Standing before a blank, wall-sized canvas, Pamela Holmes holds out her right arm as Winston Gourley unravels a tattered gray Ace bandage that looks as though it was scavenged from a battlefield. Around their wrists, he winds it tightly until the two of them are bound in solidarity.

“I’m the designated wrapper,” Gourley says, his British accent easing into a laugh.

In the background, The Clash tear through the opening track of “London Calling.” The couple are cocooned in a large tent studio outside the DIY house Pamela built with her ex-husband more than 30 years ago. The wooded 15-acre property above Timber Cove might as well be perched on the edge of the world, it’s so remote.

With their free hands, they rummage through a box of charcoal — dead, dried grapevines they cut and burned themselves — to find the right tool, their fingers turning sooty in the mix. Then, as if cued by something in the music, they start to move — an awkward tango at first, each one pushing and pulling as they find a rhythm, bodies lurching and swaying, their hands traveling across the canvas leaving a trail of black scrapes and lines in flurries. When the charcoal breaks under the pressure, they grab a new one.

“It’s a bit of a dance,” says Gourley. “And there are those moments where part of you really needs to go to the top left-hand corner, but the other person really needs to go to the bottom right-hand corner.”

There’s an athleticism to it, magnified by their breathing, like two prisoners bound on a chain gang, their work detail to render a painting instead of pounding out a road.

Next, they pick up a homemade wax stick, adding white streaks that resemble chalk marks. Then they re-tie their hands so they can both hold a brush and splatter jet-black India ink across the 80’’x 92’’ canvas, pausing only to dunk the splayed brush in fresh paint. Still bound, they walk outside and bring in two chairs to reach the highest corners of the nascent work of art.

“It’s all about dismantling one’s ego,” says Holmes.

Gourley likes to call it “a shared imagination,” something they never knew existed.

It could easily be a gimmick — the art world is full of them — but instead, it opened a portal into an entirely different way of making art for both of them.

“It’s really freeing,” Holmes says. “Neither of us make these paintings. The work that comes out of it is never predictable, and it’s not anything like either of our own works.”

Both are lifelong artists. She grew up in Pasadena, graduating with an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Gourley was raised on the British island of Guernsey off the coast of France, graduating from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. Her work is more textural, sometimes coming to life in cement plastered on wood boards — almost an extension of the Holmes Wilson custom cement furniture business she founded years ago before recently retiring. Gourley, who has shown his art internationally in the past as Patrick Gourley, is drawn to both color field paintings and encaustic works that play with melted wax and resin. When he moved in with Holmes several years ago, they tried creating their own works in the same studio, but “it didn’t make any sense,” he says. “It felt weird.”

Inspired to collaborate, they tried a few drawings where they both added layers. But they realized “the problem with doing this is I’m just laying my (stuff) on yours,” Gourley says. “But if we’re tied up together, who’s in charge? Who’s in control? And then to have anything good happen, you have to give up those things. You have to give up all your habits.”

After the first painting they’ve never looked back. In this alternate universe, she adopted the alter ego “Ivy Stranger” and he became “Ernst Worth.” Together they are Stranger Worth, signing paintings “ISEW.”

They’ve even dreamed up their own vocabulary; words and phrases such as “Do the Dusinki” and “Lewst” and “Emerlink” are scribbled on scraps of paper and pinned to the studio walls as reminders. One imaginary word,“Eachin,” helps anchor their artist’s statement that reads like a manifesto: “Eachin steps away from the personal and opens up to the collective…Eachin welcomes surrender over resistance…Eachin carries no suitcases.”

But abandoning your ego, and surrendering old habits and artistic tendencies, is often easier said than done.

“In the beginning, I would cry,” says Holmes, still wistful, but able to look back now and laugh. “It was that hard.”

As they struggled to paint together, it was “hard not to feel protective of something in the painting that you liked,” she continues.

Gourley remembers the time Holmes undid the bindings and ran out the door, screaming, “I’m never painting again!”

Even on this day, midway through the session, tension lies just beneath the surface. When asked what they’ve learned about the other person through this process, Gourley replies immediately, “I love her and I hate her.”

They both laugh as she adds, “That’s very accurate. There are times when I just despise him.”

With each abstract work — there are a handful hanging around the studio, each one very different — they keep coming back to the canvas daily, adding more layers. Any discussion of what shapes or themes might be materializing is delayed for many sessions to keep the work somewhat dreamy and unpredictable.

A week after they embarked on the painting with the charred vines, they’re finished. Layered over the early black and white scars is a splash of green paint and a bright red flourish, almost like a smoke cloud of blood floating in a green sea. After coming back to it multiple times, even flipping the canvas upside down at one point, Holmes says they finally started talking about symbols they saw in the work “about the same time we started hating each other.”

“It’s been a tough one,” adds Gourley.

“This was an extremely challenging piece to make, for some reason,” she says. “Sometimes trying to break through your identities is an ambition. It’s not always easily achieved. Sometimes we butt heads more than we do other times.”

In many ways, it sounds like any couple — artistic or otherwise — working through their issues on any given day.

So far, they’ve only shown Stranger Worth paintings at the Gualala Arts Center, and hope to reach a larger audience. They’ve also thought about what it would be like to facilitate sessions for other couples trying to work through their issues, tying them together before the canvas and seeing what takes shape.

A few of their friends have tried the technique. One couple, the wife an artist and the husband a physicist, were working on their first painting and “she was just leaving the guy completely behind,” Holmes recalls. “All of a sudden, she stood back and looked at us, and said, ‘I’m such a control freak.’ The next piece they made was mind-blowing. He was finally able to come alive.”

Holmes and Gourley both bristle at the concept of couples’ art therapy, but if they were to market it, Holmes has a pitch.

“Come and try the tie-up,” she says in a way that makes it sound almost like a dance or the chorus to a song — something so catchy you can’t resist.

“I think that’s really what it boils down to,” Gourley says. “We’re doing something that’s so primal. That act of making marks together on a surface connects us directly to our ancestors.”

strangerworth.com

The post For a Timber Cove Couple, Art Is the Tie That Binds appeared first on Sonoma Magazine.

The woman signing books at Barndiva in Healdsburg seemed genteel and refined as she smiled and chatted with a long line of friends and admirers.

Susan Preston had, for the time being, set her spikes aside.

That is, she’d chosen to conceal certain of her wild and sharp-edged aspects — the “spikiness,” as she recently described it to her daughter Francesca — that emerge in her art.

Since the mid-1970s, Susan and her husband, Lou Preston, have run a farm and winery in Dry Creek Valley widely beloved for its Old World feel and relaxed family vibe. Preston Farm and Winery sells superb wine, olive oil, organic produce, and artisanal food products like sourdough bread.

Less well known, but no less remarkable, are the talents and oeuvre of Susan Preston, who for decades “kind of split three ways,” in her words, dividing her energies “between children, business, and the art.”

With the September release of “In Ghost Time: The Art and Stories of Susan Preston,” her profile as a creative is on the rise. While helping grow the family business and raising daughters Maggie and Francesca — both now established artists in their own right — Susan was devouring courses at Santa Rosa Junior College, then Sonoma State University, then Mills College in Oakland, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1996.

