Soon at the de Young, fresh from its visit to Australia's National Gallery in Canberra, will be the "Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay."

After a memorable San Francisco visit, we bid adieu to the "Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay" which closes September 6. It will visit the Nashville's Frist Museum before returning to Paris in January.

Beginning in the mid to late 19th century, a loose association of painters rose in prominence, and became known as Impressionists. The name "Impressionist" comes from art critic Louis Leroy when he offered a satiric review of a painting by Claude Monet entitled Sunrise Impression (Soleil Levant). The review has been pretty much forgotten, but the term Impressionist remains, and is uttered with reverence and adoration by art lovers everywhere.

The impressionists found a way to express the world in a new way, taking their easels out of the studio to paint plein-air. With small thin visible brush strokes they captured exciting visual effects, achieving bold use of unmixed color to create intense color vibration, Their open compositions of ordinary subject matter, and depictions of the changing qualities of light, have thrilled the art loving public ever since.

Flowing from Impressionism came Post-Impressionism. The term Post-Impressionism was first used by British art critic Robert Fry to describe French Art from Manet onward. The Post -Impressionists extended Impressionism. They continued using vivid color, thick applications of paint, distinctive brush strokes, and real life subjects for their compositions, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms and use more unnatural color.

George Seurat and his followers used tiny dots of color which became known as pointillism. Paul Cézanne wanted to restore a sense of order and structure, making impressionism solid and durable. He reduced shapes while maintaining the bright colors of impressionism. Camille Pissaro explored pointillism which he called scientific impressionism, but returned to a purer form of impressionism later in his career. Vincent Van Goph used vibrant swirling color to convey feeling and his state of mind.

Taken as a group, the post impressionists certainly weren't a cohesive movement. As their movement proceeded, younger painters continued working geographically, exploring Fauvism and Cubism.

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay will be at the de Young, September 25, 2010 - through January 18, 2011. Included in the exhibit are paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac with some paintings from later in the careers of impressionist painters Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Story reels are combinations of story board drawings along with temporary dialog and sound effects. After a long collaborative process, involving the creative input of a large cross section of the Pixar community, versions of the story are told, retold, improved, polished, and distilled. Only the essence is what gets to the screen.

The goal of a Pixar film is to take viewers to places that exist only in imagination. If they were real places, a regular movie camera would do. But all kinds of worlds are possible for these animators, and they invite us to join them journeys of imagination. The worlds created by Pixar's animators are consciously and laboriously built, but bring thrills of wonderment to us viewers.

The Toy Story Zoetrope is hard to picture in words or even still pictures. One must see it to believe it. (see the KGO video above) The first thing you see is a large flat disk, about six or seven feet in diameter. Onto the disk are attached a series of dolls or character models arranged sequentially, each in a different stage of a motion. Then the disk begins turning, quickly accelerating into a whirring blur.

Then movie magic happens! The lights go out and a strobe light goes on, and in an instant, the whirring blur becomes full motion animation. You see each figure , as if they are standing perfectly still, but in a smooth steady motion. It is magic before your eyes. The lights go back on, and the animated motion returns to a whirring blur, and the observer is left with an expression of wondered disbelief. It is common for people to remain to watch the sequence several times, amazed at how the human eye can be fooled. They want to see the magic again.

Artscape is a very very widescreen video presentation shot onto a screen with three coordinated video projectors. It shows Pixar story boards coming to life, with a camera lens zooming into frames of the storyboard allowing sketched character ideas come to full life. Without a single word of narration, this film conveys the idea

of process, how an idea builds to a concept, and how the concept is refined and moves toward realization. In magical sweeps of motion, line drawings gain color, motion and sophistication, and return again to their original lines. What is amazing is that children viewing this presentation get it. They thrilled as their favorite characters came to life. The film ends with Pixar's ever present emblematic and inquisitive lamp observing a rolling ball of yarn -- dated John Lasseter, 1986.

Pixar: 25 years of Animation is a tribute to the artistic roots of animation, how artists use their tools to create stories, characters, and worlds which speak to us in ways accessible in no other way. Not surprisingly, there were many parallels to be found with the Walt Disney Family Museum, which shows the achievements and processes used by an earlier generation of animation pioneers. We suggest you see both, and celebrate the growth of this wonderful art form!

suitable gentleman to marry for her financial security. Her brother married the daughter of famed artist William Keith. Previously, Annie studied painting with William Keith, and although she maintained her independent artistic identity, she considered William Keith her mentor. She is featured in some of the photographs of William Keith's studio along with other women artists. Keith was kind to women artists, providing them a congenial atmosphere to create their art.

