Western Sonoma County’s Art at the Source was founded in 1995, and this year marks its 22nd year.

Every year, Sonoma County residents celebrate local art with an OPEN STUDIOS event, enabling the art-loving public to view and purchase art directly from the artists in their studios. The artists are present to host you, and available to discuss their art and demonstrate their procedures and techniques.

Linda Sorensen - oil paintings

Linda Sorensen has been drawing and painting the world around her as long as she can remember. In her grade school days, teachers would often catch her sketching portraits of her classmates.

(The teachers were less than pleased.) Undaunted, Linda developed her art from drawings, to tempera, and on into oil paintings, and from realism in her early teens, to abstract expressionism in high school and through college and law school, the latter in Berkeley, CA.

These days, Linda is a studio painter of landscapes that blend impressionism and modernism. She is most pleased to call up the exhilarating moods of the natural world, and human story in that world, by paint.

She records compositional ideas with her own photography, but frequently alters the scenes, combining points of view, changing light and color. She enjoys studying the works of American Regionalist painters, especially the works of Taos' Ernest Martin Hennings, Iowa's Marvin Cone, Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton and California's Ray Strong, and enjoys museum trips to view works by California's painters of the past.

Linda and her husband Dan Rohlfing are owners of Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery, specializing in Early California Art and also featuring Linda's paintings.

Linda's favorite painting locales are the coastal and pastoral scenes of Sonoma and Marin Counties, the beaches and mountains of Hawaii, and whenever possible, the deserts and canyons of the Southwest.

As Jean Warren looks toward her artistic future, she says with confidence that she's never felt she's arrived. With wide bright eyes and an unmistakable smile and an adventurous spirit, she confidently says, "I'm always striving for that 'next,' whatever that next is."

Jean recalls when she was a child, her grandmother would ask, "Jeanie, would you make a picture for me?" Of course Jeanie eagerly agreed and her grandmother displayed her paintings all over the house. Later, Jean's teachers encouraged her more and she came to see herself as a painter. She was always looking at shapes, natural rhythms and colors in the natural world and expressing them in paint. She says, "After a while, I just had to do art, it was part of my life."

Today Jean recalls how important encouragement was to her, so she in turn encourages her students that they can do it. Jean believes they too can know the joy of exploring what is around them and "make a picture," just like she did as a child when she was encouraged by her grandmother.

Jean says, "I learned to leave some things unsaid in a painting to let the viewer complete the picture with his or her own experiences."

She says, "Representational images spark the interest in the viewer while the abstract involves their experience and interpretation. It always has been my goal to challenge the static image, to paint more of what's going on, both on the surface and below the surface, drawing on people's different levels of consciousness."

When teaching watercolor, Jean says, "The one thing I love to get through to my students is that watercolor is so versatile, it gives you ideas what to do next, to be able to to respond to what the paint is doing on the paper is a gift watercolor gives us like no other medium seems to do.

All the accidents that happen, things which weren't planned for ... getting my students to see they're not mistakes ... but that's where the art comes in, taking it forward from that point on."

Along the way, Jean has learned from some of California Watercolor's best painters, Millard Sheets, Milford Zornes, Robert E. Wood and George Post.

Molly Lipsher ... "I believe places have a perceptible soul, imbued by layer upon layer of cultural, physical and historical impact. These aspects of place converge with more temporal elements of light, location and time to capture my imagination. I attempt to interpret this soul, the layering of elements that makes each place and moment unique.

Painting the landscape allows me to ground myself in a particular place and time. It is a moment of connection with the mysterious spirit of light, and the unexplainable incarnation of “things”. To plant oneself in a location is to become like a plant itself, experiencing the passage of the sun, the warmth and cold, the dappling of light and its disappearance.  As an artist, recording this, in the moment of its occurrence, you become a crucial part of the process.

There is a certain comfort in that, that stopping of trying to understand what is not understandable, and a transition occurs to the pure experience of it, the participation in it.  Then I begin to paint, to take it under my skin. "

“I use pastel, because I love the depth and vibrancy of the color,

qualities I have not found in any other medium. The sticks I use are nearly pure pigment, with almost no binder or additives in them, so the color is intensely rich, and since pastel is essentially a compressed powder, when applied to a surface it appears to absorb light rather than reflecting it, giving it a luscious, velvety appearance that I find so seductive.

Pastels accommodate both sketching and painting, allowing the variation in stroke and technique which can be seen in my works. They can be applied thickly, or in a sketchy, abstract manner, allowing me to respond to the mood of a specific scene or circumstance.

Pastels allow for a fresh and spontaneous application, so relevant for outdoor painting. When conditions are shifting quickly, I can lay in large blocks of color with the sides of the sticks, allowing a fast and immediate responsiveness to the

ever changing conditions of light and shadow.

I often camp on location, to experience the transitional character of a place under different light conditions and different times of day, exploring the unique light, shapes, and colors, and the mood that can be expressed in their various manifestations.”

LA's Autry National Museum exhibition of the Gardena High School Art collection runs through October, and includes nine paintings, with works by Maynard Dixon, James Swinnerton, Jean Mannheim, Franz Bischoff, John Frost, Joe Duncan Gleason, Edgar Payne, and Jack Wilkerson Smith, among others.

For 37 years, the tradition grew, and included events such as exhibitions, teas, studio talks and dinners, where artists, students, faculty and alumni all participated.

The program was most successful. Not only did the school gain an extraordinary collection of California Art, but it provided an excellent learning opportunity for students and teachers, parents, alumni.

Everyone involved enjoyed learning directly from many of California's best artists. A few students were inspired to become artists, while many became art lovers, enthusiasts and collectors.

Two of the most stunning paintings on display at the Autry are James Swinnerton's Betatakin Ruins and Maynard Dixon's Men of the Red Earth.

In the Navajo language, Betatakin means "house built on a ledge." The Anasazi people built these cliff dwellings inside this enormous alcove, 452 feet high and

370 feet across. Swinnerton's composition of Betatakin Ruins uses the graceful curve of the natural arch as a frame for the Anasazi dwellings within. He captures both the geological and human history of this very sacred place. The Betatakin Ruins are located in the Navajo National Monument near Kayenta, in north east Arizona.

Dixon's Men of the Red Earth was inspired by a trip to Taos, New Mexico. The folds in the blankets worn by the two figures reflect the folds in the landscape which is their home.

Jean Mannheim was among the first to establish a studio in Pasadena, where he held an annual exhibition of his work. These became, according to one critic, a cause for genuine pilgrimages by art lovers, including some who would make the trip from Gardena.

(From a catalogue published by Gardena HS in 1956) "When the class of 1923 visited the studio of Jack Wilkerson Smith, he was painting a High Sierra scene of dazzling lights and melting snow. The students were so interested in the picture that the artist promised it to them and some months later, Lingering Snows was unveiled in the auditorium by Mr. Smith. It has since become one of the most admired pictures in the collection."

The Gardena High School Art Website | The Autry Museum | Back to the Top

Art at the Source, 2016 Opening Reception
Sebastopol Center for the Arts

We hope you can travel about the West County and take in the wonderful art being created in Sonoma County. The Art @ the Source Catalogue includes a map with studio locations as well as thumbnail examples of each artist's work.

The Catalogue is available at each artist's studio and at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

Below are are glimpses of some of our favorites now on display at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

Philadelphia , PA
The Philadelphia Museum of Art