A Community Conversation with Ellen Vogel & Patti Trimble — April 21, 2024 @ 4PM

Center Gallery
Ellen Vogel: Swallowing Sky

Gallery Route One presents Swallowing Sky, an exhibit of mixed media works by Bay Area artist Ellen Vogel. Vogel is interested in the tactile, the physical, and the impermanent nature of things; contrasted with the available immensity of our consciousness. Cracks, openings, textures, and veiling, become the abstract language she explores this experience with. The artist explains, “Perception is turned inward; my process is both a physical and intuitive exploration of what lies just below the surface of everyday life.”

In the current body of work, newspaper is used as a means to integrate heartbreaking stories read globally. As in the Buddhist practice Tonglen, the artist’s intention is to take in the story, let it sit, and send back a deep breath or a moment of light. Vogel created sets of prayer beads made from stories she’s collected as an attempt to recall the sacred in all humans.

Ellen Vogel is a New York transplant, living in California for over three decades now. She is a graduate of John F. Kennedy’s MFA in Arts and Consciousness Program, holds a certificate from the NY Studio School, as well as having studied at California College of the Arts. She has a deep connection to nature, philosophy, and the wonder of being in a body, in this time and place. Her art gives her a physical means to communicate with the multi-level experiences of being conscious. While working as a studio artist, she taught art in several places including the Metropolitan Museum, Cerro Coso Community College, and finally 25 years in Middle School in the Bay Area. Her objective as an instructor has been to introduce her fervent belief in the innate, unique gift of creativity we all have as humans.

She has had pieces shown at Sanchez Art Center, Falkirk, San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art, Grounds for Sculpture, SOMARTS, Richmond Art Center, Oakland Museum, Bolinas Museum, and is currently an Artist Member of Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station.

To view more of Vogel’s work, please visit ellen-vogel.com

Project Space
Patti Trimble: The History of Nature

For decades, Pattie Trimble has been thinking about humanity’s place on the planet, sharing stories as a science writer, poet, and painter. In early 2023, she began a painting-as-research project. She called it “The History of Nature,” wanting to throw herself fully into the human dissonance surrounding climate change, merging science with intuition and the kind of absurd intelligence of art, as well as her experiences in the wild. She was inspired by scholar Donna Haraway’s call to writers and artists, asking for many new stories of life on Earth that tell of our complicated webs of relationship.

The series of twenty paintings in the exhibit is presented in a timeline, a storyboard that begins before timekeeping and ends in the present. Texts accompany the storyboard, including words from Darwin, Pythagoras, Heidegger, and others.  The paintings represent a means of thinking, and the images are drawn from memory, intuition, science, play, myth, and even a bit of AI.

Regarding the art-making process, the artist explains, “Painting as thinking is a conversation with memory and materials. I trust my body to to think, ask questions and let mystery appear, watch the thoughts of my intuitive heart and mind. It is the history of nature according to me…I hope it sparks conversation.”

Patti Trimble studied environmental science at UC Berkeley and worked as a seasonal interpreter for Point Reyes national Seashore. In her early twenties, she turned to art, with surrealist John Anderson as a mentor. She moved to Manhattan where for a decade she showed paintings and worked as a part-time studio assistant to abstract expressionists James Brooks, Hedda Sterne, and Richard Pousette-Dart. Her paintings were nominated for an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she received an MFA from Hunter College.

In the late 1980s Patti began writing science and literature textbooks for McGraw-Hill etc., a day job that lasted three decades. She and then-husband Bill Horvitz returned to West Marin to start a family. Patti began performing lyric poems with Bill, (at a MALT benefit) and went on to perform with musicians in many festivals and venues in the USA and Europe. She co-founded Tuolumne Poetry Festival (Yosemite); her poetry has been staged for museum installations and theater; her recordings are available on CD, Spotify, and her website. Patti lives in Petaluma and Sicily with her husband Douglas Kenning. She is painting and (slowly) writing a memoir of her ab-ex mentors: thinking through their studio conversations and postwar art practices in relation to today’s conversation about humanity, nature, and technology. 

To view more of Trimblel’s work, please visit www.pattitrimble.com 

A regional landmark since 1983, Gallery Route One is an arts organization located in the town of Point Reyes Station, adjacent to the entry for Marin County’s Point Reyes National Seashore. Besides offering rotating exhibits by member artists, GRO also maintains its various programs as well as exhibitions addressing environmental, immigration and social justice issues. For more information, please visit: https://galleryrouteone.org/