Art Show Reception: Convergence / Divergence

Join us at Sebastopol Regional Library from 2-4pm and meet the artists of Convergence/Divergence, a simultaneous exhibit of art by Jackie McCarthy and Alan Azhderian, on display in the library forum room May 19, 2025 to July 12, 2025. Enjoy refreshments, conversation and art.

About the Artists

Artist Jackie Mathes McCarthy

Artist Statement:

"'Agnes Martin said: 'Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.'

Each of my paintings is an effort to describe one of those feelings."'

Artist Bio:

"I am a self-taught artist who has been painting for 30 years."

Artist Alan Azhderian

Artist Statement:

"'I am disposed to gather and collect; compelled by an attraction to material, I pick up, process, and pack. This proclivity is somehow structural, the process of collection and the objects/material collected, seem somehow, metaphorical. 

In this body of work, processes of engagement have been multiform and many layered. Processes of engagement are in the doing: exploring, searching, finding, collecting, sorting, cutting, comparing, contrasting, evoking, feeling, considering, choosing, arranging, changing, musing, composing. In what ever I do, I seek to create processes that are engagement friendly. 

Found materials:

• All wood materials were found, already painted, as is.
• Except for washing, surfaces remained as found.
• I found the wood. I washed it. I cut it. I composed it. 

The 'Grid' and Formalism: The Grid is at once a constraining and liberating force. It unifies while it calls forth divergence. There is resolution in the limit set, but there is also the possibility of surprise, wonderful diversity and variation.

The grid format renders line and shape constant, with color, value, and texture variable. The line is the implied line of the grid while shape remains constant  as a square. It is a form to be exercised and explored. Like sonnet form, like haiku, like a fugue, it offers a whole prescribed and invites the whole beyond.

Formalism is a process and 'aesthetic whole' based on arrangements and combinations of pure art elements.  Art elements are qualities of: color, value, texture, line, and shape. While formalist compositions may be evocative, in this context, the art elements are employed as pure elements; they are non-objective, non symbolic, non narrative and so on."' 

Artist Bio:

Born December 27, 1945.

A continuum of being and becoming: Being encapsulates such notions as nature and essence, about being true to ourselves, to our individual capacities and in all that we do. 

Becoming adds to the idea of being a sense of future and holds the notions of transformation and self actualization.