During that time she was honing the distinctive style on display in her new monograph.

“All the teachers told me I had my own way,” Preston recalls with a smile. “They said, ‘You’re an original.’”

“She’s always been very much her own person,” said Maggie, a photo-based artist who lives and works in Berkeley, “a little unusual, a little eccentric, and not necessarily following the traditional path.”

The less traveled, often fantastical path trod by Susan Preston resulted in paintings with whimsical and occasionally sinister titles, such as “Make Noise Silently,” “Oh Noodles Please Don’t Leave Me,” “A Pimp’s Tattoo,” and “We Killed the Wrong Twin.” Preston’s collage-style works feature “mysterious and idiosyncratic images” that are “a form of visual poetry and storytelling,” wrote Stephanie Hanor, Art Museum director at Mills College.

As unconventional as Preston’s art are the materials from which it’s made: brown paper bags — the kind you get in a grocery store — bees wax, black tea, rabbit skin glue, chewing gum, olive oil, and foil.

That alchemy takes place in her stand-alone, 20-by-30-foot studio just beyond the farmhouse on their verdant 125-acre spread between Dry Creek and Pena Creek. Covering the studio’s walls are drawings cut from her notebooks. No longer strong enough to push tacks into the walls to hang those sketches, she keeps a small hammer at the ready, for that purpose.

The studio is a place of “creative chaos,” says Lou, who speaks with wonderment of his wife’s process, and “all these wild and weird things in her work.”

While she used to bury larger pieces of that brown paper in the river, Susan now covers smaller squares with earth she’s loosened in front of her studio. She checks them every so often “like you would stirring a good soup,” she explains. “When the pieces are ready, I take them inside and wash them off. Subtlety is what I’m looking for. Sometimes, I pour small streams of olive oil or tea on them.”

Thus does she summon “characters and anthropomorphic animals that challenge our perceptions about what it really means to be alive,” writes Jil Hales in an essay that appears in the book.

Hales, a close friend of Preston’s, is the founder and co-owner of Barndiva, a Michelin-recommended restaurant that doubles, by day, as an art gallery and played a prominent role in the genesis of the women’s friendship.

On the day it opened in 2004, a crowd gathered outside Barndiva for an exhibit Hales had painstakingly planned. A select group of makers had been invited to showcase their wares: wine, chocolate, cured meats, and other delectables — each complemented by a piece of art that “interpreted” the edible art.

Each, that is, except the wood-fired, heritage grain loaf baked by Lou Preston, which, 10 minutes before Barndiva’s grand opening, still had no art to accompany it.

That’s when an attractive woman with “an off-kilter swagger strode in through the main door,” Hales recalls in the Barndiva blog, “carrying a full bag of flour on her shoulder.”

Susan “proceeded to bend, slash, and pour the entire sack onto the new stone floor, just below the plinth where Lou’s ‘art’ sat beneath a spotlight.”

The flour dust had yet to settle before she left, then returned with a faded blue, spindle-backed chair she placed into the flour. It was a performance piece, Hales writes, that “fully caught the zeitgeist of the exhibit and spoke eloquently of the direction we hoped to take Barndiva.” It was also a moment that left Hales convinced: “I needed to know this woman.”

The friendship that blossomed, says Hales, has “intensified the last few years.” Preston Farm works closely with Barndiva. Susan has shown her work in its studio. In addition to being wonderful and kind, Hales notes, Preston is “forthright,” and “has an honesty about her that’s rare these days.”

It was at Hales’ urging, and with her considerable help, that Preston produced “In Ghost Time,” a collection of her paintings and sketches, along with a handful of indelible stories that shed light on her artistic process and recall her free-range, almost feral upbringing in Calaveritas, California, an abandoned Gold Rush town, which gives the book its title.

I grew up in a ghost town

And played in the remains of an old Fandango house.

Two large junk heaps and a forgotten blacksmith shop.

Sections of the town were separated by barbed wire fences.

The lines in my paintings and drawings remind me of that ragged fence.

I crave a strange and crooked simplicity.

That’s an excerpt from the prologue introducing the book’s “Stories,” which recount in Preston’s spare, evocative prose what it was like to grow up in Calaveritas without her father, who moved away when she was 3, but with an extended family that provided “both freedom and protection.”

You can take the girl out of the ghost town, but as Preston recounts in the book, the characters, shapes, and materials from Calaveritas, including “an old squeaky chair, a gold mining pan, iron trivets,” and the coiled baskets of the Miwok tribe just up the road, have long insinuated themselves into her artwork, embedded themselves in her being.

From the first day they met, said Lou Preston, whose upbringing on a dairy farm outside Healdsburg was more conventional, “I’ve been envious of her growing up with this incredible, magical independence.”

“In Ghost Time” was conceived and set in motion during the Covid-19 pandemic, a frightening, uncertain period of Preston’s life.

In chronic pain while recovering from a difficult surgery, “and with the added dimensions of Covid, the political environment, and the general unknowing,” she recalled, “something disoriented me severely.”

“I became unmoored, half in this world, half in another. No one knew quite what to do about it.”

This “time of madness,” she said, was worse for her loved ones than herself.

Hales, who described Preston’s condition as “a perfect physical and psychological storm that jumbled her signposts and signals,” came up with the idea that helped Preston find her way back to lucidity.

She encouraged her friend to assemble a monograph of her art and stories. “And for some reason,” Preston recounted, “that was the first idea that stuck, and gave me purpose.”

It took two years, but she regained her health and started painting again.

Susan Cuneo and Lou Preston went on their first date in 1973, having been introduced by Barden Stevenot, a visionary grapegrower who would later be credited with bringing the wine industry to Calaveras County. On this day, he was showing Lou a piece of land in Dry Creek Valley that held promise as a vineyard.

Stevenot brought along his friend from the Gold Rush region, Susan, who at the time was teaching at a tiny Graton elementary school.

Lou remembers Stevenot showing up “with this gorgeous and smart lady who arrived to walk around the property in the shortest skirt I’d seen in a long time.” She was also barefoot.

He was also taken with Susan’s intellectual range. “She was very literate in a way that I wasn’t.”

And so she remains, says Lou, who now finds himself wondering, “If we live long enough, can I catch up? And I’ve kind of decided I probably won’t.”

Not long after that first date, Susan brought her new beau to Calaveritas, about 5 miles east of San Andreas, “to stomp grapes in the stonewalled winery under my family home.”

On long walks to the barn late at night, she recounts in the book, “I turned cartwheels for him in the moonlight.”

A year after that first date, they were married in Calaveritas. Stevenot was Lou’s best man.

After the couple launched their business, Susan would make frequent trips to the vest-pocket post office in Geyserville, where there was always a line, she remembers.

While waiting, she would turn her attention to the posters of the FBI’s “Most Wanted” fugitives. “They were a marvel,” she says. Studying their photos, admiring the cleverness of their aliases — she was especially taken with one Dwight Orlando Birdsong — Susan conjured fictitious backstories for them. Before long, she recalls, she was writing “poems and tiny stories” about them.

“In a sense some of these outlaws became my people.”

