Morganne Newsom is used to seeing her work in the spotlight. As a costume designer, she's worked with television, film and theatrical productions. She's dressed Burt Lancaster for a production of "Barnum" and designed a wardrobe that singer Britney Spears asked to keep after wearing it for an episode of a Disney Channel television series.
On Sunday, however, it was Newsom herself taking center stage, as the dresses, scarves and other items she created were on display for the Industrial Center Building's 43rd annual Open Studios event.
"I've done a lot of things for a lot of productions," Newsom said. "This is an opportunity to get my own, original work out there."
The weekend-long event turned the World War II-era building into a gallery for more than 80 painters, sculptors, photographers and designers of all varieties. Some had worked and presented at the Sausalito art center for decades. Others, like Newsom, were more recent arrivals seeking a space to show off their latest work.
"This is my amulet dress," Newsom said, presenting a mesh dress decorated with dozens of tiny dangling medallions. "A neighbor of mine loves to travel, and came back from Tibet with all of these amulets.
"It's a very charged dress," Newsom added.
Photographer E. Loren Soderberg, who shares a studio with painters Ann Turner and Peggy Garlinghouse, considers himself one of the old guard. He's been working at his ICB studio since 1986, a time when most of his neighbors were struggling artists doing their best to make the rent, he said.
These days, he said, ICB's profile has grown, and the rent is much higher, Soderberg said. But the artists — especially during the last three years of recession — are still struggling.
"It used to be that we'd have this yearly art sale, and that would enable me to pay my rent for the year," Soderberg said. "It's not the same any more. Last year, my sales were down $2,000."
Soderberg says he has to spend more time marketing his work online in order to make a living. He's also had to reconsider the focus of his work. Many of his older photographs showcase Soderberg's love of travel: remote canyons, dazzling seascapes, vistas glimpsed from foreign shores. These days, circumstances require Soderberg to stay closer to home.
"It's a wonderful opportunity to live and work in Marin County, even if I can't really afford to be here," Soderberg said. "At this point, I can hardly afford to leave."
Soderberg's attention to his own backyard has paid dividends. His photograph of the underside of a pier near Fort Mason was a top prizewinner at the Marin County Fair. While the image itself is striking, it's Soderberg's presentation — placing one stepped layer of the photograph on top of another to create a three-dimensional effect — that really makes the picture stand out, turning the waters beneath the pier into the passageway to some otherworldly portal.
Just a few feet away, on the other side of the studio, publicist Lizzie Garlinghouse is studying a portrait of herself, her two sisters and the family cat painted by her mother, artist Peggy Garlinghouse.
Though she knew that Peggy sketched from time to time — and had doodled images of the saints in her parochial school notebook as a girl — Lizzie Garlinghouse said she never thought of her mother as an artist until about ten years ago, when her youngest sister graduated from college, and her mother could turn her full attention to her art.
没有评论:
发表评论