Christina Waters

Arthur Osver’s The Return - on exhibit at Winfield Gallery.

These sensational designer earrings fashioned of hammered gold-filled wire with freshwater pearls and crystals — made by Kate Coburn — are among the gorgeous handmade items available at this Friday’s noontime sale. Coburn’s earrings and necklaces, crafted of gemstones and precious metals, will be on sale at this rare event - so do not miss out! These accessories make memorable holiday gifts (although I recommend buying a few for yourself too).
The UCSC Women at Work Holiday Craft Sale, Friday, December 5, 11:30 - 1:30, happens at the Stevenson Event Center. 10% of sales will benefit the W@W Scholarship Fund. Expect to find major bargains for spectacular one-of-a-kind arts, jewelry and craft items. Checks and cash only.

Another sample of jewel queen Kate Coburn’s consummate earring designs. These elegant earrings of chrysophrase in matrix, suspended from gold-filled findings, will be on sale at the upcoming Women at Work Holiday Craft Sale, Friday, December 5 from 11:30-1:30 at UCSC’s Stevenson Event Center. You will be blown away by what you see!!!!

Here are a few of my picks for this weekend’s Open Studios art crawl.

In Bonny Doon, the studio of Ray Gwyn Smith is filled with prints, new landscape paintings and spectacular views of the redwood forest. Stop by Oct. 18-19, from 11am-6pm and savor. Smith’s studio is located at 997 Smith Grade - five miles up Empire Grade, turn left onto Smith Grade and follow the Open Studio signs. Call 831/227-5971 if you get lost.

Sara Friedlander’s kinetically-inflected images of the New York subway system and glittering architecture plunge the viewer into a wrap-around perspective. Check them out this weekend at Friedlander’s Fairmont Avenue studio.

Santa Cruz-based, mixed media artist Victoria May creates exquisite, hand-wrought creations. Her uncanny blends of richly-worked fabric and photoemulsion tend to push viewers to the edge of their art vocabularies. And that’s exactly what solid artwork should do.

So get up to The City and stretch your senses at May’s opening reception, this Saturday, August 16 from 3-5pm. The show, entitled Residuum, continues through September 27 - at the Don Soker Contemporary Art Gallery, 29 Geary in San Francisco. 415/291-0966.

Last weekend’s Plein Air Affaire event at Santa Cruz’ Museum of Art and History attracted thousands of visitors, and made even more thousands of dollars for the downtown arts venue.

The invited artists included some of the Bay Area’s leading outdoor and impressionistic painters, including the legendary Howard Ikemoto, Peter Loftus, Charles Prentiss, Barbara Lawrence, Mike Bailey, and Frank Galuszka. The artwork displayed was striking, beautiful, and of noticeably higher quality that what many have come to expect from plein air shows.

Galuszka, whose day job is professor of art at UCSC, won the “QuickDraw” prize for his atmospheric egg tempera study, Sun and Fog: View over Monterey Bay, (r.) painted on Sunday morning before the public viewing.

If you missed this summer’s Plein Air Affaire, make plans to visit next year at MAH. Alfresco artwork never looked so good. The Museum of Art & History is located at 705 Front Street, Santa Cruz (next door to the new Lulu’s).

San Francisco’s Hackett-Freedman Gallery always offers an eyeful of the best contemporary realism. Opening July 10 is a show of new paintings by Jeffrey Ripple, whose elegant still life studies are the equal to works by the 17th century Spanish masters.

The serene arrangements of flowers and fruit on orientalesque, flat-toned backgrounds show off Ripple’s incredible mastery of realist technique, but they go further than that. The enigmatic studies suggest an ineffable lifeforce behind light, shadow, shape and form - in much that way that Vermeer’s creamy light suggests an unseen, but always-present God. More…

The San Francisco Opera’s new production of Das Rheingold — the first of Richard Wagner’s four “Ring” cycle masterworks — is musically mighty, but dramatically thin. Woeful set design — presumably by a last-minute committee of amateurs — caused almost fatal dissonance with an outstanding orchestra, playing music to end the world by for three straight hours.
A decent cast, with the unfortunate exception of Mark Delavan’s wobbly Wotan, did its best to overcome a rickety set of cardboard props, direction by Marx Brothers surrogates, and a set that could only have been some sort of 21st century WPA project. The allegedly innovative digital backdrops made embarrassing references to every PBS science special you’ve ever seen, while the raked stage floor sabotaged grace, causing loud “thumps” and “oomphs” during the changing of the scenes. Actors stumbled, wandered aimlessly, More…

If there’s a legal thrill that comes close to great, live opera - I haven’t found it yet. And last Sunday’s opening matinee performance of Ariodante just proved it all over again.

Written seemingly to twist Baroque-era vocal chords into rococo pretzels, Handel’s 275-year-old masterpiece is your basic love, betrayal, revenge, death and happy ending opera seria, loaded with soprano parts written for men and sung by women in 18th century drag. Got that? Think of it this way: Handel was the toast of Europe when Ariodante debuted in 1735. It was created for the male (castrato) soprano superstar Giovanni Carestini — written by a German (Handel) living in London, set in Scotland and sung in Italian. Ben Franklin very likely saw this opera. Twice.

Sunday’s performance was by every benchmark a knock-out, bringing the San Francisco Opera House audience to its feet at least three times during the 3 hours of killer vocal pyrotechnics — imagine all those serious, white-haired opera buffs screaming, cheering and stomping their approval. Delicious. More…

01SJ is North America’s newest and largest festival of digital arts featuring transformative and provocative new works from world-renowned artists and performers at the cross-section of contemporary art, technology, and culture.

This year’s blazing Zero One digital extravaganza features UCSC’s Digital Arts & New Media 2008 MFA Exhibition - Bureau of Disruptions — involving the work of 14 tech pioneers.

It opens today — noon to 10pm — at the Comerica Building - 333 W. Santa Clara Street in downtown San Jose.