The tales of those outlaws, accompanied by her sketches, grew into a series of pieces she showed at the Southern Exposure Art Gallery in San Francisco in the early 2000s.

They also comprise “Part Three” of “In Ghost Time,” titled “The Criminal in Each of Us,” which begins with a kind of free-verse statement of her purpose:

I want to make real things, primitive, direct and concrete — like statues

Who live outside the Law.

I want to make a roomful of anarchists, who live below the earth, with

No remorse.

While raising her daughters, Preston put her life as an artist on hold. She waited until Maggie, her youngest, was in kindergarten before enrolling in art classes at the junior college.

“I would take one or two courses each semester,” recalls Susan, who was constantly checking art history books out of various libraries. Strewn about the house, those tomes were picked up and perused by Maggie and Francesca, who themselves gravitated, not surprisingly, to the arts.

So obsessed was Susan with painting, she says, that she had occasional pangs of guilt “that I wasn’t giving them enough attention” — a notion Maggie dismissed by telling her mother, “If you’d given us too much attention, we wouldn’t have been able to find our own way.”

Francesca, a poet, essayist, artist, and editor based in Petaluma, contributed “Lean In Closer,” an essay accompanying the fourth and final section of “In Ghost Time,” a crazy quilt of drawings and musings collected and curated from the dozens of journals her mother kept over nearly 40 years.

Those journals and notebooks contained “words, patterns, unanswerable questions, cross-outs, lines from poems — all dancing around and within those fabulous faces,” Francesca recalls in her essay.

The notebooks could be found throughout the Preston household, “all over the place, like turkey feathers after a dust-up. Sometimes they were left open. If I came across one, I would gaze at it like a lost sibling.”

The drawings in those notebooks, which evoke the illustrations of New Yorker cartoonist Maira Kalman, were often rough drafts, precursors of the mature works that came later. Susan’s hope is that other artists might look at the sketches “and understand how my mind works when I’m figuring out what art to do.”

To look carefully at some of those drawings, she said, is to see “exactly where my thinking was.”

In a Q&A with her mother that appeared on the website Fuji Hub in February 2025, Francesca wrote that although Susan “did normal things like pack lunches and look for ticks in our hair, she was also growing into her real life as an artist, a painter, an inward-outward thinker. By the time I was 20 she had made her way to the prestigious MFA program in painting at Mills College, under the mentorship of master Hung Liu.”

Liu, one of the first Chinese artists to establish a successful career in the United States, died in 2021 of pancreatic cancer, two months before the opening of a major exhibition of her work at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

A few months before her death, Liu had been planning an exhibit honoring women artists she’d mentored during her two decades at Mills. Thirteen of those former students were chosen to have their work showcased at the exhibit, Susan Preston among them.

One of the questions Francesca posed to her mother concerned a sketch gleaned from one of those journals. Beside a drawing of a gazing woman is the sentence “Put a little anger in your sugar bowl.”

Asked to explain, Susan replied, “Well, I think that as a woman I don’t want to be walked over. One of the ways we can keep that from happening is to be a little spiky. Pretend you’ve got spikes all over you. I mean, you don’t have to be that way all of the time. But like how animals can change form when they need to? Like that.”

Or like the spiked plant she mentions early in her book:

I live in a place called dry creek

Where stinging nettle grows unbidden

Along the ruffian water

Before a rain I might bury a drawing down

Under the black dirt

Near my studio door or take a painting to the river

To bury it by placing rocks on its face

When I return to collect the pieces I feel like a mother rescuing her child.

The post For Sonoma County Artist and Farm Owner, It’s Time ‘To Be a Little Spiky’ appeared first on Sonoma Magazine.

It was a serendipitous encounter with an antique French anatomical textbook that set Robert Mahar on the path to becoming a renowned embroidery artist and craftsperson. As he leafed through the book, the illustrations, rich in detail and saturated with color, captivated him. Despite their somewhat unsettling nature, they ignited his imagination.

“You transfer that to fabric, and you start stitching on top of it, it becomes this really beautiful, layered process,” Mahar explains. “That somehow just resonated with me.”

This idea came at a time when companies specializing in print-on-demand fabrics were gaining momentum. Mahar began stitching embellishments on his custom fabric and shared the results online.

“I got such amazingly positive feedback and reinforcement; it just started those wheels turning,” he says. “That’s what I’ve become most well-known for.”

Not long ago, Mahar notes, embroidery choices were limited to patterns that appealed mostly to women of a certain age and maybe their granddaughters whom they passed the craft onto. “Unless you wanted to do baskets of kittens, you didn’t have a lot of motif options,” he quips.

Mahar found his niche developing his own patterns by exploring vintage paper ephemera, such as botanical prints, maps, and postcards. Drawing on his background in graphic design, he combines those images — anatomical illustrations with botanical prints, for example — to create collaged, free-form embroidery samplers. One standout piece depicts blackberry brambles emerging from the ventricles of a heart; another, called “Crocus Cranium,” features a skull with a crocus growing through it. In Mahar’s hands, these unexpected pairings seem destined to be together. “What gets me excited is taking a heritage craft, like embroidery, and finding a new and modern way to interpret it or somehow make it my own,” he says.

With his naturally expressive and humorous demeanor, video quickly became an ideal medium for Mahar and he began doing embroidery and other craft tutorials online. His work soon caught the attention of the producers of NBC’s “Making it,” a reality craft competition series hosted by Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman. Mahar competed on the show’s first season in 2018, helped test run challenges in the second, and then became an associate producer for its third and final season.

Amid his growing success, Mahar and his husband, George, joined the pandemic-era migration from big cities to quieter locales, trading the glam and grit of Los Angeles — where he had spent the previous three decades — for a more relaxed life in Sonoma.

“It’s been this wonderful about-face,” says Mahar, who grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and always considered himself a “city mouse.” “The fact that I get to have a yard, and a dog, and walk around a field every day is one of the happiest parts of my day.”

Another perk of life in Wine Country is having space for a home studio, where his senior rescue dog, Bunny — a German wire-haired pointer — always stays close. The room is minimalist, with white walls and ample space for creative projects, offering a stark contrast to Mahar’s colorful, vintage aesthetic, a passion that developed during regular weekend trips to swap meets and flea markets with his dad while he was growing up.

Craft supplies, embroidery hoops, irons, notions of all sorts, and a rainbow of embroidery floss are tucked away neatly in drawers and cubbies. Projects in various stages of completion are pinned to felt boards on the wall above his sewing machine, adding pops of color to the room.

There’s his blackberry heart sampler, with “George” stitched in cursive. He shows off a botanical piece, a teacup magnolia, where instead of outlining the flower, he took a more abstract approach, using dainty pink stitches the size of pinheads to represent the flower’s scent.

“Envisioning that as aroma floating off of the petals, that was kind of fun,” he says. “It’s all French knots. I freaking love French knots. I don’t know what it is.”

Two shelves of vintage books flank either side of the studio door — volumes on needlecraft, cooking, and even cowboys exist both for decor, and perhaps inspiration, including a particularly fetching 1950s-era Better Homes & Gardens Handyman’s Book.

“Have I ever used it? No. But do I love the aesthetics of it? 100%,” he says, laughing.

