THE SURREAL SHOW Featured Artists

OCTOBER 6, 2012 - NOVEMBER 27, 2012

EVENT DETAILS | ARTISTS

Robert R. Bradshaw

Robert R. Bradshaw is a full-time artist of 25 years.

His art education began at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then was pursued at the American Academy of Art, in Chicago. Bradshaw lived in San Francisco for 25 years, owned a retail store called The Obelisk, sold it, and returned to his art work, showing in several galleries and the San Francisco Open Studios. He moved to Carmel, Ca. where he belonged to the Carmel Art Association for 8 years, and then to Palm Springs, where he currently lives.

Robert R. Bradshaw is represented by the Desert Art Collection in Palm Desert, Ca, by the Stephen Archdeacon Gallery, and by J. Howell Fine Arts Gallery in Healdsburg, Ca.

Robert R. Bradshaw is in the Artists Council annual juried show at the Palm Springs Art Museum from Oct. 16 to Dec.9, 2012

Shaktima Brien

Born in Montreal, Canada, Shaktima Brien is a member of The Palm Springs Art Museum Artists Council.

Her first art book Surreal Vision/Paint Life, a monograph featuring an essay by Betty Ann Brown, Ph. D., Art Historian, is just being released at Gallery 446 in a Group Show she curates.

Brien's paintings were shown at the Palm Springs Art Museum three times in the past few years.

After two solo exhibitions in Palm Springs and Los Angeles, Brien wrote and published Angelina and Men (2010), a kunstlerroman on becoming an artist.

In 2008, Brien received an Honorable Mention at the 10th Juried Art Show of the City of Palm Springs,

and in 2004 her tableaux were exhibited at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History for the premiere of Signs of Time. In the 90's, selected pieces by Judy Freeman, Associate Curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, were included in a spiritual art exhibition. Others were sold at the Shirley MacLaine and Whoopi Goldberg Art Auction. Brien has collectors in Europe, Canada and the Unites States.

Charles Ciali

Charles Ciali teaches several workshops a year around the country in both mono-print and encaustic painting in addition to holding open studio time for both mediums at his studio located in Palm Springs. 
a mixed media artist, he has explored the possibilities of different mediums and how they work with each other.
Today Charlie Ciali’s work is primarily monotype prints and encaustic painting.  Monotype prints are prints
pulled form a painting that has been painted on a Plexiglass plate. Only one impression is made from the painted plate. 
The difficulty in this method of work is that the artists is always working in reverse of the final piece, several “drops” of the inked plate may run through the press on one piece until the finished art work is achieved.
Charlie Ciali has served as a Palm Springs City Commissioner on the Parks and Recreation Board and the Palm Springs Public Arts Commission. He currently serves on the Board of Governors for the Palm Springs Museum Artist Council and is an invited instructor frequently at the Museum. In addition he teaches privately in his studio.
He has been a mentor for four years with the Arts Institute of Palm Springs High School and also has served as President of the Board for the Friends of the Arts Institute at Palm Springs High School.

Monica Cuyto

Monica Cuyto is a Peruvian native, board in Lima Bay area. In 2009 she relocated to California, Graduated in 2003 whit a degree in Marketing, She attended Plastic Art in the School Bellas Artes de Lima Peru in 2006. She works Abstracts, landscaping and Erotic Styles.

William Dey Danovsky

I began my career working as a fashion stylist in Chicago. Later, I moved to New York City,
where I worked for 12 years alongside some of the best photographers in the fashion industry.
During that period I was encouraged by professionals I knew to take advantage of my affinity
for photography and visual composition.

As soon as I began experimenting with the camera, I knew I had found my creative muse.
I began with portraits of fashion models initially, but after relocating to Palm Springs
several years ago, I felt compelled to begin shooting all the other beautiful things here
in the desert, such as Mid-Century Modern architecture, classic cars, and the ever-changing
visual scope of the desert itself. I love the desert lifestyle, and very much enjoy shooting
in the Palm Springs area, even including it as a backdrop in my portraiture and fashion shots.
My photographic work continues to evolve through further exploration of the visual medium.

I am also involved in helping many charities through my work, including Friends of Palm Springs
Animal Shelter, the Palm Desert American Heart Association, The Living Desert, and many others.
am also a member of the Artists Council at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

easures and self-realizations.

Shahram Farshadfar

Shahram Farshadfar believes that laughter overrides fear at the subconscious level. “I confront societies with their own taboos by expressing myself through my artworks joyfully, beautifully, radically and humorously. I promote love and peace dynamically and view life beyond Iconic behavior aka Human behavior.” References: Abraham & Sarah, Ra, Ramses, Moses & Sapura, Mithra, Zarathustra, Josef, Mary & Jesus, Buddha & Quan Yin, Mohammad & Fatima, Shams & Rumi, Shinto & Omikami. Organizations: Artists Council Board of Governors Palm Springs Art Museum 2007-2009.

