“La Jungla”

Bay Area fine artist and designer Sarah Soward has been working for over ten years, creating Web and print designs, as well as editing technical guides and teaching design theory and software skills at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC). She animates, she codes, she scripts. And she also paints endangered rhinos.

“It’s a love story. There’s no better way to explain it,” she says. “I’ve been painting rhinos off and on and in fits and starts for over a decade. I love them: Their shapes and negative spaces, their wrinkles and horns, the hairy ones, the armored ones, the stoic ones rolling in mud. In the beginning, it was about the horns and ferocity. Now it’s about the attitude, the ears, and the toes. The first paintings were made because a friend needed a wedding present. Her love of [the rhinos] became my love of them.”

Soward’s rhino series, “Rhinotopia,” came about because her working method involves both research and metaphor. “I learn through painting — and I like to share what I learn,” says Soward. “My reasons for painting rhinos are fairly straightforward. My reasons for painting them the way I do is a little more esoteric. I like to overthink things. It’s fun for me.”

In an effort to try to save the endangered rhino in real life, Soward donates a percentage of the sales of each rhino painting to the International Rhino Foundation. “In an effort to make them immortal and, therefore, figuratively beyond the reach of extinction, these rhino paintings tie into and embody different powers, deities, and archetypes,” Soward explains. “The titles of the paintings come from songs that further illustrate the concept on the canvas.”

A selection of Soward’s rhino paintings will go on disply in a nature-focused group exhibition called “La Jungla,” opening on February 1, at the Wonderland SF Gallery and Boutique in San Francisco’s Mission district, a place for emerging Bay Area fashion designers, painters, photographers to get discovered and celebrated by the public at large.

The “La Jungla” show not only features Soward’s paintings, but also work by artists Alec Huxley, Felicia Ann, Irene M. Feiks, Jasper Thomas, Juniper Harrower, Johnny Ringo, Kate Daily, Maggie Hurley, Mark Campbell, Melanie Alves, Ryan Jones, Steve Javiel, Yvette Buigues and Xiau-Fong Wee.

Hanson Digital created exhibition-quality digital captures of a number of Soward’s most recent paintings in the rhino series using the Betterlight scanning back system. The files were then color corrected and matched to the original artwork for a variety of future uses.

La Jungla: Feb. 1 through the end of March; opening reception February 3, 2012, 6pm-10pm @ Wonderland SF, 2929 24th Street (between Florida and Alabama) San Francisco, CA 94110. Call (415) 641-4600 for more information.

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Sarah Soward
Wonderland SF

Located just outside Havana, the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte (National Art Schools) were a product of the Cuban Revolution. Created by three architects who had hoped to reinvent architecture just as the revolution hoped to reinvent society, the school and its architects unfortunately fell into disfavor with the new regime and was abandoned. The school’s complex of brick and terra-cotta Catalan-vaulted structures was left to be swallowed by greenery and nearly forgotten.

That is, until the publication of John Loomis’ landmark book Revolution of Forms: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools.

An architect, scholar, and teacher as well as author, Loomis first published Revolution of Forms: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools in 1998 through Princeton Architectural Press. The book examined the architectural design for the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte as a companion to the ideology and culture of 1960s Cuba. Revolution of Forms not only revived interest in a forgotten bit of history, but brought international attention to the structures that eventually caused the Cuban government to re-evaluate the school’s cultural significance and to commit to the preservation and restoration of the complex.

The book also played an important part in the creation of Unfinished Spaces, a documentary film by Alysa Nahmias, and inspired a series of installations by Cuban artist Felipe Dulzaides, most notably Utopía Posible, as well as “Next Time It Rains,” and “Broken Glass.” Additionally, the book has become the basis for an upcoming opera, produced by Charles Koppelman and with Robert Wilson as director.

A prolific writer and lecturer on the subjects of architecture and urban design, Loomis has spoken at Harvard University, Stanford University, The Getty Center, Columbia University, the Graham Foundation, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Instituto Superiore di Architettura di Venezia. For his work on Revolution of Forms, he received an award from the World Monuments Fund and chaired the 2002 ACSA International Conference, “Architecture, Culture, and the Challenges of Globalization – Havana /La Habana.”

