Trompe-l'œil is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Trompe l'œil, which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving painted objects or spaces as real. Forced perspective is a related illusion in architecture.
Paul Edmund Soldner was an American ceramic artist and educator, noted for his experimentation with the 16th-century Japanese technique called raku, introducing new methods of firing and post firing, which became known as American Raku. He was the founder of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 1966.
Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
Fred Baier is an avant garde British furniture designer maker working since the 1970s when he graduated from the Royal College of Art and taught at what is now Faculty of Arts.
Sam Maloof was an American furniture designer and woodworker. Maloof's work is in the collections of several major American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Maloof, the first craftsman to receive a MacArthur fellowship, was described by The New York Times as "a central figure in the postwar American crafts movement".
American craft is craft work produced by independent studio artists working with traditional craft materials and processes. Examples include wood, glass, clay (ceramics), textiles, and metal (metalworking). Studio craft works tend to either serve or allude to a functional or utilitarian purpose, although they are just as often handled and exhibited in ways similar to visual art objects.
Garry Knox Bennett was an American woodworker, furniture maker, metalworker and artist from Alameda, California, who was known for his whimsical, inventive and unconventional uses of materials and designs in his work. His workshop and studio was in Oakland, California.
Marvin Bentley Lipofsky was an American glass artist. He was one of the six students that Studio Glass founder Harvey Littleton instructed in a program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in fall 1962 and spring 1963. He was a central figure in the dissemination of the American Studio Glass Movement, introducing it to California through his tenure as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Abstract illusionism, a name coined by art historian and critic Barbara Rose in 1967. Louis K. Meisel independently coined the term to define an artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the mid-1970s.
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.
JB Blunk (1926–2002) was a sculptor who worked primarily in wood and clay. In addition to the pieces he produced in wood and ceramics, Blunk worked in other media, including jewelry, furniture, painting, bronze, and stone.
Rupert Williamson has been a Designer and creator of one-off furniture for over 40 years with work in many museums and public collections, together with his work written about and illustrated in many books and articles.In 1999 he received a PhD for his thesis “New Forms of Imagery in Furniture". The Reflections of a Designer working in the Craft Revival of the 1970s and beyond” together with a major collection of his designs.
Adrien Segal is an artist, furniture maker, and sculptor who uses data to inform her artwork. She is currently an adjunct professor of Furniture Design at the California College of the Arts and a practicing artist studio furniture maker.
Richard Shaw is an American ceramicist and professor known for his trompe-l'œil style. A term often associated with paintings, referring to the illusion that a two-dimensional surface is three-dimensional. In Shaw's work, it refers to his replication of everyday objects in porcelain. He then glazes these components and groups them in unexpected and even jarring combinations. Interested in how objects can reflect a person or identity, Shaw poses questions regarding the relationship between appearances and reality.
Wendy Maruyama is an artist, furniture maker, and educator from California. She was born in La Junta, Colorado.
Joe Doyle was an American artist. He is one of the original painters in the style, abstract illusionism, of the 1970s and has since evolved his style using computerized technologies to create Digital art.
Nance O'Banion (1949-2018) was an Oakland based American artist who "pioneered creative explorations of handmade paper". She is known for her sculptural paper works and book works which focus on themes of change and transformation. A retrospective sample of the arc of her work may be viewed at: https://nance-obanion.com
Lucia Mathews was an American painter born and raised in San Francisco, California, primarily known for her work depicting California landscapes and the state flower, the California Poppy. A lifelong Californian, she was the wife and partner of artist, Arthur Frank Mathews, a well-regarded painter, muralist, and teacher in the Bay Area. Together they founded the Furniture Shop and the Philopolis Press in 1906. Her work is featured in museum collections throughout California and the United States and is evocative of the California Arts and Crafts style.
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.
Rebecca Gabriel is an American contemporary realist painter and figurative artist, specialising in the Renaissance tradition.