During William Keith's final year as he endured a protracted illness, Annie Harmon wrote Keith a letter. In it, she recollected the earlier days, "We can never forget the good old studio days with our Master of Art, nor can we forget the stick that used to come flying across the Studio to make us jump and laugh when our minds were so intent on our work."

Annie Harmon exhibited her work

with the San Francisco Art Association and in the Women's Building at the Chicago Columbian World's Fair of 1893. Although prolific, she lost over 400 paintings in her studio in the San Francisco Press Club Building during the 1906 earthquake.

Mary DeNeale Morgan 1868-1948 attended the California School of Design in San Francisco in the late 1880's, studying with Arthur Mathews, Virgil Williams and Amedee Joullin.

From her family home in

Gallery in Oakland. William Keith visited the exhibition and purchased one of his student's paintings of Pacific Grove. Her favorite subject on the Monterey Peninsula was its cypress trees. She was to make Carmel her home.

Mary DeNeale Morgan never married. She had suitors, but chose to share her home with her mother and her sister who had become a widow, Jeannie Morgan Klenke. Mary's sister-in-law, artist Charlotte Elizabeth (Bodwell) Morgan moved to Carmel in 1923 and maintained a studio with Mary. Mary organized the Arts and Crafts Club of Carmel, teaching classes there until 1925. In 1914, she invited and hosted William Merritt Chase who came to teach for the summer. In 1927, she and her sister-in-law Charlotte organized the Carmel Art Association which still is active today. Mary's passing was fitting in that when she died in 1948, she had an unfinished work on her easel.

Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel 1870 - 1954 was born in an artistic family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her mother was an artist, and her grandfather was a member of the Royal Academy in London. Marion studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and later in New York with William Merritt Chase.

Before returning to Milwaukee, she taught art in the Chicago public schools and at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then she had an offer from the Sante Fe Railroad which changed the direction of her life. She was offered an opportunity to paint murals for the Sante Fe Railroad ticket office in San Francisco. The railroad trip west brought Marion to Sante Fe and to the Grand Canyon, places she would return to on artistic treks later on.

It is reported, but no reliable source is noted, that William Keith introduced Marion to his good friend Elmer Wachtel 1864-1929. Elmer had studied with William Keith between 1892 and 1894.

Marion remained a tonalist, with no examples of her work even hinting at impressionism. Her favored subject, the tall eucalyptus showed Marion's preference for strong undulating line, favored by painters of Art Nouveau. She was popular on both coasts and she exhibited widely, often with her husband.

After her husband's death in 1929, her interest in painting

temporarily waned, but in 1931, she picked up her brushes again, painting the hillsides of the San Gabriel Mountains near her Arroyo Seco home. She died at her Pasadena home in May, 1954.

The California Water Color Society was an important presence in American art in the 1930s through 1970s. The painters had been perfecting their abilities to document everyday life when World War II came along.

Their medium was portable, cheap and immediate -- well-suited to capturing the war domestically and on the front lines. Life magazine commissioned some of the artists—among them, Barse Miller, Paul Sample, and Fletcher Martin -- to depict preparations for conflict. Now, for the first time, The Oceanside Museum of Art has collected World War II watercolors by California artists. The exhibit–Painting World War II—is curated by Glen Knowles, an art professor at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster.

Linda Sorensen's Paintings now showing
at Smith and Kirk Gallery in Bodega Bay

Also on exhibit at Smith & Kirk are the paintings of Linda Sorensen -- yes, that's Linda of Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery. Stop at Smith & Kirk and take a look. You can also keep up with her new works online at www.LindaSorensenPaintings.com and on ArtWanted.com.

Bodega Bay's Visitors of Summer, Gray Whales

We have gray whales in Bodega Bay this summer. There seems to be a large population of krill in our waters, causing a group of juvenile gray whales to stay for the summer rather than head to their historic feeding grounds in Alaska. They may stay until the migration south to Mexico for the winter. So visit the coast soon and bring along a good set of peeled eyes, a long lens camera, and binoculars to Bodega Head, and take in the show.