Loomis recently updated Revolution of Forms for a new generation of architects, with a new preface and epilogue, and a revised chronology. Hanson Digital drum-scanned Loomis’ collection of original 35mm slides taken on-site at the complex, and color-corrected the images for inclusion in the updated edition.

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Revolution of Forms
Buy the book

Kathryn Siegler is a painter who is irresistibly drawn to artifacts of the past. “I have always been fascinated and obsessed with life from a bygone era. There is something both comforting and mysterious about things from an earlier time,” she says in her artist’s statement. “A sense of history and nostalgia, and the feelings that invokes, speaks to me. Black and white films of the 1940s were one of my earliest visual influences; a stylized, dramatically lit world that was overwhelming with details. It has always been about the details.”

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Siegler carried influences from both photography and graphic design into her paintings, using photographs to collect images of objects and locations that appealed to her, and her graphic design sensibility to detect particular significances in the shapes and ideas expressed through typefaces and text. Seen through Siegler’s eyes and paintbrush, old neon signs and vintage packaging can take on special dimensions of meaning.

Siegler is represented by ADLER&Co. Gallery, which specializes in “modern and contemporary art by both masters and accomplished mid career artists,” and which also represents contemporary artists such as David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and Vassily Kadinsky. Her work is collected internationally: LUXE magazine devoted an article to (now former) San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s penthouse, in which Siegler’s painting “U and I” occupies a prominent position above the chocolate-brown sofas in the media room.

Siegler’s work is also displayed in the public collection of the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and for the past several years, she has exhibited paintings at the Fine Art Dealers Association Annual Los Angeles Art Show, an event held at the Los Angeles Convention Center for art dealers, gallery owners, and collectors.

Hanson Digital has worked with Siegler to create high-quality reproductions of her artwork, starting with reproduction-grade 4×5 transparencies of her original paintings. Drum scans of the transparencies are then carefully color-matched to the originals, creating files that can then be used for advertisements, Web site use, or fine art Gicleé prints on paper or canvas.

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Adler & Co
Kathryn Siegler

“From the Road”

Darren Samuelson had an idea that led to a unique Do It Yourself project: he created a camera to fit the film he’d wanted to use.

A sushi chef by day with a longtime interest in photography, Samuelson had been experimenting with large-format cameras, but with the declining availability of sheet film, cost was becoming an issue. He’d heard about photographers working with X-ray film – a tricky material, even for an experienced darkroom photographer, but cheaper than commercial photographic film – and decided to try it. Instead of cutting the sheets down to fit his existing cameras, though, he decided to try to build a camera that would be large enough to fit the 3-foot film sheets.

What he’d set out to make was a view camera – an old-fashioned, bellows-equipped, sheet-fed, cloth-over-the-head style of the sort used by Ansel Adams and other great film photographers of history – only much larger. Huge cameras have certainly existed before, such as George R. Lawrence’s camera for photographing trains, reportedly the largest in the world, but for what Samuelson wanted to do there was no exact equivalent. He had to start from scratch.

The eventual custom-built camera took over six months to construct, involving a hand-cut bellows (which he had to remake after the first try turned out to have been mis-measured), and solving problems along the way such as lightproofing areas of his apartment to use as darkroom space. Building pump-driven developing tanks for the huge film sheets (after finding out that developing trays at that size were simply impractical) and light-safe paper boxes for sheets cut down from a mural paper roll to use for contact prints took almost as long. All told, it was a year’s worth of work to get the camera up and running and ready to create images.

With the camera ready and (most) of the technical issues worked out, Samuelson took his creation, nicknamed “The Beast,” on an odyssey across America to shoot scenic monuments and other points of interest. His road trip and the camera drew the attention of onlookers, police (the size of the camera and the length of time needed at each location couldn’t help but prompt questions, especially in one memorable instance in New York), and the media. He’s been interviewed by Popular Science, MAKE magazine and PC World as well as local media at his various destinations, such as New Orleans’ Times-Picayune and his home base of San Francisco’s KGO (ABC channel 7).

