Once Upon A Frame launched OUAF, a gallery committed to bringing together local North County artists and San Diego residents, in 2021. OUAF hosts an artist in residence every three months as well as features work from local artisans and designers.
Read about the gallery’s launch, and about owner Yael Gmach, here.
UPCOMING EVENTS
RIN COLABUCCI PAINTINGS
Born in post-Hiroshima Japan and the daughter of a Japanese master craftsman, Rin Colabucci began studying traditional Japanese calligraphy by the age of five. As an adult she developed into a self-taught artist as she traveled the globe, absorbing ideas, techniques, and motifs that are reflected in her unique, ethereal style. Colabucci’s vivid and emotional work can be found throughout the world, from the Marin Beach Resort in Dubai to San Diego International Airport. Once Upon a Frame (132 E. Cliff St., Solana Beach, CA 92075) is proud to display her current works, with an opening on June 1st, 4-9 pm. All are welcome.
“My paintings are not just representational images, but icons and symbols to evoke emotion, stories, and images.” Come see what stories emerge for you from Colabucci’s paintings.
Rin Colabucci, The Knot
PAST EVENTS
DAGMAR GALLEITHNER-STEINER: ON THE TRAIL OF DER BLAUE REITER
dagmargalleithner.com
Buried within the simple compositions and limited color palette of Dagmar Galleithner-Steiner’s oil landscapes is a journey away from and back to her artistic and historic roots in Germany. A native of Huglfing, Ms. Galleithner-Steiner moved to the United States in 2013 and found artistic success with her hyper-realist portraits of dogs and horses, including a commission to paint the official portrait of several of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club’s Pacific Classic winners. In 2018, facing burnout, she pivoted to training as a Health Coach and yoga instructor and in that process found herself returning to the artistic style and the underlying philosophy of her youth: the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) movement.
A form of Expressionism that emerged in the early twentieth century, Der Blaue Reiter emphasized the emotionally transformative power of color and abstract form in art, a response to the alienation artists felt in a rapidly modernizing world. For Galleithner-Steiner, the movement from hyper realism to Expressionism was also a kind of freedom, a transition from a very cerebral to an emotionally driven artistic process. “It has taken me years to feel ready to take this step toward free expression,” she says, which in Galleithner-Steiner’s case meant stepping away from an intense focus on technical detail and toward bright hues and suggestive shapes that create joyful harmony on the canvas and in the viewer.
And this truly is a return home for Ms. Galleithner-Steiner. Her birthplace, Huglfing, is nearby Murnau, home of artist Gabriele Münter who, along with Wasily Kandinsky and other artists, formed the Blue Rider movement. What’s more, Münter’s home became a hiding place for the group’s paintings after the Nazi regime deemed Expressionism “morally degenerate.” Generations later, Galleithner-Steiner finds herself reconnecting with her roots - artistic, historical, emotional - creating oil landscapes deeply informed by German Expressionism and embodying the many forms of freedom that the Blue Rider movement represented.
Dagmar Galleithner-Steiner, New Point Loma Lighthouse, 2022
Lisa Miller: Time Framed
A pediatric orthopedic surgeon turned award-winning photographer, Lisa Miller beguiles the viewer with images that are simultaneously timeless and timeworn. Her photos - roses past their prime, tangerines positioned in front of trees, gas pipes in close up - are familiar yet otherworldly thanks to the precision of her compositions and technique. Miller counts Rembrandt, Sebastião Salgado, and Sam Abell among her influences, but she is in especially rapt conversation with 17th-century Dutch and Spanish still life artists: “They make painted objects look realistic and I make photographed objects look like paintings.”
Lisa Miller, Tangerine Dystopia, 2021
Brady Willmott
OUAF was honored to showcase new works by San Diego artist Brady Willmott, a pop surrealist painter who stirs the observer with a most intriguing visual excursion into his worldview. Willmott's wild tableaus are actualized with a masterly technique that pays homage to High Renaissance and Surrealist styles, yet he is never far from his roots as a snowboarder and tattoo artist.
Hear Brady Willmott talk about his artwork, his process, his influences, and his life as an artist here.
Brady Willmott, A Matter of Time
Kate Joiner
The saturated colors and not-quite-realism of Kate Joiner’s paintings pay homage to early 20th-century Fauvism, but her figures, portraits, and landscapes are 100% 21st-century San Diego. Shorelines, abandoned horse ranches, and standing figures are familiar yet foreign, with vibrant hues and abstract shapes taking center stage.
“I take with me graphic design elements, architectural and engineering designs, and social interactions and then come full circle to depict life, as a woman, as a mom, as a native, in San Diego.”
Click here to see Kate Joiner walk through and describe landscapes that inspired two paintings in her Secluded and Convenient series.
Kate Joiner, In Memory, 2021
Kate Joiner, Stable Fading No. I & II, 2020