August 12, 2020 — With museums and galleries closed due to the pandemic, arts exhibits have moved
online. The Willits Center for the Arts, which has long been a hub for community gatherings for art openings, classes, and events, has shifted to an all-virtual art show, featuring the Willits Photography Club, ceramicist Ileya Stewart and painter Peter Onstad. Art is a huge part of their roles in the community, both in terms of being together and making sense of the world. Onstad claims it’s difficult to verbalize the non-verbal nature of visual art, but then he paints a picture in words of a recent painting of the coronavirus, full of signs and symbols and current events. It features a skeleton, several 19’s, and a pair of dice with ‘snake eyes,’ or, he explains, “single dots on the dice, which represents, in the game of crap, you lose.”
For her part, Stewart has created a series of ceramic mandalas and bright, nature-inspired pieces, like a large, cheerfully carnivorous-looking daisy wrapping its petals around a vase that’s patterned like a harlequin coat. When she talks about the role of an artist, it sounds like she’s describing that piece, with the vase as a vessel and nature devouring and moving and everything brilliantly alive. “I’m trying to hold neutral space for this transformation to happen,” she muses. “I think it’s going to be an incredible rebirth...there’s always change...that’s one thing in my work that it represents is constant movement. You can’t hold it still. It has to move through this process, and we’re here to witness what’s happening.”
Stewart got her masters of fine art from Mills College in 1987. Onstad, too, has an MFA, from the Art institute of San Francisco. From his student days, art meant community: a community of spiritual intensity, with a combination of excitement, devotion, and purpose. “When I was going to the Art Institute, I felt it was like in retrospect, looking back, it was like a monastery. Everybody was so serious. Not in a grim way, just about their work, and art, and scurrying from classroom to classroom. It was just such a wonderful feeling.”
Still, he’d really like to have a party. With art, and friends, and maybe some music and wine. “It’s really too bad that we can’t have an opening like it used to be, with the crowd and our friends, and then have the gallery open to the public...but Gary’s doing a great job of improvising, with the pandemic going on.”
On August 13, Gary Martin, the curator of the Center for the Arts, is planning to release a video tour of the exhibit, which is hanging in the physical space of the gallery, with natural light pouring in through plentiful windows.
For working artists, selling art is an incidental but essential fact of life, one of those things that just happens when people are enjoying good art and company with good taste. Stewart made the switch to ceramics from painting shortly after she moved to Mendocino County in the 90’s, and got involved in selling her work at craft fairs, which are just as much about socializing as they are a marketplace. Now she’s resigned to making another switch, selling her work in the digital age on a digital platform. “He’s right, it is the future,” she acknowledged. “It’s hard to imagine that people would buy art without being in its presence, but we all become more versed with the internet...I’m sure we’ll learn a lot.” Her thoughts on her creative process are apropos for the times: “I used to just freak out when things weren’t going well. But now I know to just hang back for a minute, or days, or a time, and let the process happen.”
It’s a big week for online events at the Willits Center for the Arts. On Friday evening, Martin is starting up his free monthly art talks again, with “The Power to Look,” which he says will be about taking more time with images, letting them challenge you, and finding out how to read them. Before the pandemic, his presentations were accompanied by images on a 9 by 12 foot screen at the art center. If you’d like to join by zoom and you’re not already a member of the Art History Club, you can visit the website, willitscenterforthearts.org, or the Facebook page to find out how to participate. Martin says the selection of images will include some abstracts, some realism, a little van Gogh, and a little of this and that. Art, he says, is really important especially during the hard times.
“We have to go on and keep doing our part, as good human beings,” Onstad adds. Still, he reflects, “I’ll take the old days.”