Although the images produced from these shoots could easily be enlarged to wall-sized murals without losing sharpness, no darkroom enlarger big enough to create such prints currently exists. (Perhaps another DIY project for the future?) Instead, Samuelson creates contact prints from his negatives for display, and Hanson Digital worked with Samuelson to adapt some of his images into digital format for various promotional uses.

A solo exhibition of Samuelson’s work, “From the Road: Experiments in Ultra Large Format Film Photography,” opens on August 20 at the Inclusions Gallery in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood.

Darren Samuelson From the Road: Experiments in Ultra Large Format Film Photography: August 20 – September 18, 2011; Inclusions Gallery, 627 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco; artist’s reception on August 20 @ 6-8 pm; discussion/Q&A session on August 25 @ 7-9 pm.

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Darren’s Great Big Camera
Darren Samuelson
Inclusions Gallery

Shopping for a nice gift? Why not support a good cause while you’re at it? The Birth Bills Project is an online auction created on behalf of David and Amy Nyquist, after the unexpected cancellation of their health insurance left them with nearly $12,000 in medical expenses following the birth of their second child, Samuel. A group of friends, neighbors, business owners, and artists came together as a community to rally around the couple, donating talents, services, and products, in hopes of raising at least $5,000 to help offset David and Amy’s medical expenses.

A variety of artists and businesses donated a wide range products and services to the project. Services available for bids include everything from salon haircuts, massages, dog walks, babysitting, and dance lessons, to photographic portrait sessions, custom landscaping and aerial tours of the Bay Area. You can also bid on original works of art, from jewelry to paintings, or a matted photograph by Hanson Digital’s owner Mark Hanson.

You can view a selection of the items offered for sale on the Birth Bills Project site. Whether you’re looking for ukelele lessons or a tax preparer, the site has more than a few surprises in store, and of course, it’s all for a good cause.

All proceeds from the auction will go directly to David and Amy for medical expenses; labor on the project is entirely on a volunteer basis, and all auction items have been donated at no cost. The auction begins on 8:00 am on Thursday, July 28 and ends at 8:00 pm on Friday, August 5.

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Birth Bills Project

Palm Avenue Pop-Up Art Shop

Pelham Houchin III is an artist with a very personal vision. An accomplished painter who has created background environments and textures for video games such as MySims Kingdom, The Sims Medieval and James Bond: From Russia with Love, his personal work contains all the fine details and painterly technique of realistic landscapes. The imagery, however, leans toward the fantastic and surreal, with floating jellyfish, mysterious forest creatures, dreamlike visions of outer space and unusual plant life.

Pelham’s work will be exhibited during the month of July as part of the Palm Avenue Pop-Up Art Shop in San Mateo, California. A monthly showcase for San Francisco Bay Area contemporary artists co-produced by Pierson 20th Century Design and Red Square Boutique, the Palm Avenue Pop-Up Art Shop takes place on the first Thursdays of each month, with opening receptions from 6 pm to 9 pm.

Additional artists to be featured in the July exhibition include Jean Tripier, Murphy Adams, Kurt Lackner and Dannell Powell.

To create digital versions of the artist’s paintings for print reproductions and Web site use, Hanson Digital produced high-quality digital captures of the artwork using our Betterlight scanning back system, as well as archival 4×5 films and drum scans. The files were then carefully color-corrected to match the originals, and museum-quality giclée prints were created on an archival fine art paper.

Palm Avenue Pop-Up Art Shop: opening reception on July 7th from 6 pm to 9 pm, 1628 and 1630 Palm Avenue, San Mateo, CA.

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Pelham Houchin III
Palm Avenue Pop-Up Art Shop (Facebook Event Page)
Pierson 20th Century Design

Corisca: The Island of Beauty / Corse: l’Isle de Beauté

Mara Gahagan has been drawing and painting all her life. Her brother, the late visionary painter, Brian Gahagan, was a huge influence on the young Mara and some of her earliest memories include creating artwork together with Brian.

