PREVIOUSLY FEATURED ARTISTS
Laurie Shelton
Laurie Shelton is a longtime Napa Valley resident who grew up near Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was exposed to art at an early age by her mother, and later studied painting at the Academy of Arts in San Francisco. Laurie’s work is often inspired by childhood summers spent at her grandparents’ farm, as can be seen in her paintings of cows, roosters and sheep. She cites Richard Diebenkorn, Pierre Bonnard, Gregory Kondos and Lucien Freud, among others, as having influenced her work. Laurie’s paintings have recently been shown in Napa Valley, Palo Alto and Paris. In addition to painting, Laurie is a vintner, a mom and a wife.
Nancy Willis
Artist Nancy Willis lives and works in the Napa Valley. As a painter/printmaker she works with themes of intimacy and social connection by creating series that examine daily rituals and interior/exterior landscapes. Sparking chandeliers, dreamy beds, or the remains of a dinner party are often used as motifs. Her work explores how color, light and atmosphere can evoke a sense of place.
Willis is currently the artist in residence at the Westin Verasa/Napa through 2021. Her recent group exhibitions include Seen/Unseen in San Francisco and NEXT: Print Matters in Houston, Texas. Willis often responds to global and environmental events with artistic projects, as with Conflict Zone and Savor the Moment, which was an homage to the city of Paris after the 2015 terrorist attacks. After the 2020 Glass fire destroyed much of her neighborhood, she created a series of paintings that recorded the effects of the fire on the forest near her home. She presented the work in Finding Beauty After the Fire at Nimbus Arts for the one-year anniversary of the Glass Fire.
Willis is a vital part of the Napa Valley arts community. Beyond her committed studio practice, Willis has influenced artists and viewers through her teaching and curatorial projects as well as workshops in France and Sundance.
Trevor Mansfield
Trevor Mansfield is a contemporary photographer whose experimental working process results in abstract images which, due to their medium, challenge the viewer to stop and wonder. At first glance, his work often appears completely abstract. It is only after taking time to look closer that an uncanny glimpse of reality emerges. His compulsion to photograph constantly has brought forth a diverse set of works that are unified by his always surreal and abstract style.
Trevor implements meticulous, experimental processes of deconstructing objects, then reconstructing them in order to discover abstract forms. Often using Organic materials or capturing fleeting moments to create these sculptures, an ephemeral state is captured that must be photographed. Light is Reflected, refracted, and absorbed to reveal subjects in an almost other worldly way. This combination of manipulations of form, time, and light creates original forms that challenge viewers to either decipher or imagine what they are seeing.
Trevor has a BA from the Paris College of Art and a studio certification from SPEOS Photography School in Paris. His work has been exhibited at La Bibliotheque Chateau d’Eau, FIAC 2015 in Paris, and at Ne-na Contemporary art space in Chang Mai Thailand. Most recently after completing his residency at the Seoul Foundation of arts and culture in South Korea he has settled in Barcelona, Spain where he currently practices.
Rob Watermeyer
Rob Watermeyer, a native to South Africa, explores his adopted California in order to find common ground with a new culture in a foreign land. Engaging with the patterns and shapes of his local landscape has allowed him to feel at home both inside and out.
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1983. Awarded an Undergraduate in Fine Arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa 2008. Awarded a Masters of Fine Art from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA 2011.
Gordon Studer
Gordon Studer’s earthy, confident abstracts are rooted in his discipline as an award-winning commercial illustrator, lending his work a strong, graphic cadence. The result speaks to liminal experience, interstitial time, and dreamscapes in deliberate forms in black atop a palette of ochre, sky blue, and crushed clays.
Having studied fine art at Penn State, he went on to teach at the California College of the Arts, and enjoyed a 25 year career telling visual stories for Fortune 500 corporate clients and major media outlets. His background is evident as he applies an intentionality to his paintings, delivering on a specific narrative, inviting the viewer to a purposeful encounter.
Based between San Francisco and Los Angeles, California, he once experienced a bout of complete amnesia, allowing him to refresh his perception of the natural world and question concepts such as imagination, dream, and recollection.
Michael Roché
Formally trained as an Architect, Michael has earned a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from UC Davis and a Master of Architecture Degree from UC Berkeley.
He works professionally as a Creative Director and his projects range from Graphic Arts, Branding Strategy to the Built Environment. "The Panel Project" was conceived in 2016 and has continued to develop as an ongoing effort to capture approachable art that touches on nostalgia. Each piece is an original meaning one of one. The compositions are are composed of an iconic image, a color field, a caption and a signature mark with the goal of making only one of each with unique configurations. Most of all they are meant to make people smile. Custom panels have been commissioned for family, friends, wineries and private collectors.
