Learn about the Artists of GGBA’s Bird Art and Holiday Sale
By Daryl Goldman
The GGBA Bird Art and Holiday Gift Sale is taking place right now in our online store (click here to go to our store) and runs until 9 pm Sunday, November 1. This sale is serving as a fundraiser for GGBA as well as a way to help artists make a living during these difficult times. We’re hoping that this fundraiser helps make up for some of the revenue GGBA lost when we had to cancel this April’s Birdathon fundraiser.
I am so grateful that these amazing artists have agreed to participate and are sharing 50%, (in some cases more!) of the proceeds of their sales with GGBA. Many of them have been affected by the closure of the galleries and stores due to the pandemic so please help us support them while they support us.
I wanted to share with you a little about each of the 15 artists that are participating in this sale.
Each of these artists were chosen because they include birds in their high quality work. Some of these artists are very well established and highly recognized. Others are artists that are just now starting a business. All of them bring immeasurable talent to GGBA. We are immensely grateful that we can collaborate with these talented folks.
So without further ado…
Rigel Stuhmiller
Rigel Stuhmiller – one of the very popular artists from the GGBA Bird Art Auction last May – has enthusiastically agreed to participate in this fundraising sale.
This time, rather than offering a limited number of options, Rigel has very generously offered to open up almost her entire inventory for our fundraiser. Our members will be able to click on a link to her website and shop to their hearts’ content. GGBA will get 50% of the the proceeds from almost all her items when the code “GGBA” is used. If you would like to shop on Rigel’s website, please click here.
Rigel is a Berkeley-based printmaker and illustrator. Her line of notecards, wall art, scarves and home goods featuring her artwork can be found online and in over 500 museums, botanical gardens and boutiques across the country. When designing her products she chooses environmentally friendly options sourced as locally as possible.
Rigel believes in giving back to the community so she donates 5 cents for every item sold to the Alameda County Community Food Bank. So far, she has raised raised enough to provide 17,500 meals.
Nancy Overton
There was heated bidding for the three birds that Nancy Overton donated to the Bird Art Auction in May, so we’re happy that people who were outbid can finally take one of her wonderful birds home!
Nancy Overton is a local artist now working in torn paper collage and paper mache bird figures. She is a graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland California, class of 1965 and has a Fine Arts degree in Painting. Nancy designed stitchery kits for many years while she was the New Product Director at Sunset Designs and oversaw design development of needlepoint, lace and quilting products for Peking Handicraft. She has designed everything from stuffed animals to fabric food to T-shirt kits and children’s chairs, and written many how-to craft articles.
Paper became Nancy’s medium of choice some twenty years ago and her subjects include birds, forest animals, cats, dogs and food. She uses colored Lokta papers and also creates some of her own colored papers with watercolor. She uses old sheet music, stamps and old recipes in both her collages and on her 3-D birds. Nancy sells her original collages and birds in galleries and online. She lives with her rescue dog, Bob, overlooking Chabot Park, where many of her subjects make their home.
Martha Chilvers
Martha Chilvers has sewn all her life, and word has it that when she was a child her dolls had the best clothes in the neighborhood. She’s a retired nurse and for many years has delighted in making dresses for the children and grandchildren of her co-workers and friends at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. Martha recently left the East Bay for Colorado but continues to send her wearable art to lucky toddlers and children in the Bay Area.
Martha’s children’s clothes have such detailed decorative stitching, strong seams and whimsical buttons. They are sewn to last and to be passed on to others when they’re outgrown. She believes that the more complicated the pattern, the more fun it is to make. She was up to the challenge of finding the perfect fabric with birds while sheltering in place.
Martha’s other passions include international wildlife tours, doing volunteer work with animals at nature preserves in other countries, and raising money for the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. With the encouragement of certain friends she has started aiming her binoculars at not just Elephants, but also at birds.
Laura Zindel
Laura Zindel is an artist and designer who combines her passion for ceramics and naturalist illustration into unique housewares. Her work incorporates techniques from the Arts & Crafts movement and is inspired by the natural world.
A ceramist by training, Laura has always loved to draw with a pencil. Her initial drawings on the surface of clay with a glaze pencil ultimately led her to the transfer process she now uses for creating commercial works; her drawings are now silkscreened and printed as enamel transfers. This process lends itself to repetition, allowing her to create exquisite surface patterns from her drawings on bowls, mugs, dinnerware, canisters, vases, platters and more.