Though Gahagan’s painting style is distinctly her own, her choice of subject matter shares some of her brother’s interests in international travel and observations of natural and man-made environments.

Born in Marlborough, England, the Irish-American Gahagan grew up primarily in Michigan. She was awarded the School of Art and Architecture Scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she graduated with honors. An award-winning artist and designer, Gahagan published her first limited edition at twenty-one, which was exhibited at the New York Art Expo. Since then, her work has been published internationally and featured in exhibitions in Washington D.C, San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.

In September 2010, Gahagan directed a painting workshop in Corsica. While in the area, she took the opportunity to travel across the island on her own, painting watercolors of the coastal landscapes and seaside living spaces.

Hanson Digital created high-quality digital scans of Gahagan’s artwork from this series to create a series of reproduction giclée prints, which were printed on archival fine art paper.

The original paintings from the Corsica collection are on exhibit during the month of July, 2011, at the Alliance Française, 1345 Bush Street, San Francisco.

Corisca: The Island of Beauty / Corse: l’Isle de Beauté: through July, 2011, at the Alliance Française, 1345 Bush Street, San Francisco, CA.

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Mara Gahagan
Alliance Française

One of the most famous photographers of sharks and whales on the planet, Amos Nachoum has won multiple awards, including BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year. His photos and essays have appeared in National Geographic, Time, Life, The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Le Figaro, Terra Sauvage, Airone, Mondo Somerso, Der Spiegel, Unterwasser, among many others, as well as the books The Living Ocean, The World of Nature, and Oceans. He’s led National Geographic expedition teams and photo expeditions; he’s co-produced documentaries; and he was co-founder of Israel’s Marine National Park on the Red Sea.

A champion of large marine life in particular, his presentation at the annual TedX Conejo 2011 Conference in Los Angeles tackled popular myths about the dangers of sharks, orcas and other ocean creatures, and how such fears affect the ecosystem.

His most recent photographic adventure was a visit Sri Lanka to document the Pygmy Blue whales, a trip that he and other wildlife photographers had waited 28 years for, until the ending of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009). The BBC, National Geographic, Scuba Zoo and Nachoum’s own BigAnimals expeditions all descended on the country February through April, 2011 to take advantage of the whales’ seasonal activity, in this first chance to photograph the whale population in the Bay of Bengal for decades.

While smaller than the giant Blue Whale, Pygmy Blue Whales are still enormous animals which can easily reach a size of 60 feet in length. It’s easy to imagine how impressive such a creature must look up close!

To swim so close the whales requires a great deal of patience, stopping the expedition boat’s engines as soon as a whale is sighted, and from there it’s all free swimming and diving – no scuba tanks. Hanson Digital worked with Amos to optimize his digital images from this expedition for a feature in Sport Diver Magazine, as well as for the photographer’s own Web site and blog.

When not otherwise doing any of the above, or appearing on television, or speaking at conferences about ocean conversation, Nachoum personally leads small, intimate groups on voyages around the world to experience whales and other wildlife as up-close and personally as he does. The groups are kept small in order to adhere to the principles of eco-tourism and lessen the environmental impact on the animals.

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“Finding Jake Lee”

It’s a modern-day detective story: of missing paintings found, an artist rediscovered, and a piece of San Francisco cultural history restored.

The history of the paintings begins in 1959, when famed restaurateur Johnny Kan had commissioned a series of 12 watercolor paintings by artist Jake Lee celebrating Chinese-America history. Lee (1915-1991) was a commercial artist and teacher who worked in watercolors, blending the look of traditional Chinese painting with California scenery. He was a frequent cover artist for Automobile Club of Southern California’s member magazine, Westways, from the 1950s to the 1970s, creating California landscapes and scenes of Chinese-American culture.