Kelleen Sullivan
As a professional fine artist, Kelleen Sullivan interlaces classical and contemporary ideas into extraordinary forms with her dynamic use of color and light. Her expressionistic world is strong and bold. Reflecting both her passions and classical art training, Kelleen’s work delivers a colorful humane view of the people and accoutrements of daily life. The confluence of this inheritance effectively emerges, in part, in her form-defining use of color, her strong sense of composition and her use of positive and negative space to achieve harmony and balance in her work. From this harmony emerges an aesthetic that is appealing in its raw passion rather than pure form. Light is the artist’s friend, at once capricious and compliant. The artist revels in bright shreds of mottled sunlight, captured in colorful highlights, molding it to her will. Kelleen abandons the line for color. To capture the essence of each situation or object, she develops and continually replays a group of subjects.
Kelleen studied art at the International Academy of Art in Nice, France and at the Brera Art Academy in Milan, Italy. She completed her formal studies at the University of California Davis, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and illustrated the Human Anatomy textbook for the UC premed and medical school curriculum. Outside the United States, Kelleen’s work is held in collections in Brazil, Roma, Oslo, Norway, Bali and Hong Kong.
Sharon Paster
Sharon Paster is an award-winning, Sausalito-based contemporary artist. Her semi-abstractions are based on the Northern California landscape—focusing on the hills, the bay, the beach and its people. She captures their energy working with oil pigment sticks almost exclusively. Using these oils as both drawing and colorful painting tools, she is able to create tension amidst the calm—contrasting the fixed with the fluid—and showcasing the connections that exist just under the surface.
Sharon’s work has been shown at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, as well as in various publications including House Beautiful, Luxe Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, Marin Magazine and the Serena & Lily Catalog. She co-chairs the ICB Sausalito Artists Association board and is a regular contributor to Art for AIDS and the Lymelight Foundation. Sharon is represented by Art in Giving, in Boston, which donates to pediatric cancer research, as well as a number of other galleries throughout the United States.
Andrea Cazares
Andrea RJ Cazares received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the American University of Rome in Italy where she studied religious iconography, art history, and ancient methods of art-making. Her work is influenced by antiquities and spiritual symbolism from multiple cultures that she combines into figurative and natural forms to narrate stories and create beauty.
Andrea works full-time at Nimbus Arts, a non-profit art center in St. Helena, CA, overseeing studio spaces and running inventive classes as an Artist instructor for both children and adults. She brings 9 years of fine art experience in painting, drawing, printmaking, clay sculpting, sewing, majolica, and has a wealth of knowledge regarding art materials and techniques.
William Callnan III
Artwork is the vehicle in which I communicate and share the profound importance of creativity in thought and action. Creative thinking instills a sense of empowerment and fascination in an active engaged viewer. The content of the work deals with the contrasting push and pull of despair and hope in one’s own actions and morality, as well as the world at large. I approach this goal through the juxtaposition of content that is sentimental, satirical, beautiful and macabre. I use all media to attain this aim.
Carmen Deñó
Carmen Deñó is an illustrator from Santo Domingo based in Barcelona, Spain. After more than a decade working in the advertising industry as an art director and graphic designer, she has focused her practice on illustration. She currently works for a wide array of editorial publications. Her work is characterized by bold colors, expressive lines and subtle textures in a visual language that tries to uncover what lies beneath the mundane.
The Baker Sisters
Their current studio, Ehlers Society, is a 1920’s hay barn as described in “American Art Collector,” as “A 6 acre ranch in the sticks with hundred year old houses, trees, rusty cars, fields, a gypsy wagon, a river, and an abundance of talented artists”. From Ehlers Lane, the Sisters along with the collective society of creative’s who frequent the barn, are constantly turning out productions, film, art + fashion shows, music, and stage sets.
The Baker Sisters tend to use similar colors, but all have a consistently distinct tone. Melissa's painting style is most abstract, while Mercedes's is representational, and Anna’s pieces lean into the surreal. Reflections on Napa Valley's landscapes and light, particularly at dusk, inspire each of them to create the unique dreamscapes you see here.
Art and wine naturally go together, according to the Baker Sisters, who have collaborated on large-scale outdoor installations and other works for local wineries, including Flora Springs and The Terraces.
Their collective works demonstrate the sparkling eclectic energy of this Valley, and what a lifetime of exposure to the local elements of nature + art + wine may inspire.