Laura Zindel Design, the collaboration of Laura and her husband, Thorsten Lauterbach, has been creating beautiful objects for the home since 1997. Laura and Thor, along with a staff of local artisans, create fine ceramics, dinnerware, and housewares from their design and production studio in Brattleboro, Vermont.
John & Debbie Beasley
John and Debbie Beasley opened Medicine Bluff Studio on the screened in porch of their home in Oklahoma in 2001. The studio was named after a beautiful bluff nearby.
John is a sculptor and illustrator and he designs and creates each of their sculpted relief tiles of Owls, Egrets, Otters, Loons, turtles and other animals. His wife Debbie works alongside John in creating new ideas for tiles and provides customer service. John says of their collaboration: “We work together every day and we are so blessed that we love being together and love what we do.”
John and Debbie now reside in a beautiful little town east of Cincinnati, OH. The studio remains a small, keeping the focus on the quality – not quantity – of their handmade designs.
Maggie Hurley
Maggie Hurley’s birds on wood blocks sold out at the GGBA Bird Art Auction in May so we are very happy that she didn’t hesitate to offer us more of her birds for this fundraiser. It is easy to fall in love with her birds and create a flock on your wall.
Maggie Hurley is a Southern California native now living and creating in the San Francisco Bay Area. From teaching herself to paint as a child, to studying at Laguna College of Art + Design, Maggie has imagined, created, and crafted for the majority of her life.
Maggie’s love of nature, wildlife, and conservation started at a young age and continues to inform her work. She hopes that her art will inspire people to feel hopeful and motivated to do good work for the planet. Maggie believes in giving back a portion of her proceeds to important organizations that help make the world a better place.
Casey Riley
Casey Riley makes it easy to be surrounded by birds while you go about your day, with her beautiful and functional messenger bags, pillows, pouches and zippered wristlets.
Casey started Laterzees in June of this year, after losing her job due to the pandemic. She needed something to keep her busy when shelter-in-place started, so she taught herself graphic design and began designing her own fabrics!
She says, “The conservation and protection of the irreplaceable wildlife that inhabit this planet are what drives me to run a business that does whatever possible to help preserve our natural world. That is why I incorporate Hemp and sustainable fabrics, eco-friendly shipping supplies and recycled materials as much as possible! I love sharing my love of nature with others who value the same and I can’t wait to see where this all goes.”
Casey is based in Georgetown, MA.
Scott Partridge
Scott Partridge’s birds were so popular that they practically flew off the page at our Bird Art Auction last May, and we are delighted that he was happy to share more of his digital prints on wood panels with us for this fundraiser.
Scott was born in Louisville, Kentucky and currently makes his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Scott works in both traditional and digital media. He says that his images, whether highly abstracted or representative, are largely drawn from the natural world. He counts among his many influences such artists as Miro and the surrealists, as well as the natural history illustrators such as John James Audubon and Charley Harper.
It’s worth going to his website to see his work for the many projects he has worked on, such as Rhythm and Roots’ A Guide to the Birdsong of South America, the Bird Genoscape Project and the Tera Maris Nature Museum in the Netherlands.
Jennifer McBrien
Jennifer McBrien is a fiber artist with a passion for birds and drawing with her sewing machine. Each of her messenger and tote bags that we are selling have a freehand machine stitched bird applique on the front and use recycled mid-century curtain fabric as an accent.
Jennifer is a Baltimore native who began her artistic career as a painter, exhibiting her work throughout the East Coast from the mid- 1980’s to mid- 2000’s. She has taught art and headed a high school art department, received grants and an award for her painting.
About a decade ago, Jennifer began to use textiles to play with color, composition and line. She draws on her sewing machine with a freehand machine stitched method, adding color with fabrics and felt applique shapes. Her subjects speak of her observations of the natural world that tend to get ignored: edible plants commonly mistaken as weeds, such as dandelions, purslane, and thistles. Her other favorite subjects are the birds that inhabit her urban home. Keeping her products eco-friendly, Jennifer is driven to use organic cotton, hemp and upcycled materials.
As a member of Lights Outs Baltimore, Jennifer helps to educate others about the importance of the conservation of our birds and environment.
