By DANA GUZZETTI
Martinez News-Gazette Reporter
Main Street Arts Gallery has chosen the work of two new artists, Paula Oesterling, and Jared Foster, to appear now, through July 31 at the downtown gallery in Martinez, now through July 31.
Paula Oesterling’s Hawaiian floral subjects and vivid colors, and Jared Foster’s blend of architectural features bathed in ever-changing shades of light and shadow reveal fresh views of the world around us.
Paula Oesterling
Born in Riverside, California, Paula Oesterling began her art career in high school and earned her Bachelor of Arts in Drawing and Painting from the University of California, Davis. She continued art study in California and Hawaii and taught art privately, and in public and private schools. In realistic and representational pieces, she works in oil, acrylic, graphite and mixed media.
Osterling considers the creation of art a journey of self-discovery. The now, Northern California painter
Paula’s paintings and murals are in private collections, schools, and businesses in Michigan, Colorado California, and Hawaii. She currently paints and resides in northern California. Paula wrote, “Creating has been a journey of self-discovery.”
The artist said her work is a reflection of her love for impressionism. The colors, shapes, and emotions of Hawaii, and in mixing form with texture and what she sees, produces a mental composition of possibilities.
Jared Foster
Jared is an engineer by education but found himself returning to artistic endeavors. Prior to engineering, Jared studied art and architecture in college, only to find himself drawn to photography, pencil and charcoal or painting. Of those three creative mediums, the ability to convey colors and textures made him embark on a self-taught journey to become an accomplished painter.
“It was my interest in color, self-expressive imagery, and the natural abstraction in nature that was irresistible,” Jared explains.
He was born in California and raised in Alaska where he began to see the connections and power of the natural world. Instead of traditional landscapes, Jared takes a close-up look at structures and how nature interacts with them. “There is a natural abstraction that occurs in the environment,” Jared observes. “I can push away from the macro compositional framework and embrace the abstraction in nature when contextual markers are removed.”