Since moving to Sonoma, Mahar has taught fiber arts classes at the Sonoma Community Center and through Crafted at Appellation. In mid-September, he hosted “Well Crafted Sonoma,” a five-day craft retreat at the secluded Westerbeke Ranch in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain. Two dozen women from 11 states joined him for a week of workshops on botanical dyes, felted miniature coats, and, of course, embroidery, using one of his latest fabrics: a bold and bright vintage kitsch map of Sonoma County.

Many participants were already familiar with embroidery hoops and “floss” (the six-strand cotton thread), so Mahar moved quickly into some of his favorite tips and tricks. Using an overhead projector, he demonstrated how to easily separate threads in a skein of floss and how the number of threads used can change the look of a stitch from delicate to bold, much like how brush size affects watercolor painting. He shared that a linen or cotton canvas is his favorite, explaining, “It makes a popping noise when you stitch through — a little crafting ASMR.”

After offering a refresher in several stitches — fly, running, back, star, satin, and finally tidy French knots — he encouraged his students to explore free-form embroidery on their maps. “The goal,” he reminded them, “is not perfection, it’s documenting a memory.”

Mahar’s fabrics, such as his vibrant map of Sonoma County, serve as canvases for creativity, inviting anyone — regardless of embroidery experience — to embellish the designs. “It encourages a newbie to want to dig in and do more,” he says.

Mahar holds himself to a higher standard, however. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I have a certain sense of artistry that I bring to it.”

There has long been a tension between art and craft, with the former historically elevated above the other. For Mahar, who has a degree in art history and spent more than a decade as a fine art appraiser, the lines between the two have recently blurred.

“We’re seeing a lot more fine artists incorporate elements of craft into their work,” he says, pointing to exhibitions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s recent retrospective of Ruth Asawa, famous for her crocheted wire sculptures. “It’s more driven by the creator than the culture,” he adds.

A particularly fortuitous discovery since moving to Sonoma has been the Sonoma Botanical Garden, where Mahar now serves as the director of learning and engagement. Over the years he has taught embroidery classes at botanical gardens in San Francisco and Palo Alto featuring his vintage plant and floral samplers, something he hopes to introduce into the programming at the Glen Ellen garden.

After two decades in an entrepreneurial career that required frequent travel, Mahar appreciates the opportunity to stay close to home and his family. He also relishes having time to stitch together a new network of resources, friendships, and community.

“I’m trying to lean into that with a sense of adventure that I haven’t had in a long time,” he says.

Gardens Aglow

Robert Mahar has created a Winter Workshop of DIY craft projects as part of the “Gardens Aglow” event at Sonoma Botanical Gardens. From 5-8 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays Dec. 5-21. Tickets: $30 general, $25 members, $12 youth 5-17, free for children 4 and under. 12841 Highway 12, Glen Ellen. 707-996-3166, sonomabg.org

The post Embroidery Artist Robert Mahar Crafts With Vintage Vibes appeared first on Sonoma Magazine.

Cristina Hobbs sees no reason to have a large house when there is such an expansive landscape — exquisitely styled by Mother Nature — beckoning her outside.

An artist whose paintings, watercolors, and ceramics are inspired by the natural world beyond her windows, Hobbs sees the outdoors — with its gardens, tall grasses, wild animals, vineyards, and trees — as both her creative inspiration and an extension of her home.

If she’s not painting or working at her potter’s wheel in her vineyard studio, you’re most likely to find her playing and engaging in creative projects outdoors with her two young daughters, cultivating flowers for cutting, and gathering herbs and other natural gifts for the table.

Her ceramics, with their uneven edges and intriguing textures, have an earthy quality; she paints large canvases in a style she describes as being “at the edge between abstraction and figuration” that evoke the colors, patterns, skies, and shifting weather of Sonoma County and Northern California.

Born and raised in Germany — her mother is Argentinian and her father was German — she laid down roots here nearly 20 years ago with her husband, visionary winemaker and international consultant Paul Hobbs, known for his single-vineyard-designate wines. Cristina’s art is similarly entwined with the gently hilly terroir of Sebastopol’s Green Valley, a place often swaddled in morning and evening fog.

The couple met at a winemaker dinner at the Sao Paulo, Brazil home of her mother and her late stepfather, an Argentine diplomat specializing in business and trade. Cristina at the time was pursuing a career in foreign diplomacy herself and had enrolled in a graduate program in Buenos Aires. But meeting Hobbs, who is credited with elevating the then-underappreciated Malbec wine grape in Argentina, would set her on another path to California. Here she explored her artistic side, studying painting at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and building community with other artists in Sonoma County.

She remembers being bewildered by the cool fog settling over Sebastopol when she first drove in from the airport in 2006.

“When you think of California as a European, you think more of Southern California. I was surprised by that and how cool it was here in the evening,” she recalls of the conditions that would swiftly become so much a part of her life and her art.

She settled into the snug 1910 Craftsman-style farmhouse on 7 acres near the Paul Hobbs Winery that the vintner had bought not long before. Instead of building a new house, Paul, who enjoys architecture and landscape design, enlisted the help of local carpenters Roger Wishard and John Berg. Working with the same footprint and façade, they transformed the interior from a warren of little rooms into an open-beamed, light-filled space with windows that offer picture views of the 5 acres of Chardonnay Hobbs planted on the former apple farm.

“I wanted to preserve it because I felt it spoke to Sonoma County — west Sonoma County — and the ethos of the period,” he says. Even with the arrival of Sophia in 2013 and Louisa in 2016, they remained content in the compact space, which fosters a familial closeness they are committed to maintaining.

“We always found that mostly everyone is in the kitchen. This is where we spend most of our time,” Cristina says, standing behind a stove set to face the dining area and living room for ease of conversation while cooking. The hub is a large, worn black marble island where they do crafts and make cookies.

In autumn, the smell of zucchini and banana breads envelop the house. Cristina and the girls like to take their wagon to fetch apples from an old orchard nearby to make apple crumble and tarts. Although the harvest means long days, Paul, who grew up on a farm in a family of 11 kids, makes a point of coming home to eat a homecooked dinner with Cristina and the girls. Everyone sits down at the custom-made walnut farm table together, even if it means dinner is delayed until 7:30 p.m.

Cristina is instilling a love of art into her daughters. Both girls have October birthdays and then there is Halloween, with pumpkins from their own garden and decorations they make themselves. A potting shed in the garden, where each girl has her own raised bed — Sophia has a tea rose bush and chamomile to dry her own teas while Louisa grows blueberries and catnip for their two kitties — also doubles as a crafts room. Tools share space with crafting supplies and a sewing machine.

The two-story black shed stands like a cottage amid ornamental grasses, perennials, and sunflowers. With its steeply pitched roof, it makes a perfect haunted house that the girls love to do up with spiderwebs and other spooky decorations. It is their favorite haunt, next to the giant bedroom they share. Carved out of the attic with intriguing spots for hiding and play, it also has a built-in desk that overlooks a broad lawn where they play Frisbee with their miniature poodle, Daisy. From here they can also watch the leaves from a stand of sycamores turn orange, yellow and red.

