Artist Jon Doe Photographer Jane Anderson
UC Davis Health Campus – May 23 – May 27
Wel Sed is a post-internet portrait artist, installation artist, and muralist of over 30 years that incorporates classical portrait techniques and compositions with pop surrealist and abstract expressionist and illustrative elements, using them to create multilayered narratives thru subtle, stoic, melancholic, and/or pensive expressions in his main work, and fun, inventive and imagination inspiring expressions in his school murals. He primarily works in oil, but has worked in a number of mediums both physical and digital, as well as created large scale installations, both static and interactive. He has shown work in San Francisco, Oakland, Denver, NYC, Raleigh, Greensboro, and most recently at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. He also participated and helped organize both Art Hotel and Art Street and has turned his efforts towards community centered programs and organizations within underserved communities, and educating the youth on how to properly establish business practices for a career as a professional artist. Although valuing anonymity, he remains forward facing and dedicated to the neighborhoods that he was raised in.
Sonny Behan, also known as Sonny Sundancer, is an acclaimed artist renowned for his magnificent large-scale wildlife murals and intricately detailed oil paintings. His art, which seamlessly blends realism with abstraction, can be found in galleries and streets worldwide, from South Africa to New York. His bold use of color and dynamic compositions capture the movement and energy of the animals he brings to life.
Northern California artist Bryan Valenzuela has spent the last couple decades aiming to perfect a unique drawing technique involving the atomization of the figure by carving out shape, shadow and light with handwritten text. Paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and fragments are used simultaneously as both the form and content of each piece. As form, the text delineates figures and subjects layer upon layer as shading. Words varying in size from the minuscule and unreadable, to large and bold are used in a manner similar to crosshatching and stippling. Though virtually unnoticeable from afar, once the viewer steps closer to each work they are engulfed in a barrage of words intermingled with other mixed media elements such as acrylic paint, gel transfer, gold leaf, and collage. As content, the language provides a sense of the inherent information and associations, metaphors and meanings that act as a meditation on the image. Recently Valenzuela ventured into the public art sphere, garnering a $350,000 commission from the City of Sacramento. In October of 2016, he completed a large suspended sculpture consisting of over 400 blown glass spheres in an abstract, aquarelle version of the American and Sacramento river confluence. The following year saw Valenzuela complete his first ever mural for the Wide Open Walls festival. Other mural commissions have followed in its wake including permanent works in San Francisco, Chicago, Napa, and Sacramento, as well as temporary works in New Orleans and New York. He has won Best in Show at the California State Fair Fine Art Exhibition, Best in Show at the Crocker Kingsley Biennial, received the Leff Davis Grant for Emerging Artists, and exhibited nationally in many group shows, most notably for Scope at Miami Art Basel and Moniker in London.