Work shown by Raquel Baldocchi
Join us tonight from 5-7pm for Mill Valley’s First Tuesday Artwalk and a reception for our September 2016 artists, Raquel Baldocchi and Tom Killion.
RAQUEL BALDOCCHI Artist Statement
Visual art has the capability to move an observer to tears. I had this experience years ago when attending a retrospective of Pierre Bonnard’s work in New York. Making artwork can have a similar transcendent affect on me as the maker, when all of the elements and materials finally meld into a finished piece. I paint with acrylic mixed media on panel, incorporating layers of pigment, glue, paper and drawing material. Working with a variety of materials allows me to create pieces with rich contrasts and subtleties. I refer to the human figure and animal forms as a source of endless visual interest.
My current work seeks to present characters from potentially distant eras and locales, set into a modern, abstract construct. I draw inspiration from historical portraits, vintage photographs, family memorabilia. My great aunt made numerous scrapbooks filled with charming images of flora, fauna and illustrations of all types of human interaction, which often influence the contents of my paintings. I am continually drawn to stories and images of incidents both real and imagined, and I aim to recreate some sense of their wonder in my work.
RAQUEL BALDOCCHI Artist Biography
A native of San Francisco, Raquel Baldocchi was raised in the city and her upbringing included life on her family’s ranch in San Benito County. She earned a BFA in Printmaking in 1980 from the Academy of Art College, and from 1984 to 1994, she was an instructor in the arts at San Francisco University High School. Over the past several years, in a studio at the ICB building in Sausalito, she has revived an art practice, devoting herself full- time to the development of her craft.
TOM KILLION Artist Biography
Tom was born and raised in Mill Valley, California, on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. The rugged scenery of Marin County and Northern California inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints using linoleum and wood, strongly influenced by the traditional Japanese Ukiyo-ë style of Hokusai and Hiroshige. He studied History at UC Santa Cruz, where he was introduced to fine book printing by William Everson and Jack Stauffacher. In 1975, he produced his first illustrated book on UCSC’s Cowell Press.
After traveling extensively in Europe and Africa, Killion returned to Santa Cruz in 1977 and founded his own Quail Press, where he published his second book, “Fortress Marin”. In 1978, Killion began graduate studies in African History at Stanford University, completing a doctorate on Ethiopia in 1985. He also continued to make woodcut prints of the California landscape, producing his large-format “The Coast of California” in 1979. During the early 1980s, Tom divided his time between history research in Europe and Africa, and the development of his multi-color woodcut prints.
During 1987-1988, Killion worked as administrator of a medical relief program in a camp for Ethiopian refugees in Sudan and traveled with nationalist rebels in war-torn Eritrea. In 1990, after many years of work, Tom produced “Walls: A Journey Across Three Continents” — an extensively illustrated travel book combining his African experiences with woodcut printmaking. Killion then devoted four years to teaching African History at Bowdoin College, Maine, and in 1994 was a Fulbright scholar at Asmara University in Eritrea.
In 1995, Tom returned to California and taught in the Humanities Department at San Francisco State University while he worked on a new hand-printed, large-format book, “The High Sierra of California” in collaboration with Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder. The new book was published in a trade edition in 2002 and received a number of awards. In 2008 Tom and Gary published a second collaboration, “Tamalpais Walking,” and in 2015 his third collaboration with Snyder and Heyday Books, “California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Poetry, History and Prints.” Killion is currently working on landscape prints including treescapes, coastal and mountain views. His studio is located on Inverness Ridge near Point Reyes, California.
