Morton Wayne Thiebaud was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is associated with the pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists. Thiebaud used heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.
Melvin John Ramos was an American figurative painter, specializing most often in paintings of female nudes, whose work incorporates elements of realist and abstract art.
Joseph Raffael was an American contemporary realist painter. His paintings, primarily watercolors, are almost all presented on a very large scale.
Joseph Santos is a contemporary American artist/watercolorist. He is known for his watercolor paintings of urban and industrial objects. His work has garnered many awards nationally, including the Paul B. Remmey award at the prestigious American Watercolor Society 138th international exhibition in New York City. His paintings have been exhibited in museums throughout the United States, including the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois and the Springfield Art Museum in Missouri. His watercolor paintings have also been featured in national publications including Southwest Art, The Artist's magazine and American Art Collector
Robert Brady is an American modernist sculptor who works in ceramics and wood. Born in Reno, Nevada, he has made his home in the San Francisco Bay Area for many decades. Brady is a multi-faceted artist who works in ceramics, wood, painting, and illustration, and is best known for his abstract figurative sculptures. Brady came out of the California Clay movement, and the Bay Area Arts scene of the 1950s and 1960s, which includes artists such as Peter Voulkos, Viola Frey, Stephen de Staebler, and Robert Arneson who was his mentor and teacher in college.
Andreas Nottebohm, born in 1944, is an American/German artist whose work is associated with op art, visionary art, and space art. He is considered one of the key innovators of metal painting.
Duane Albert Armstrong is an American painter, best known for his oil on canvas paintings. He was born in Fresno California, and was raised near San Luis Obispo California. His foster mother taught him to paint as a child.
John Pugh is an American artist known for creating large trompe-l'œil wall murals giving the illusion of a three-dimensional scene behind the wall. Pugh has been creating his murals since the late 1970s. He attended California State University Chico, receiving his BA in 1983 and the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2003. He has received over 250 public and private commissions in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Barbados, Japan, Taiwan, and New Zealand. He currently lives and works in Truckee, California. His particular style of trompe-l'œil painting has been called "Narrative Illusionism."
Riki R. Nelson is a contemporary American oil painter known for her realistic and surreal portraits of jazz musicians, bar patrons, city street scenes. In a 2008 review, her work was described as, "realistic in the physical sense and raw in the spiritual sense, capturing the discordant element of self". Using traditional realism, which she complements with contemporary colors and compositions, she expresses a uniquely creative vision rooted in the elegance of traditional realism, while utilizing subtle surrealism to capture what she perceives as ‘the undercurrent of pathos’ in contemporary life. Nelson works exclusively in traditional oil and oil paint mediums.
John Dwyer McLaughlin was an American abstract painter. Based primarily in California, he was a pioneer in minimalism and hard-edge painting. Considered one of the most significant Californian postwar artists, McLaughlin painted a focused body of geometric works that are completely devoid of any connection to everyday experience and objects, inspired by the Japanese notion of the void. He aimed to create paintings devoid of any object hood including but not limited to a gestures, representations and figuration. This led him to the rectangle. Leveraging a technique of layering rectangular bars on adjacent planes, McLaughlin creates works that provoke introspection and, consequently, a greater understanding of one's relationship to nature.
Roland Conrad Petersen is a Danish-born American painter, printmaker, and professor. His career spans over 50 years, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and is perhaps best-known for his "Picnic series" beginning in 1959 to today. He is part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
Clyde Follet Seavey was an American artist.
Leo Kenney (1925–2001) was an American abstract painter, described by critics as a leading figure in the second generation of the 'Northwest School' of artists.
Carlos Villa was a Filipino-American visual artist, curator and faculty member in the Painting Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work often explored the meaning of cultural diversity and sought to expand awareness of multicultural issues in the arts.
Travis Collinson is a visual artist whose paintings take elements from photographs and sketches and reinterpret them at larger scale.
Todd Williamson is an American artist specializing in contemporary abstract expressionism.
Jean LaMarr is a Northern Paiute/Achomawi artist and activist from California. She creates murals, prints, dioramas, sculptures, and interactive installations. She is an enrolled member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria.
Stephanie Skalisky is an American artist who is best known for her series of works she made while working for The New Yorker as a cartoonist.
Harry Bowden (1907–1965) was an abstract painter who lived and worked both in New York and California. He showed in both group and solo exhibitions in Manhattan and San Francisco and was a founding member of American Abstract Artists. He is known both for fully abstract and for representative works, but the latter predominate. He once said a painter should embrace many ideas, symbols, forms, tones, and colors and through metamorphosis make them into a new thing — a painting having a life of its own. Having taken up photography as a mid-career hobby, he became as well known for his photographs as for his easel works.
Ruth Tunstall Grant (1945–2017) was an African American artist, educator and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area known for her paintings, community activism, and arts advocacy. Her work has been featured in many invitational group exhibitions as well as solo shows at national and international venues such as Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, Texas; Rath Museum, Geneva, Switzerland; Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California; and Los Gatos Museum of Art, Los Gatos, California. She had a strong focus on community service and advocacy of children’s rights and social justice in and beyond Santa Clara County. She established many innovative, ongoing arts programs and inspired creative activists, such as Marita Dingus.