For Kan’s, Lee painted scenes of daily life for early Chinese immigrants: hard-working railroad workers in the Sierra Nevadas; scenes from in San Francisco’s Chinatown such as the New Year’s lion dance; workers in factories making cigars, wine, lanterns, and butchering pigs; and the 1888 champion Chinese fire-hose team of Deadwood, South Dakota. These paintings decorated the private Gum Shan (”Gold Mountain”) dining room in the landmark Kan’s Restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown for more than 20 years, but disappeared from public view sometime in the 1980s.

The paintings had vanished so thoroughly that nothing more was know about their fate until The Chinese Historical Society of America received an email in 2010 about a Pasadena auction where 11 of the original set of 12 paintings were being offered for sale.

Moving quickly, the CHSA raised drummed up donations for funds to bid on the paintings, hoping to reunite the collection and return them to their original home of San Francisco. The Society was successful in recovering seven paintings through the auction, the remaining four going to a Southern California collector of Lee’s art. Then, a day later, the missing 12th painting – the Deadwood fire-hose team – was found as well, and the CHSA snapped it up, for a total of eight of the original set.

But the story is far from over: a painstaking process of restoration still lay ahead for the paintings, which had been removed from their frames over the years and had suffered warping and blooms of mildew. Working with Zukor Art Conservation of Oakland, CA, the CHSA had the paintings carefully restored. Hanson Digital photographed the artwork in both “before” and “after” states on 4×5 archival transparency film, and made drum scans of the films to be used for giclee reproductions.

Founded in 1963, CHSA is the oldest and largest organization in the country dedicated to the documentation, preservation, and presentation of Chinese American history and culture. The museum is located in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in the old YWCA-building that was designed by architect Julia Morgan.

For her herculean work in securing the paintings, as well as other contributions to cultural diversity, Exhibition Director Sue Lee was hailed by KQED as a Local Hero in 2010, as seen this YouTube video.

The paintings are on display through September 16, 2011. A 32-page catalog of the exhibit, Finding Jake Lee: The Paintings at Kan’s, written by Gordon Chang, a Professor of History at Stanford University, is also available.

Finding Jake Lee: exhibition on display through September 16, 2011 @ the Chinese Historical Society of America, 965 Clay Street, San Francisco, CA 94108; Tuesday-Friday 12-5 pm, Saturdays 11 am-4 pm; $5 admission (reduced rates for Students, Seniors, and Children), free for CHSA members and children under 5.

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“History’s Shadow”

David Maisel is a photographer fascinated by the artifacts of time and nature. His previous photographic series, many of them revolving around aerial photography of sites such as Mount Saint Helens and The Great Salt Lake, have documented the large-scale imprint of nature on the landscape. But recently, his attention has been drawn to a smaller scale: in “Library of Dust,” Maisel photographed copper canisters that stored the unclaimed cremains of thousands of patients who’d died in an Oregon psychiatric hospital between 1883 and the 1970s. The images of canisters, blooming with multicolored corrosions and mineral deposits, are haunting to say the least.

“History’s Shadow,” Maisel’s latest series, is also a collection of artifacts, this time of historic art. During a residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, Maisel was able to view the museum’s library of x-rays of the items in their permanent collection, and found them to be oddly compelling. Selecting images from the Getty collection and also from the archives of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Maisel then transferred the images from the original x-rays onto color film. The print editions he created from these new films show the hidden interiors of sculptural forms to an audience beyond art historians and conservationists for what may be the first time.

Selected prints from the “History’s Shadow” series will be go on display at Haines Gallery in San Francisco starting April 6, his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Working directly with Maisel and his studio, Hanson Digital created a series of museum-quality large format prints for the exhibit on an archival fiber-base paper stock.

In time, Maisel hopes to develop this series even further, in collaborations with museums around the world. Meanwhile, the images are also collected in a new monograph, History’s Shadow, by David Maisel, soon to be published by Nazraeli Press (the publisher is taking preorders for a projected June release), which includes a short story by Jonathan Lethem.

History’s Shadow: April 6 – June 4, 2011 @ Haines Gallery, 49 Geary Street, Suite 540, San Francisco, CA; opening reception with the artist on Thursday, April 7, 5:30 to 7:30pm.

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David Maisel
Haines Gallery