Michael Hinkle

I have been chasing the art my entire life. As a young boy growing up in the Palm Springs area I remember being pulled out of school for day trips to Los Angeles area museums. I was obsessed with cartoons, drawing, photography, television, and magazines. My parents encouraged my creative side and supported my need to express myself by buying art supplies and letting me turn my bedroom into an artists studio littered with drawings, magazine clippings, and experimental works-in-progress.
I have been modeling for photographers for over 20 years and have collected a catalogue of images that
I often use for my self-portrait figurative paintings. Most of the early paintings were experimental, but from my first piece to the latest work, whether figurative, floral, or architectural they are all connected and involve a similar process. Words like love, and symbols such as my birth year (1969 and 69), tally marks, and my initials are reoccurring graffiti-like elements in all of the paintings.
The paintings are moments in time and they are autobiographical. 
The process of creating the imagery and making a new painting is unpredictable. I have to approach the ideas with the understanding that I need to be open to allowing the unknown to guide me. I feel lucky when a new work is completed because many things need to fall into place for it to be right and balanced.
My art attempts to spin artifacts of memory, censorship, and eroticism into impressions of dynamic beautiful obfuscation. Inspiration for my paintings is derived from the human body, architecture, photography, color, lines, rhythm, nature, media, and aspects of contemporary culture. The paintings are multilayered and complicated, just like us. I am trying to push the boundaries, and create something new and interesting as a presentation of the world I live in.

Timothy Kroe

Timothy Kroe is a visionary artist and writer who grew up in Wichita, KS and has lived in the desert for 10 years. He has exhibited his work numerous times in Palm Springs, as well as in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Provincetown, and Idyllwild.
Timothy graduated from Antioch College in Seattle with a degree in Archetypal Imagery.
He is also credited with writing three novels, and is currently adapting one of them for the screen. He now enjoys the year-round sunshine in Palm Springs, CA.

Gary Patterson

I was born in upstate New York, and I have lived in New York state, Illinois, and in California – Bay Area and Palm Springs. While I have always painted, spells of full-time painting were sandwiched between jobs in retail (College of Arts & Crafts, Macy’s), advertising (VP of a small agency, Macy’s again), web printing (sales), and in event coordination (Palm Springs Art Museum).
I am a self-taught painter, and have exhibited in shows across the country, including many group shows and also solo shows ranging from a bookstore in Berkeley, to the Hanger One Vodka distillery in Alameda, to the lobby of a large office building in San Francisco, at Gallerie Mystere in Palm Springs,
and at Willo North Gallery in Phoenix in 2011. I have won several awards in art competitions.
My work is in collections across the country and in France.

Bret Philpot

Los Angeles born artist Bret Philpot creates acrylic based paintings that visually ride the fence
between organic earthiness and urban aggression; a contradiction he embraces.  His themes can range
from personal spirituality to organized religions to political injustice.  Philpot has a lot going on
beyond his desert studio, whether boldly painting live at a music festival in front of a few thousand
people or photographing graffiti in Damascus, Syria, he lives life in full volume.  Perhaps The Desert Sun said it best; “Stale. Boring. Common. Three terms you will never hear associated with Bret Philpot’s paintings”. “Bret’s paintings are insightful. It’s intelligent art. A methodic arrangement of chaos and urban consciousness, with finesse thrown in for good measure”.  –The Desert Sun, Palm Springs

Jorge Sicre

This Cuban-born artist grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Sicre (born 1958) attended the University of California, Riverside, and then received a B.A. in art history from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1980. Sicre is an artist of Picassian range and artistic invention. A true figlio d árte, he is the only grandson of the author of the giant Marti monument in Havana's Plaza De La Revolución, Juan Jose Sicre, who was credited by contemporary encyclopedia for introducing modernism to Cuban art. His cousin, Antonio Gattorno, led the Avant Garde ("Los Once"). He was active in the Philadelphia arts scene during the mid-1980s before moving back to southern California in 1985. His oils and watercolors have been exhibited in New York, France, Italy, Philadelphia, California, Florida, Mexico, and South America. He lives in Desert Hot Springs, California. Sicre's imagistic work spans every idiom from abstraction to classicism but is at its root fed by the fountainhead of modernity; the mythic world of 19th century symbolism which sought what Paul Gauguin called "The mysterious source of human thought.” A protégé of deconstructionist philosopher Derida, Greg Lambert compares Sicre's art with philosophy of Kant and introduced his images to an array of significant other philosophers and writers, many of whom found a resonance and even a device which helps clarify the focus of their own work.

William Webster

Art critics have noted the spirit of Jackson Pollock’s style that flows through the work of Palm Springs artist William O. Webster but in an uncanny twist of fate, it’s not just Abstract Expressionism that these two “action painters” have in common. Both were in horrific accidents: Webster lived. We know Pollock did not.

During the two hours when William was clinically dead on a hospital gurney he saw and communicated with the Divine through the language of vibrant technicolor unknown on earth. Thus, spiritually and artistically, he became consumed with a new passion for color — color as an aspect of the Divine that he had experienced for himself and lives to share with others.

When Webster awoke out of his two day coma, he had one question: Who am I? His search for the answer is this show. We can see in his pieces where he grapples with his blocks in an ocean storm scenario or slips into the bliss of his opened heart. His search evokes our empathy for we feel his uncertainty, humility, anger, faith and surrender through his painting. In exquisite irony, Jackson Pollock entitled his very last work, “Search”.

In the spirit of Pollock and for all of us, Webster, through the series of paintings encompassing this show, takes us on the ultimate journey— the search for the true Self. This series of works can be viewed as if they were movie stills. Webster’s goal, upon graduating with honors in Art from Cass Technical High School in Detroit, was to move to California and work as an animator for Disney. He didn’t get the job. But now, years later, he is working as an animator for the Divine.