Kathleen Dustin
Part of my job as an artist is to pay attention, and so for 30 years I have been paying attention to the stages in my life and those of women around me, to the lives of women in the exotic places where I’ve lived, and now to the quiet life I live and the natural world around me. The imagery of my work comes from taking a deep look at my life, responding to it, and expressing it so that it strikes a cord in someone else too, encouraging them to pay attention.

In my past work, I’ve paid attention to my personal day-to-day life as a “house-wife/mother” by reinterpreting it into a series of “Housewife Queens”. Then I paid attention to the material culture of women in the developing country where we lived for 4 years by making a series of “Village Women Purses”. Later I paid attention to my personal emotional life in a series of purses with women’s faces where I also included biblical scripture on the back of a purse, which was relevant to the facial expression.

More recently, I’ve been paying attention to the shapes, color shifts, and repetition of the small mundane elements in the woods, such as seed pods, buds, moss, grasses, leaves, sticks and stones. Then I strive to reinterpret the natural world by making an object on a different scale based on what I find. My hope is that it causes someone to pay attention to a tiny seed pod or to the repetition of grass under ones feet, to pay attention to the small mundane things (and maybe even people) in one’s life.

Anne Laddon
Color and design have been my focus in art for over 30 years … Always a “color junkie” I push color to the limits and look for energy and confidence in my brushwork. The immediacy of pastels allow me to create quick studies in unlikely locations. Capturing these spontaneous moments present challenges that I later address in my studio. Currently I enjoy creating large oils on location pushing perspective and space."

In 1984 she moved to California's Central Coast and opened a studio gallery in Cambria where she continued to create limited editions, monotypes, and handmade paper. She exhibited her work in New York each year at the International Art Expo there, as well as in galleries in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. In 1990 she began to study oil painting and by the mid nineties was hooked on "plein air painting" which she continues today.

I live in a beautiful small town, Paso Robles, in California's central coast with Rolling hills, oak trees, coastal breezes, exquisite landscape. It has transformed itself in the past ten years from an Ag community of cattle, horses and almonds into the "new Napa" with the rapidly growing wine industry. I've been a professional artist, printmaker and oil painter, all my life and although I have loved living in the community there has not been a place for the visual arts. In the premier central location on our park is a 1930 automotive showroom, vacant since the 2003 earthquake. This 9600 sq. ft. building is the perfect location for the visual arts, for open studios, workshops, and educational programs. My ten years of experience in the 1970s as one of the founding artists of an art center in Alexandria Virginia, the Torpedo Factory Art Center, It has given me the vision and confidence to create a non profit organization, design the new venue, interview artists, arts and educational organizations, and work with the city and community to make Studios on the Park a reality…Please visit our website at www.studiosonthepark.org and come visit us in California!"

Barbara Rachko
The Black Paintings series of pastel-on-sandpaper paintings grew out of my Domestic Threats series (which reached a conclusion after approximately fifteen years). The new series continues my use of Mexican and Guatemalan folk art—masks, carved wooden animals, papier mâché figures, and toys—as surrogates for human beings acting in highly-charged narratives. But now the figures (actors) take central stage. All background details, furniture, rugs, etc. have been eliminated and are replaced with a dark black background.

The initial idea for Black Paintings emerged from my study of jazz history, especially Miles Davis’ modification of bebop into cool jazz. In bebop the notes are played hard and fast as musicians demonstrate their technical virtuosity. Cool jazz is a much more relaxed style with far fewer notes being played. The music is pared down to its essential elements. My new series parallels this. It evolved from complex and dense visual compositions to paintings in which I emphasize the actors.

Begun in 2007, this series is my most personal body of work to date. The black background symbolizes death and emptiness. The actors are emerging from a deeply painful state. It is still with them but it is somehow now also behind them. Similarly my current work comes out of deep pain.

Joyce Zipperer
Shoe styles say whatever women wish to express: classy, sexy, absurb, cloddy, fetish, sporty, comfortable, matronly, exotic, sparkly, strapy or boots of personality. They could be too tight, too high, too pinchy, too woobly, too wide, too short or hopefully, fit just right,
but they're in style and I'm wearing them!!