“We take our rakes and make humongous piles and jump in them,” Sophia says.

The house is simply furnished with a large, custom-designed wraparound sofa for reading and a round, artist-made stamped concrete coffee table with an impression of leaves. Right now, it is covered with colorful wooden toys from Germany, where Cristina goes every summer with the girls while Paul is traveling to his other wineries in France, Argentina, and the Finger Lakes region of New York. But there is always color from the flowers Cristina brings in from her own garden — lots of marigolds in fall — and from Full Bloom Flower Farm in nearby Graton.

The home is not a gallery of her work, although one particularly atmospheric piece catches the eye in their living space, with another work near the entry.

“It was a time when I was into describing the feel of weather — the fog-like qualities you have in the morning here, the texture of the dried leaves and the raindrops. It’s very nature inspired,” she explains of the soft images that are only suggestive in their dream-like quality in moody hues of indigo and blue — with a burst of buttery gold like sun breaking through the clouds.

Many of her pieces — both paintings and ceramics — grace the hospitality center and the Howard Backen-designed offices at Paul Hobbs Winery a short 15-minute walk away through the vineyards. Cristina’s influence is reflected in the interior design and the paintings she created especially for the space based on local scenes. She and Paul worked closely with the late Backen, one of Wine Country’s leading architects and pioneer of the rural vernacular style, to create the winery offices, a series of connected buildings bridged by glass hallways. Cristina’s paintings capturing the natural moods of the landscape are also featured on several wine labels.

After she drops the girls off at school, Cristina heads out into the backroads and takes long walks, often pausing to photograph things she sees along the way as a “starting point” in her creative process. One of her favorite hikes is the Pomo Trail out to Shell Beach, where, from one particular perch, she is captivated by the site of the Russian River flowing into the Pacific Ocean. She takes note of whatever is growing and is especially taken by the lacy lichen that hangs from the oaks like underwater coral, something she never saw in Germany.

She brings her ideas back to a small studio carved into an historic 1850s farmhouse at Paul Hobbs’ Ross Station Estate, a former stagecoach stop. Here, Cristina can sit at her small potter’s wheel or work on a canvas while looking out at nature unfolding in the vineyards. It could be the fog burning off in the distance or a pack of coyotes on the move.

She doesn’t overthink her work or constrain it by sketching it out before she applies brush to canvas or hands to the clay. “If something else comes in at that moment, I want that to happen. I don’t want to feel obligated because I made that sketch,” she explains.

She instead lets it flow naturally, and she often surprises herself by what comes out. But it all speaks to her appreciation of the small moments: carving pumpkins with her girls, sharing a family meal, or watching the weather shift outside her window. Her images are, as she herself describes them, “observations of the everyday that at times go unnoticed; a celebration of the little things you see that stay in the back of your mind.”

Find Cristina Hobbs’ artwork at cristinahobbs.com and at Maison Djouf at 332 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg, maisondjouf.com.

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Rick Oginz’s house sits on a steep hill on the lowest slopes of the Mayacamas Mountains, rising from and overlooking the Valley of the Moon. It sits just high enough to attain a modest yet clear view of Sonoma Mountain on the other side. Over there, to the north, is Jack London State Historic Park and the ruins of Wolf House, the famed author’s ill-fated dream home that captured Oginz’s imagination and became the subject of more than 20 of his paintings over the course of five years. They recently exhibited inside the park’s House of Happy Walls Museum.

The House of Happy Walls, incidentally, was where London’s widow, Charmian, lived from 1935 until her death in 1952. She might’ve been living in Wolf House during that period after the author’s death in 1916 at the age of 40, except that their forever home — which was to include a sizable workshop and library — burned one night in 1913 just before it was completed, leaving behind only its massive stone walls.

Somewhat like London’s home was intended to, Oginz’s abode — which he moved to in 2020 after living and working in Los Angeles, Oakland, Toronto, and London — serves as a workshop, studio, and gallery.

If Oginz squints in the right direction he might imagine peering all the way across the valley, through the redwood canopy, and into what’s left of Wolf House. He didn’t move here just for an almost-view of an incinerated mansion. “I looked around for a house that would be close enough to San Francisco, and I found this,” he says, but there’s no denying his reverence for the site. “It was the high point of civilization but returned to nature immediately on completion. Its walls and arches reveal ambition that was denied.”

Beyond his aesthetic and symbolic interest in Wolf House, Oginz is a longtime admirer of London’s fiction, having read about a dozen of his books. “His overarching theme is the contrast between civilized and wild,” Oginz explains. “Like a dog becomes a wolf, or a wolf becomes a dog. And, so, the Wolf House, before our eyes, is returning to nature, with all the vegetation growing on it. In one of the fireplaces, there is a pretty large beehive, and you can see bees really active around it.”

His mixed-media renderings of different aspects and views of the Londons’ house on 22” by 30” watercolor paper combine bold, almost cartoonish color with simple, sketch-like linework that occasionally reveals every stroke or stipple of ink. It’s a divided approach the lifelong artist has used before, but that’s particularly well suited to Wolf House: subject and style both appear simultaneously unfinished and perfect as they are.

In fact, the site is conflicted to its core, positioned at the intersection of past and present, dream and reality, home and ruin. “My house will be standing, act of God permitting, for a thousand years,” London wrote during its construction, a sentence that now reads more like an order than the hubristic prediction history has revealed it to be.

Oginz plays with this further by including steel braces and other supportive structures in his drawings, as well as the wooden and chain link fences that surround and protect Wolf House. This lets the viewer experience the site as Oginz did — or as would any member of the general public — and also captures its fragility.

The Wolf House works are thus documents that interpret and preserve the landmark at a specific point in time. The structure itself may not be standing in another 900 years — certainly not as it looks now — but perhaps Oginz’s renderings will, somewhere, in some digital cloud. So will his illustrations of architectural landmarks in other places he’s lived and worked: the Port of Oakland, Tribune Tower, and Bay Bridge; the Watts Towers in Los Angeles; the CN Tower in Toronto.

His vast repertoire, dating to the late 1960s, covers many other subjects: industry, technology, transportation, science, biology, nature. He’s proficient in myriad mediums, methods, and materials, having practiced drawing and painting, sculpture and ceramics, wood and metalwork side-by-side for decades. In fact, after Oginz’s exhibition at the House of Happy Walls he began making ceramics at the Sonoma Community Center down the road — in some cases bringing to life three-dimensional designs he’d already drawn.

“My work is autobiographical and journalistic,” he says. “I react to my literal environment by representing it in graphic and/or sculptural form.” Oginz’s reactions to his external environment in turn make up his most intimate one, as the walls, floors, and shelves of the rooms and hallways of his home have become a de facto gallery, displaying a rotating selection of his works spanning much of his career. A framed piece from the Wolf House series is on the west wall, facing Sonoma Mountain.

Downstairs, Oginz’s drawing studio is both an archive and a workshop in itself. There, he spends hours on the fine, black linework that defines his style. Displayed on one wall is a series of paintings of his neighborhood’s landmarks, of sorts, depicted throughout the seasons: large, gnarled trees; rows of old vines; and a nearby wine estate under construction that, like Wolf House — and perhaps all of existence, seems in Oginz’s view to be perpetually incomplete.

