steps I took during the creative process.

I usually approach a canvas with a particular endpoint in mind. After each session, I examine the work, reevaluate my goals, and sketch out on paper my new vision for the painting. A particular work may go through dozens of iterations before a final version emerges. A quote from Richard Diebenkorn, which I keep in my studio, serves as a reminder that painting is a journey that requires both imagination and dedication: “I can never accomplish what I want only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.”

Ideally, the end product is surprising and familiar all at once. I consider a painting a success when I’m able to find the right balance between these two competing ideas.