- Collector's Corner
- Represented Artists
- Events
- News
- Hours & Directions
- Map
- We Deliver!
- Posters & Prints
- Past Shows
In the News
Artistic Retirees Come of Age
By Anita Creamer
Sacramento Bee
January 8, 2012
David Post was a lawyer. Eric Dahlin taught high school for more than three decades. Norman Hinman worked as a researcher in the UC Davis animal nutrition lab – and before that, as a cowhand and ranch manager.
Now, in their retirement years, they're artists: good ones whose work commands a price; not hobbyists or dabblers.
For them and other Sacramento region residents, art is the second act of a creative life. Retiring from their longtime professional careers has given them time to pursue their earlier and continuing interest in art.
As a result, their art has deepened with new complexity and meaning.
"I see a lot of that today," said John Natsoulas, who owns the John Natsoulas Center for the Arts in Davis and organizes the annual California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts each spring.
At last year's conference, which included displays of participants' work throughout downtown Davis, he noticed that a growing number of the artists were past 50 and devoting their retirement years to creating art.
"They were telling me, 'I took sculpture in high school and college, but I did X for a living instead,' " he said. "More and more people are saying, 'I don't feel fulfilled. I want to do what I always wanted to do, but I listened to my parents and was practical instead.'
"And now they're fulfilling their dreams and making a little money off their art."
In some ways, they're also living the dream of millions of other retirees who seek to establish second-career, home-based businesses – many times, creative businesses involving crafts or the arts – after their 50s.
Because older adults are rejecting the idea of retirement as a time to slow down, the number of retirement-age people who identify themselves as self-employed has increased more than 5 percent since 2008, according to AARP statistics.
"I get people asking me about retirement," said Post, 67, who lives in Sacramento's Arden Oaks neighborhood. "I wish everybody had a hobby, something they passionately, passionately want to do. For me, art is more than a hobby."
His father, Alan, who died last year, followed a similar path, working for decades as the state's legislative analyst, then becoming a prominent painter after he retired. Post's late mother, Helen, was a widely recognized sculptor.
Not surprisingly, Post – who led McDonough Holland & Allen's litigation department until his retirement in 2005 – grew up surrounded by art and artists. Yet when he sought an outlet for expression during his working years, he first tried writing.
"I'd try to write short stories at night but drink copious amounts of espresso trying to stay awake," he said. "I was falling asleep trying to write."
By the mid-'80s, he turned to painting. His work, expressionist canvases complex in geometry and color, has found new freshness since he retired from the law and gained time to devote to thinking about art and making art.
"David's art wasn't a hobby before, but he didn't have time to pursue it with his whole heart," said D. Neath, owner of Sacramento's Archival Framing gallery. "Now he does.
"Eric Dahlin is the same way. He's doing bigger, more important work now than when he was teaching. Being a high school teacher has to suck the energy right out of your head."
Dahlin, 66, is a ceramicist who lives in east Sacramento – a local boy, a baker's son, who grew up fashioning small boats and buildings out of the clay in the fields near his house. Until 2003, he taught ceramics at Encina High School.
Old Objects, New
Art
By Ed Goldman
Sacramento Magazine
August 2011
Regional artists are
rediscovering the environmental and cost benefits of creating works from
other people’s discarded materials. Our writer, who works in the medium
himself, calls the form “Art-Eco.”
Since I’ve been dabbling in it for years, I’m a tad giddy to report that
what I call Art-Eco is cool once again. This found-objects medium can
include painting, sculpting, collage- and furniture-making, even music
composition. (Some call that last one “sampling”; others call it
“stealing.”)
In this form, artists recycle or “re-purpose”
discarded materials to create new visual uses for them.
Credit for Art-Eco’s second coming probably belongs equally to two
familiar “e” words: ecology, for the
obvious reason that by using the used, you’re not thinning rain forests
to turn pulp into drawing paper; and economy, because it’s a lot cheaper
for artists to use existing boards, the reverse side of canvases and
even thrown-out paint than it is to purchase them new.
I recently spoke with five local artists
who’ve been experimenting with this form for some time. They were
recommended to me by D. Oldham Neath, owner of Archival Framing
and Gallery in East Sacramento, where I’ve sometimes shown my
work, and Michelle Alexander, executive director of the Arts & Business
Council, whose volunteer board is presided over by someone who looks
just like me.
Continue reading the story by following this link...