“It looks very ominous to me, because you can’t really tell if it’s under construction or destruction,” he says. “It’s in that state of flux.”

Learn more at rickoginzart.com.

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If water is life, rain in California is so much more. It defines eternal cycles within cycles of boom and bust: dry summers broken by wet winters; multi-year droughts quelled by equally severe atmospheric deluges. Rain is a godsend, a destructive force and an indicator of long-term changes to our climate.

To ceramic artist Kala Stein, rain is all this — as well as a muse and co-creator. Water falling from clouds into the narrow breezeway outside her Sonoma studio, or drip-dropping from the lip of the gutter, rinses away pigments on the surface of small, handmade tiles she sets out to record its signature.

“The tiles are really a collaboration with the rainwater,” Stein says. “Depending on how much rain and how hard it’s raining, I get different effects on the surfaces.”

Some reflect a “harder drip,” where the rain has “eroded” away the white ceramic pigment she applies before placing the tile outside. Others show more of an “overall wash,” where the rainwater and pigment have “puddled” on the tile’s face.

“After it reaches a point where I feel like the surface is interesting, I’ll remove it from the rain and fire it to make the material permanent,” Stein explains. She likens the process to creating a fossil record of a particular day and a particular expression of rain. And just as with a fossil, the imprinting material — bone or shell or rainwater — disappears, leaving only its shadow. Stein calls the series “Ghost Rain.”

In a recent show at downtown Sonoma’s Alley Gallery, adjacent to the La Haye Art Center, Stein hung “Ghost Rain” tiles in groups of three or eight or 20, each representing a single day and evoking a certain aesthetic or pattern. The rest was left to the eye of the beholder.

“All of my work is abstract, so people can see what they want when they look at it,” Stein says. “It’s interpretive.”

Not in doubt, however, are the works’ foundation in natural processes and materials, including the base tiles themselves, which Stein fires from a dark, iron-rich clay body. Displayed indoors, the finished products “bring a natural element into the built environment” without literally depicting specific scenes. “I’m trying to tap into the feelings of nature, more so than the imagery,” she notes.

The same can be said of another of Stein’s ongoing series, “Atmospheric,” whose pieces memorialize a larger-scale phenomenon: the storms themselves that bring the rain. She starts with satellite images of storms, such as the atmospheric river that hit California on Jan. 4, 2023, dropping as much as 6-8 inches of rain in some parts of the region.

Stein rendered a snapshot of that January storm taken from more than 500 miles above Earth upon a wall-mounted mosaic of terracotta tile, forming a massive installation 6 feet tall and 12 feet across. A marbled blue-and-white glaze shows cloudy spirals and undulations against a dark-red, Mars-like field. The result is both familiar enough to recall unbridled natural forces and alien enough to invite ambiguity and close inspection.

In any case, it is no romantic idyll. Stein calls the piece “an investigation of the tragedy of the Anthropocene Epoch that marks a moment in time, a collective experience of severe historic weather.”

Other works exploring dichotomies of natural-versus-disturbed and creative-versus-destructive take different forms, like the large white vessels with unruly surfaces inspired by satellite imagery of Hurricane Helene. Closer to home, her “Urns for Manzanita” are a tribute to all that burned during the Nuns, Tubbs, and Pocket wildfires of 2017. Crafted of fired black clay and a cracked glaze that recalls charred manzanita wood, the urns are designed to “evoke emotion and loss,” Stein says. At the same time, they are imbued with a sense of “rejuvenation and resilience.”

The 2017 wildfires were an introduction of sorts to California for Stein, who was raised in rural upstate New York by back-tothe- land, homesteading parents and developed an intimate yet pragmatic connection to the natural world. She spent many more years living up and down the East Coast before moving to Sonoma in 2015 to run the ceramics program at the Sonoma Community Center, where she still teaches.

“It’s a completely different experience living out here,” Stein says. “Experiencing the seasons here, and the geography, has been really influential and inspirational.”

So too has been witnessing the reality of the climate crisis.

“I want my work to address that, without overtly pointing to the problems with it. I’m basically celebrating it, maybe lamenting it — lamenting loss caused by natural disasters, the loss of our non-renewable resources. I’d like this work to be in conversation with those issues.”

Kala Stein’s ceramics studio is at La Haye Art Center, 148 E. Napa St. in downtown Sonoma, just off the square. The studio is open by appointment — to visit, email kala@kalastein.com. For information on ceramics workshops or to purchase her work, visit kalastein.com.

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The Harris Gallery in Healdsburg’s bustling main square has been a cornerstone of the local arts scene since it opened in 2000.

Founded by artists Marc Cabell “M.C.” Harris and his son, who goes by A3L3XZAND3R, the gallery showcases two generations of family artistry on two floors of the meticulously restored, Italianate-style Plaza Arts Building, once the town’s first bank.

There, overlooking the Healdsburg Plaza, visitors can explore carefully arranged, illuminated artworks — complemented by a glass of wine from The Harris Gallery Art & Wine Collection.

The exhibitions include works by M.C. Harris, who paints in a modernist, cubist and abstract expressionist style, and A3L3XZAND3R, whose work spans classic impressionism to abstract minimalism.

Jazzy beginnings

Born in New York City, M.C. Harris’ childhood was infused with creativity. His mother was a writer and fashion couturier, while his father, Edward Jurgen Harris, was a jazz impresario and surrealist painter. His godfather was the legendary jazz trumpet virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie.

“Jazz is the original American art form. It celebrates freedom, innovation and individuality,” Edward Jurgen Harris once said, quoted in M.C.’s newly published book, “All That Jazz,” which explores Edward’s paintings and his connections to the Jazz Age.

M.C. spent his formative years in Northern California and attended the California College of the Arts, graduating in printmaking in 1972. His first public exhibition was a two-man show in San Francisco, where his etchings were displayed alongside the lithographs of renowned Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis “M.C.” Escher.

He eventually moved to Guatemala to learn Spanish and take some time off, ultimately leading to his career’s next evolution.

“A cord struck. He fell in love with the people, the objects and the culture at the local markets,” said A3L3XZAND3R of his father.

M.C. had an idea to bring Guatemalan culture and crafts to the American market. He had learned about the retail business through his mother, who owned clothing stores and boutiques throughout the Bay Area.

“He would go to a person’s stand at the markets and buy baskets, satchels, jackets, and different objects and take them to trade shows,” said A3L3XZAND3R. “Macy’s would say, ‘We could sell that.’ He basically became an importer and would take orders live at shows.”

M.C. founded the now-closed Marco Polo Companies, an importing operation that emphasized various industries, from women’s clothing to textile bedding.

While M.C. loved the work, it was a challenging career for someone with a family.

“It was a lot of travel, and there were three boys at home,” recalled A3L3XZAND3R. “It would be a two to a three-week trip to have new items made, and then a lot of travel for trade shows.”

Ultimately, after a 30-year career, M.C. retired.

“I retired from the fashion and textile business and began oil painting,” he said. “My wife Peggy removed me from my studio and installed me, and my work, in the old bank boardroom off the Healdsburg Plaza.”