Tex Buss
Tex Buss donated one of original watercolors and several prints to our Bird Art Auction in May. Our members loved them and their sale brought in a lot of birdseed for GGBA. We’re so happy that she is sharing 3 different prints with us this fundraiser.
Tex is a painter and tattooer in San Francisco. She owns Authentic Tattoo on Church Street and is a lifelong bird nerd. She specializes in bird imagery in both tattoos and works on paper. Her work can also be found featured on the recently revised Golden Gate Bird Alliance website. You’ll notice Tex’s gorgeous bird illustrations throughout the site. We’re grateful we’ve had a chance to collaborate with Tex once again.
Hilary Powers
Hilary Powers is an avid birder as well as a GGBA member and volunteer. Since the age of six, she has been building birds and animals in any medium that would take a shape. She got hooked on needle-felting on Thanksgiving Day 2009. Hilary is easily recognizable at GGBA events and bird walks because she wears her amazing needle-felted animals clipped to her hat and shoulders. She created this seven-day-old, life-sized Peregrine Falcon in 2011 while monitoring a Peregrine Falcon nest. It was always meant to be a donation for fundraising and now it is! Thanks Hilary!
Sylvia Gonzalez
Sylvia Gonzalez is a Petaluma, CA artist whose current work consists of monotype in the background, with charcoal pencil and soft pastel drawings on top. Her gorgeous work has multiple layers of color, imagery, text, and patterns. Her art reflects her love of wildlife and nature and much of it focuses on passerines, owls, foxes, bears, hares, cats, rhinoceroses and trees.
Paige Snow
Paige Snow is a self-taught artist from a small town on Maryland’s East Shore.
She creates needle-felted birds, rabbits, bees, dogs and forest animals that are amazingly lifelike. Since her business is small and each animal takes a lot of time to create, she was only able to offer us a few items. We are very lucky to present them to you.
Amy Rose Moore
Amy Rose Moore’s giclee prints were very popular at our Bird Art Auction last May, selling for more than double their listed price. We’re very excited that she offered us new prints for this sale.
She works in a variety of water-based media, including watercolor, gouache, ink & acrylics. Her favorite surface is tea-toned paper and she favors the tiniest of teeny-tiny paintbrushes.
Amy rose Moore was born and raised in the woods “somewhere in the Sierra Cascade Mountains of Northern California” and she says she is largely influenced by the vast forests and mountains of her childhood. She now lives and works in San Francisco.
She would like to make her work accessible to all who connect with and enjoy it, so her goal is to offer it in a number of different formats, including the prints we are offering here.
Sharol Nelon-Embry
Chocolate makes a wonderful holiday gift, and Sharol Nelsen-Embry’s Chocolate Tasting Kits will educate as well as titillate and satisfy the craving. She wants more people to learn about and enjoy organic chocolate from single-origin cacao, single-batch chocolate makers, and those who practice farming and harvesting techniques that are friendly to birds.
Sharol Nelson-Embry, a GGBA member, retired from the East Bay Regional Park District in 2017 after 26 years supervising the Crab Cove Visitor Center. She is currently becoming certified as a Master Birder through GGBA and the California Academy of Science. She has an online business, Cocoa Case curating chocolate tasting kits and offers educational programs through Air BNB as well as Piedmont Adult School and Alameda Recreation. She developed and runs the popular Birds and Chocolate Birdathon Trip that raises money for GGBA.
Bess Petty
Bess Petty is an artist, graphic designer and life-long bird lover based in Oakland California. Working from her home studio, she crafts the Bird vs. Bird line of wallets, coasters, pins, buttons, pillow, ornaments, magnets, gift tags and notecards. Her illustrations use rich colors and clean lines to capture the beauty and charm of our native birds, with a particular focus on local California species.
Bess made up six different packages of her work for us and each package can be given as a gift or divided up into a number of gifts. Or her birds don’t need to migrate and they can enrich your own life.
About Daryl: Daryl is a GGBA member and the lead volunteer on the Bird Art and Holiday Sale. A retired psychologist of over 33 years, Daryl shifted her focus to creating art and birding. Daryl was also one of GGBA’s featured artists in spring’s online auction. GGBA is extremely grateful to Daryl for her hard work in helping to organize this online holiday sale.