Exhibit of late artist Laureen Landau opens June 11, 2011
"Ignored Omens," an exhibit of select works of the late Sacramento artist Laureen Landau, will open with a Second Saturday reception at Archival Gallery on June 11.
Landau, who left a large part of her sizable estate to her two dogs, was the subject of a posthumous Bee profile in April 2010. A longtime Sacramento City College art instructor, she died in August 2009 at age 69. The works on display in the exhibit were created between 1997 and 2005.
Archival Gallery is located at 3223 Folsom Blvd. in Sacramento. For more information, call (916) 923-6204.
Archival Framing celebrates new site, more space
Sacramento Bee Photo by Brian Baer
By Dixie Reid
Friday, Jan. 7, 2011 | Page 28TICKET
The crows are on Folsom Boulevard
Archival Framing owner D. Oldham Neath has moved her frame shop and art
gallery – and the painted black birds that traditionally grace her front
windows – from struggling Del Paso Boulevard to a getting-trendy commercial strip in east
Sacramento.
"I'll miss Del Paso,"
Neath said. "I'll miss Lil
Joe's, because I could call over and they'd bring me breakfast. But
we just didn't have enough room."
Her new and much larger location, a 1940s-vintage building next to
Cheaters bar and down the street from 33rd Street Bistro, debuts this
weekend with a
Second Saturday artists reception.
The opening show is
"Old
Wine, New Bottle:
A Few of My Favorite Things,"
an array of works by Neath's favorite
local artists: Suzanne
Adan, Robert Bowen, Mark Bryan, Eric Dahlin, Al Farrow, Fred Gordon, Judy Kennedy, Marilyn Kuksht, Laureen Landau, Corey Okada,
Skinner, Michael Stevens, D.L. Thomas
and Laurie Winthers.
(The Bee's art critic,
Victoria Dalkey,
picked "Old Wine, New Bottle" as one of
this month's top
Second Saturday exhibitions.)
Some of the artwork will be for sale, priced at $250 to $12,000.
"Old Wine, New Bottle" will mark
Neath's return to
Second Saturday after a two-year absence – a significant fact
because she helped start the event (Second Saturdays, as it was called
then) in the late 1980s.
"It had started to become a circus," she said of stepping away from
Second Saturday.
"I was getting a lot of kids and people who thought they were hip and
cool, and not looking at the art at all.
Second Saturday
chased away most of our serious collectors. They wouldn't come out for a
Second Saturday."
Neath opened her frame shop in 1983 and has moved a few times. She was
on Del Paso Boulevard
the past three years.
Sacramento's monthly
art walk hit its stride in 1993, with a few hundred art-lovers browsing
a handful of midtown galleries before heading out for dinner or a night
on the town. As the number of
Sacramento's
galleries grew, so did
Second Saturday,
spreading into downtown, east
Sacramento, Howe Avenue and
Del Paso Boulevard.
Midtown remains the event's ground zero. Police estimated that 20,000
people turned out in September, many clustered around 20th and J
streets. Two hours after the 10 p.m. closure and unrelated to the event,
a 24-year-old bystander was caught in an exchange of gunfire between
rival gangs. His death prompted city officials to look more closely at
Second Saturday
and public safety.
"As one of the people who founded Second Saturday,
I don't want to see it end," Neath said. "I would like to see
Second Saturday
go back to what it was in the '90s, a little more spread out. Shuttles
stopped at every gallery every 15 minutes, and there was no drinking on
the streets.
"I'm returning to the artists reception, which is a chance for art
patrons and collectors to come and meet the artists.
Second Saturday
recently lost that."
So Neath is unpacking her 200 champagne glasses and preparing to
celebrate Archival Framing's return to
Second Saturday.
"People like the idea of Second Saturday,
but I just think that real art collectors are disappointed the first
time they go," she said. "And it used to be that
Second Saturday
was crawling with children, with families, and I think we have the
opportunity now to bring that back."
Neath is luxuriating in her new 2,400-square-foot space, twice what she
had on a Del Paso Boulevard.
"I always said I wanted to have a gallery big enough to play volleyball
in, and so my husband (Tom
Neath) got me a volleyball net for Christmas. We'll have it up
somewhere."
© Copyright The Sacramento
Bee. All rights reserved.
Please click on links below for previous features about Archival Framing in the news...
Sacramento gallery features Laureen Landau, Richard Feese in memoriam
Mentors celebrated at North Sacramento gallery