CREATIVES

I am an environmental woman artist inspired by the landscape and wildlife of Sonoma and Marin counties, especially the wetlands along the Petaluma River and San Pablo Bay. My work is about this place, the natural world of the North Bay, combining representation with abstraction.

I work in acrylic on wood panels in the studio, or on location around Sonoma and Marin Counties and recently traveling to Glacier National Park in Montana where I was the 2022 artist in residence.

I was born and raised in a small college town in the Pacific Northwest.

My family spent summer vacations camping, fishing, boating and swimming on the lakes and rivers of Washington and Idaho. The love of the outdoors instilled in me by my  father, an avid outdoorsman, led to my passion for nature and animal life as my  painting’s subject matter. I have an optimistic view of the regenerative power of nature when aware humans intercede.

Hemu is multi-talented.

Artist's Statement Amanda Rose Hopkins Art of Nature

I've been a professional artist in Sonoma county for over 20 years. I currently design souvenirs for locations all over the country. I sculpt wood and paint to express myself on a personal level and to break away from the confines of a computer screen. I am an illustrator with experience designing anything from living space to custom tattoos. If there is a concept inside a client, I'm the one who reveals it. My work varies from logos and corporate identity to soulful expressions on a very personal level.

David Baldwin // visual artist and experimental musician.

Born in Upland, California. His work blends the natural with the dream world, invoking familiarity with questions that ask the viewer to seek their own answers. Using vibrant colors, natural shapes with gestural abstractions his work draws the viewer into a new world of personal immersion and thoughtful introspection. Always looking for a tension-filled balance of familiar comfort with an intriguing question that compels the viewer to look deeper.

Baldwin is based in Santa Rosa, California.

Ipolani Bovee

Ipolani Bovee is a Native Hawaiian visual artist based in Santa Rosa, California. Her practice spans watercolor, drawing, and large-scale painting, with roots in fine-line tattooing and disciplined mark-making. Her work examines color, line, and botanical form as sites of attention, restraint, and inherited responsibility.

Bovee’s background in tattoo practice informs her approach to surface and pacing, where each mark carries weight and intention. Long engaged with watercolor, she is currently expanding into larger acrylic works that explore scale and color as physical presence rather than illustration. Botanical forms recur as distilled structures rather than literal representations.

Her work draws from lived experience, cultural lineage, and sustained observation, prioritizing depth over spectacle. In addition to her studio practice, Bovee owns and operates KŌ Studio Art and Tattoo in Santa Rosa. She is actively engaged in the regional arts community and is pursuing public art opportunities and grant-supported projects throughout Sonoma County.

Born and raised in beautiful Sonoma County, CA. I studied Fine Art in college, and fell in love with youth work and community arts.

Experiences like the ‘Tubbs Fire’ that hit Santa Rosa serve to strengthen the ‘artist within me’. It foements subjective creative moments that utilize my past, present - and my future as focal lenses.

Spontaneously, I chose The San Francisco Art Institute over The Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Art Institute  at Chicago for my formal Art education. I received my BFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Public Art. I’ve studied stone sculpture for 10 years with Master Sculpture-Ante’ Marinovic, one of Croatia’s premier stone sculptors and is considered a Croatian national treasure.

I explore the collaboration between artist, media and tool in such a fashion as to give rise to multiple layers of compressed info within each piece I create no matter if it is a purely visual work or an interactive space or environmental art form.

For me, art screams out into all aspects of my life. As an artist in western society, dogma and bravado go hand in hand with economic choice.

Art is my life. If it’s not nailed down or permanently affixed,  it’s in trouble of becoming art resource material. Well, upon further review, even that won’t deter me from considering an objects use in an art piece.

Jason Cool/Henson

Catherine Cruz is a French-American abstract artist who works with collage and mixed media.  Informed by more than twenty-five years of experience in the design world, she takes inspiration from a unique perspective, which spans architecture, interior design, and sustainability.

She is driven by curiosity and the visceral need to experiment.  In her abstract art practice, she has found paper and paint to be both simple and complex materials that can be manipulated in many ways.  She grew up in an environment where the juxtaposition of old and new architecture creates a beautiful tension.  In her current art, she sees the textures representing the old and the collage elements representing the new.  Her art is informed by the passing of time and the effect of the natural elements on the built environment, which creates beauty and complexity in distressed and weathered surfaces.

Her abstract vocabulary is based on intuitive mark making, lines and forms, as well as the exploration of visual and tactile texture, and a good understanding of color. Her art-making process is very intuitive and explorative and she enjoys creating multi-layered surfaces because it is an exercise of trust, patience, and perseverance.

Catherine was born in Mante-la-Jolie, France, and moved the United States in 1987 to attend college.  She received a Bachelor of Science in Interior Design (Cum Laude) from Florida State University in 1993 and had a successful career as residential and commercial interior designer for 20 years, followed by a second career and the creation of her own business as LEED-accredited green building consultant working with international architectural firms in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, and Houston.

She lives in Sebastopol, CA, with her family, and stays in Valence, France, every year where she hosts a creative art retreat. She created Be You Art Studio and launched her creative workshops in 2018 and she has led numerous art classes for children and adults for both in France and the USA.  Her passion is to encourage others to unleash their creativity, experiment with materials, and connect with their imagination.

She participates in Sonoma County’s Art Trails Open Studios every Fall, a juried event comprised of over 120 artists, and she teaches and volunteers at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.