Immersed in art

Around the same time, A3L3XZAND3R was coming into his own as an artist. Like his father, he was immersed in art from an early age.

“I grew up around it and was surrounded by it, looking at my grandfather’s work — hundreds of art books. I was obsessed with it and loved it,” said A3L3XZAND3R. “I always knew it was what I wanted to do.”

By the time his father opened the Healdsburg gallery, A3L3XZAND3R was studying at the Florence Academy of Art.

“It was essentially a boot camp for learning how to draw and paint extremely well,” he said. His time in Italy allowed him to draw imaginative prompts, such as, “An umbrella, upside down in the wind blowing 200 miles an hour.”

He also attended a summer program at the Russian Academy of Art, to which only five international students were invited. While abroad, he would send his artwork home. During the summers, he worked at his father’s gallery.

Once he moved back home in 2006, A3L3XZAND3R became a full-time partner in the gallery, and the business has grown every year since.

“The idea is he shows his work, I show my work, and the general philosophy is where we live and how we express ourselves,” said A3L3XZAND3R.

Blending art with wine

Fifteen years ago, A3L3XZAND3R met his wife, Leah Harris, an avid wine collector. She made her wine collection available for friends and family at the Harris Gallery.

Once a wine tasting room permit became available in downtown Healdsburg, A3L3XZAND3R filed quickly.

Adding the wine program to the gallery led to a transformation.

“The gallery became a more comfortable, approachable space,“ said Leah. ”People started understanding the connection between art, wine and the community.“

The Harris family decided to add their own label to the collection and turned to their close friend Wells Guthrie, who won acclaim at Copain Wines. He created a Pinot Noir from Anderson Valley.

“It became a natural evolution of our program to add our wine, but it was important to me that our wine artist (winemaker) was a friend, an extension of us,” said Leah.

And the wine inside the bottle had to match the caliber of the art that decorated the bottle’s exterior.

“I didn’t want it just to be a pretty bottle,” said Leah. “We wanted it to be an extension of our story.”

The gallery’s wine collection expanded further after Leah reached out to famed winemaker Leo Hansen, who was familiar with the Harris Gallery. The two struck a deal to trade a painting for a palette of Chenin Blanc made specifically for the Healdsburg gallery.

Today, Hansen makes a Chenin Blanc and a rosé for the Harris Gallery, which also has added a sparkling wine to its portfolio.

In addition to the gallery, bottles from the The Harris Gallery Art & Wine Collection are available at local establishments such as The Madrona and Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg, Diavola Pizzeria & Salumeria in Geyserville, and Nick’s Cove in Marshall.

“We want genuine partnerships and authenticity,” said A3L3XZAND3R.

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Santa Rosa’s Spring Maxfield has been a fixture of the local art scene for over three decades. She holds multiple art degrees, but Maxfield is not an artist — not in the traditional sense, at least.

As executive director of Urban Arts Partnership, her work involves organizing, promoting and supporting the output, and thus the livelihoods, of other artists who call Santa Rosa home.

“I want people to be who they are, and I feel like there’s so many people that aren’t able to fulfill that in the economy that we have in Sonoma County,” says Maxfield, who recently received a Merit Award from the city of Santa Rosa. “If there are ways to create economic opportunities for artists, then I want to help with that.”

Maxfield’s next event is the 20th annual WinterBlast, an interactive art parade and open-studio celebration in Santa Rosa’s South of A (SofA) Arts District on Saturday, Nov. 9 (srurbanarts.org).

Finding Motivation

What motivates me is brilliant people. I encounter so many amazing humans every day who are not getting to sparkle because they’re working jobs they hate to support their art, when really what they should be doing is being creative. I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to find ways to turn that into an income for people, so that they can quit their dull jobs and create an economy from what they should be doing with their lives.

Rising Tides

The more art that’s out there, the more people recognize that it’s accessible to them. The more artists that are selling work, the better they are going to be at getting more customers. A rising tide floats all boats. Creating that economy is about educating the public and providing opportunities for artists to sell their work and for people to find art that they love.

Santa Rosa’s Art Scene

There are so many different pockets, and you’ll really see a very distinct flavor to each. You’re going to find what you’re looking for; there’s a little bit for everybody. I do think that there’s a growing appreciation for art in Santa Rosa. It is much more supported by businesses and the city itself than when I first started here.

Heading to Winterblast

It celebrates the coming darkness and winter in general, and is an irreverent, silly commentary on the “SofA” designation that the city gave that area many years ago. Artists started it by just pushing their studio sofas out into the street and having a party, and it’s evolved from there. I think right now, the purpose WinterBlast serves is giving the public an opportunity to immerse themselves in a very family-friendly expression of personal creativity.

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“Arthur Monroe: A Tow to Carry” is a bold new show at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art well worth a visit this summer.

The late abstract expressionist painter and community activist was an important member of the Beat circle in San Francisco’s North Beach and later set up one of the first live-work studios in the landmark Oakland Cannery.

He was dear friends with musician Charlie Parker and closely connected to other abstract painters, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann. Curated in part by the artist’s son, Alastair Monroe, this is the first major show of Monroe’s vibrant, spirited canvases in nearly two decades.

The exhibition of Monroe’s work — over 25 pieces from 1958 to 2011 — runs through Sept. 8 at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

The museum is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. General admission is $10 and free for SVMA members and those 18 and under. Admission is free every Wednesday.

551 Broadway, Sonoma, 707-939-7862, svma.org

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In Sonoma County, public art is easily accessible, in every town. Petaluma, especially, has loads of public art, and to help you explore it, we’re offering a guide of the highlights.

There are more than 30 outdoor public art pieces scattered around the city, including murals, sculptures, arches and a community-built fountain.

‘River Arch’

In August, Petaluma-based artist David Best unveiled his new public art piece, “River Arch,” an intricate, rust-colored steel archway that greets passersby on Lynch Creek Trail off Lakeville Street. The 25-foot metal arch — with decorative curves, natural motifs and a chandelier-like detail — enhances the industrial look of the area while serving as a gateway between downtown Petaluma and the surrounding natural landscape.

Best is known for the large, elaborate temples and sculptures he creates for the Burning Man festival. The Petaluma Public Art Committee commissioned Best in 2017 to create the River Arch to improve the site for residents and visitors, welcoming them to Petaluma’s downtown. Lynch Creek Trail is located at 88 Lakeville St. in Petaluma.

‘Wrist Wrestling Champions’

Wrist wrestling transformed from a playful test of machismo to a nationally recognized sport when local legend and Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes arranged a match at “Diamond Mike” Gilardi’s bar in 1955. The thrilling contest, which ended in a draw, generated so much attention that a committee was formed to organize a tournament. The tournament grew over the years, and, in 1962, the first World Wristwrestling Championship was held in Petaluma’s Hermann Sons Hall.

