Author: Liz Goldner

“The Walk to Save the Canyon” occurred in Laguna Beach on November 11, 1989. For that happening, 9,000-11,000 people walked four miles from the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts into Laguna Canyon, expressing their desire to preserve that greenbelt. The activities leading to The Walk, the event itself, the subsequent demonstration and the result from these activities — all preventing construction of a massive housing project within the canyon — are legendary tales among long-time Lagunans.  Yet today, while new residents and visitors to Laguna Beach...

19 October, 2020 /

Paradise for SoCal art lovers during summertime is usually Laguna Beach. With three art festivals, the Pageant of the Masters, many art galleries displaying their treasures and rotating exhibitions at Laguna Art Museum, the city has been a garden of earthly delights for decades. Of course, this summer is different. The throngs of art-viewing tourists and residents — along with local artists eager to talk about and sell their work — are replaced by quiet streets and empty art venues, thanks to COVID-19. However, the abundance...

10 August, 2020 /

Perhaps it is serendipity or simply good luck; but more likely, Elizabeth Turk’s presence working in an expansive artistic environment is the result of her irrepressible ambition, sense of adventure and impressive talent. In this time of Covid-19, Turk is busy and locked away creating sculptures and installation works at Logan Creative in Santa Ana. And while numerous artistic spaces are closed, this compound welcomes artists working in many different media. With large, airy studios, the space affords easy social distancing for participants to work comfortably, to dialogue...

15 June, 2020 /

With the art world on lockdown, and with many of us desiring, even needing, to feed our art addictions, many visual and performing arts organizations throughout the OC are getting creative with how they remain relevant to the larger OC art scene. Luckily, many art organizations are offering opportunities for the public to still engage and enjoy art digitally, whether it be through live streaming, virtual tours, social media engagement, online art collection browsing, film screenings, videos of recorded performances, or through art-related lectures. This...

18 May, 2020 /

Naida Osline’s photographic artwork is a manifestation of her vivid imagination. Her images depict her fascinations with underappreciated beauty, the subtle magic of everyday occurrences, surrealism in reality, and the magic of indigenous California flora and fauna. Osline’s work also delves into “themes of economic and cultural structures, community, identity, gender, aging and transformation, along with the mystical and natural worlds in tension with the human-built environment,” she explains to the OC Art Blog in an interview. To view her photos—many of them exhibited in OC...

20 April, 2020 /

While baby boomers are the first generation raised with television as a major life influence, Jeff Gillette surpasses most of his contemporaries with his fascination for TV images, particularly for animated characters. The Costa Mesa-based artist recalls his earliest major artistic influence to us in an interview, “I grew up in Michigan in the 1960s through ‘80s, often watching The Wonderful World of Disney, and I loved the shows, especially the cartoons.”  Yet when Gillette first visited Disneyland in 1978 in his teens, he hated the experience...

06 April, 2020 /

The several dozen figurative and expressionistic paintings by Artemio Sepúlveda currently on view at Laguna Art Museum are so empathetic and deftly done, the casual viewer might think they were created by a widely-known artist. But beyond a small coterie of admirers and collectors—many in and around Laguna Beach—Sepúlveda (alive and well at age 85) is barely known.   What’s even more surprising is the story of the artist’s life. The son of a miner in Mexico, he grew up in grinding poverty, making it difficult for him to have the art education he...

16 March, 2020 /