By 1988, the city of Petaluma erected a statue downtown — made by prominent Cuban artist Rosa Estebañez — in Soberanes’ honor, depicting him and another man locked in a strenuous battle of the forearms. The bronze sculpture includes a plaque commemorating Soberanes as “the World’s Number One People Meeter” for his knack for making fast friends. Find the statue near the corner of East Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard North, next to Lemongrass Thai Noodle and across the street from the Petaluma Heritage Mural

‘Reared In Steel’

Get a taste of Burning Man at the corner of Copeland and East Washington streets, where Petaluma artist Kevin Clark set up his private art studio Reared In Steel. The massive metal sculptures out front are a fixture in downtown Petaluma, when they’re not at the annual Burning Man festival or rented out to various other events.

The steampunk-like artworks that can be spotted on Copeland Street include a 70-foot “Flower Tower,” a metal-winged guardian lion (“Guardino Leone”), a fully motorized “Rhino Redemption” art car and an intimidating “Medusa Madness” sculpture. Then there’s the giant squawking metal raven perched atop the studio.

While the working art studio is private, visitors are welcome to view it from the street and snap photos of the huge, unusual art sculptures in the studio yard, at 100 Copeland St., in Petaluma.

‘Outlet, Plug & Cord’

In Petaluma’s Theatre District, it’s hard to miss the giant wall outlet and plug protruding from the PG&E Substation on the corner of First and D streets. The comically large sculpture made of steel, wood and fiberglass seems to fit right in with its surroundings while adding levity to the industrial look of the area.

The cord of the plug appears to be coming out of the ground, suggesting it’s drawing power from the nearby electrical towers to supply energy to the PG&E building. The utility company commissioned artist Joel Jones, of Basal Ganglia Studio, and fabricator Shawn Thorsson to create the art piece, which they unveiled in 2015.

‘Faces of Petaluma Fountain’

In the middle of Petaluma’s Theatre District is a water fountain covered in more than 800 unique faces made of clay and set in colorful mosaic tile. Ceramic artist and community organizer Donna Billick designed and led the public art project, which welcomed Petalumans of all ages to sculpt self-portraits from clay.

Billick took the finished clay faces back to her art studio in Davis to fire and prepare them for installation, and Heath Ceramics in Sausalito provided the mosaic tile panels. The project was completed in 2007 and presents an artistic link with the Petaluma community’s past and future. See the colorful, whimsical fountain in Theatre Square, surrounded by local businesses such as Trattoria Roma, Sol Food and La Dolce Vita Wine Lounge. It’s located at Theatre Square, 140 Second St., in Petaluma.

‘Cherry Soda’

Patrons of Petaluma’s Boulevard Cinemas can’t miss this whimsical abstract statue of a yellow-and-blue cup spilling over with pink cherry soda. Sculptor Robert Ellison created the painted-steel statue in 2003, originally installed at Lucchesi Park.

The Petaluma Public Art Committee purchased “Cherry Soda” from the Voigt Family Sculpture Foundation after Ellison’s death in 2012, and the two groups worked with the city of Petaluma to facilitate the installation at the cinema. “Cherry Soda” resides at the corner of Second and C streets in front of the theater, and the statue remains a popular hangout spot for young people waiting to see a movie. Boulevard 14 Cinema is located at 200 C St. in Petaluma.

‘A Whale of a Good Time’

A life-size whale tail made from scrap metal stands 15 feet tall in the Deer Creek Village shopping center, where it dives into the pavement between Sourdough & Co. and Habit Burger Grill. Sacramento artist Terrence Martin created the sculpture in 2014 after gaining inspiration from a whale-watching trip. The statue seats nine people inside and is surrounded by a ring of fluorescent blue lighting that glows at night.

The aquatic sculpture was the first piece in a series of art installations at the shopping center, including a 20-foot steel and glass abstract tree sculpture (also made by Martin) next to Mary’s Pizza Shack and decorative benches created by Martin and local artist David Duskin

Hands & Balls, Petaluma

Meant to represent balance — of the rational and spiritual, terrestrial and celestial — a pair of giant concrete hands rest on red marbled balls in front of Lagunitas Brewing Co., coaxing in curious onlookers. The position of the hands evokes Buddhist iconography of symbolic hand gestures (known as mudras). The right hand appears to be in the Abhaya position, with the palm facing forward, representing fearlessness and protection. The left hand is in the Dhyana position (the meditation mudra), with the hand resting and palm facing up, symbolizing compassion for all living beings.

The husband-and-wife team Peter Crompton and Robyn Spencer-Crompton built the sculpture, with Peter focusing on the form of the concrete hands and Robyn on the mosaic surface design. The “Hands & Balls” sculpture has been a part of the Sculpture Trail in Cloverdale and Geyserville and was installed in front of Lagunitas in Petaluma in 2012. Lagunitas Brewing Co. is located at 1280 N. McDowell Blvd. in Petaluma.

‘Fred J. Wiseman Monument’

In 1911, local pilot Fred J. Wiseman embarked on a short flight, in a biplane he designed and built, to deliver mail and newspapers from Petaluma to Santa Rosa. It was the world’s earliest “air mail” flight. A park in Petaluma was named after the pilot (Wiseman Park), and local Cuban artist Rosa Estebañez created a monument in his honor in August 1968.

The monument, a bas-relief of Wiseman’s bust and plane mounted on a wall of stone and concrete, was originally located in Kenilworth Park, where Wiseman began his first air mail flight. Now it resides in Wiseman Park on the east side of Petaluma, near the Petaluma Municipal Airport.

‘Home Stretch’

Standing at the corner of Lakeville Highway and Frates Road, an 18-foot totem sculpture seems to defy physics. Made by Donna Billick in 2007 and covered in vibrant mosaic tiles, it has an inverted cone perched on what appears to be a miniature house, which balances atop five colorful spheres descending in size.

Like Billick’s Faces of Petaluma Fountain, the mosaic tiles on “Home Stretch” are from Heath Ceramics in Sausalito. The totem may be in an odd place — on the corner of Lakeville Highway and Frates Road, across from Petaluma Poultry Processors — but it’s encircled by four benches, where people can relax and admire its details

Honorable Mentions

Petaluma Friends: A sculpture made of Corten steel depicting a dog with a cat standing on its back, and a small bird perched on the end of the cat’s tail. The dog has a bone-shaped hole across its body, revealing the green tin of the Adobe Animal Hospital building behind it. The animal sculpture was created by Dale Rogers Studio in 2015. Adobe Animal Hospital, 408 Madison St., Petaluma

Heron & Reeds Wall Relief Sculpture: A large wall relief sculpture depicting a heron flying low among reeds, made of copper and established in 2009. Raley’s Grocery Store, 157 N McDowell Blvd., Petaluma

Lucchesi Park Tower Sculpture: An abstract, green metal tower sitting in front of the Petaluma Community Center. 320 N. McDowell Blvd., Petaluma

Millennium Arch: A black-painted, steel archway in McNear Park commemorating the local Rotary Club’s commitment to the city. Made by sculptor Nicolas van Krijdt and established in 2003. McNear Park, 1008 G St., Petaluma

Dubull Eagull: Unsurprisingly, Petaluma’s art and visitor centers have a number of sculptures outside, including the “Dubull Eagull” (also known as the Double Eagle). The rust-colored steel sculpture is an abstract, minimalist depiction of two eagles flying between two tall columns. It was made by Peter Forakis in 2001. Petaluma Arts Center, 230 Lakeville St., Petaluma

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