Catherine Chang

Catherine Lucky Chang is a Taiwanese-American artist and yoga teacher living in Palo Alto, California.  Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she received her BS from Skidmore College and her MFA from the University of Georgia.  Chang’s work directs qi towards inner peace, love, and joy. Chang unifies printmaking, drawing, collage, and natural dyeing on her handmade translucent abaca paper.  Through the integration of meditation in daily life, she uses intuitive, abstract marks to evoke spontaneity, naturalness, and vitality.

Chang has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in New York and Georgia and abroad in Florence, Cortona, and Crete.  Her work has been shown at institutions such as The Georgia Museum of Art, Whitespace Gallery, Rainforest Art Foundation, Madison Museum of Fine Art, and Hathaway Gallery. Chang recently attended artist residencies at Mudhouse in Greece and Mauser Ecohouse in Costa Rica. 

Chun-Hui Yu

Yu, Chun-Hui has exhibited her paintings extensively in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States including the Liaoning Provincial Museum (2018), Shanghai Art Museum, Qinzhe Art Center (Hangzhou 2019), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2019), and the Silicon Valley Asian Art Center. She has studied under the mentorship of many masters including Huang Chun-Pi, Wong Lui-Sheng, Chiang Chao-Shen, Hau Pei-Jen (who taught at the Pacific Art League for 50 years), and other eminent artists.

Yu has taught Chinese Brush Painting and Calligraphy at San Jose City College and at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto for 25 years. She also taught a workshop at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. She is a mentor to many aspiring artists. 

Her personal inspirations are nature, poetry, and Zen and her art exemplify an integration of painting, calligraphy, and philosophy.  Her ink paintings include many abstract landscapes in a contemporary reinterpretation of the Classical Chinese art forms.

Jared Sines 

When Jared Sines was 8 years old, his father enrolled him in the Richard Stephens Academy of Art, now the Academy of Art University, in a life drawing class. The school’s founder, Richard “Pappy” Stephens, was a friend and colleague of Jared’s Dad, who was an accomplished fine and commercial artist. Thus began Jared’s years of the academic art training.  During this time, Jared and his Dad, who ran his own ad agency, enjoyed working on various art projects around the family home, as well as going plein air painting together. In addition, his Dad taught him the fundamentals of advertising art and copywriting at his office in San Francisco. 

While attending San Francisco State College in the early 1960s, the young artist discovered the immaculate still lifes of Al Proom and Gerald Stinski in Shreve and Company’s windows on Grant Ave. Painted in the style of the 17th-century European masters, they inspired him to try to achieve the hyperrealism of these contemporary masters. After a few tries, he had produced several miniatures to present to Shreve’s art consultant, Mr. Walter Nagle. The work was enthusiastically accepted and soon was displayed alongside the paintings of his artistic heroes.  From then on, Jared has shown his work in many fine California art galleries and retail establishments, including J. Jessop and Sons in La Jolla, the Studio Shop and Rorke’s in Burlingame, Pomeroy, and Hoover Galleries in San Francisco, and Zantman Galleries in Carmel. Presently, his still lifes and landscapes are on display at New Masters Gallery in Carmel, The Garden Gallery in Half Moon Bay, and the Portola Art Gallery in Menlo Park.

May Shei

My devotion to art started way before I went to preschool. I painted and made crafts all the time. I grew up in a small town in Taiwan, where the traditional Hakka culture was everywhere. From antique house decorations and paintings to murals and sculptures in the temples, my childhood was a combination of the old and the new. We also lived in a national park, so the environment was full of beautiful life objects and landscapes. It was like an art book everywhere to me.

I left my home to study art at 16 years old. After I graduated college, worked in Kua-Hua Advertising Ltd for two years, then I got married and had two kids. Throughout it all, I never stopped illustrating and making art. I participated in international art competitions, was juried in, and received a wide variety of awards.

Because of my background- a major in commercial art design and a minor in Chinese painting, oil, and watercolor, I use different elements like "point ", "line", and "space " in my pieces, along with bright color on silk or rice paper. My art mirrors my life journey.

I now teach Contemporary Chinese painting, and it's never an easy job. To teach Chinese painting, you need to be familiar with 5000 years of history, the language, and deal with the difficulty of finding special materials. It's worth teaching to see people from all backgrounds and histories taking my class, forming relationships with them, and seeing the fruits of their hard work.

Robert Dvorak

Robert Regis Dvorak is a professional speaker, painter, and teacher. He has given over 3000 presentations promoting creative thinking, personal awareness, imagination, vision, and risk-taking for corporations, associations, and schools--universities, colleges, high schools, and elementary schools.

Dvorak received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded a two year Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome--FAAR for post-graduate study. Dvorak was a professor of architecture for seven years at the University of Oregon and two years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught design, problem solving and communication skills including drawing, film-making, watercolor painting, and other media skills. He was awarded a grant from the California Arts Council to promote art and creativity to elementary school teachers and children.Dvorak draws on a rich background of unusual experience for his presentations including: being a member of the moon shot design team for the vehicle assembly building at Cape Canaveral, working as crew on large sailing yachts in the Greek islands, designing maternity centers in Trinidad, making experimental films--his animated films have been featured in festivals in the USA, Europe, and Australia--doing caricatures in Japanese night clubs, drawing temples in India, bicycle touring in Holland, hiking on the Great Wall of China, climbing the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and traveling in 69 countries making drawings, watercolors and speaking.Dvorak has written and illustrated books on drawing and painting: Travel Drawing and Painting, The Practice of Drawing as Meditation, Drawing Without Fear, The Pocket Drawing Book, The Magic of Drawing, and Experiential Drawing. He has also written and illustrated Selling Art 101, Productivity at the Workstation, The Pathfinders Guide to Creative Power, and he has illustrated two guidebooks, Exploring Half Moon Bay and the San Mateo Coast and Monterey Peninsula Explorations. Two of his articles have been published by American Artist Magazines.  Sketching while Traveling in Greece and Twenty Minutes to a Beautiful Figure.  He has produced 23 posters of his drawings, paintings, and woodcuts; and made 22 short 16mm films. Many of Dvorak's paintings and films are in corporate and private collections. His films are in the collections of The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institute, The New York Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Institute, his paintings are in the collections of The Bank of America, Del Monte Corporation, and ICON of California and many private collections including the Vanderbilts, the Boyds, the Kwei collection and many others.

Rona Foster

Rona was born in Boston, Mass., and lived in West Newton, Mass. As a young girl, she spent many hours at her coloring table creating art. After visiting California in her late teens, she moved there in the early 1970s. She graduated from Sonoma State University’s School of Expressive Arts in 1979.

Creative expression has always been important to Rona. Now a visual artist, she has also been a singer, songwriter, and performer. In 1990 she recorded a CD of original songs.

Rona is both a painter, mixed media, and clay artist. As a painter and mixed media artist, she paints with acrylic paint, often adding texture by using different kinds of paper, gels, and mediums to her canvas. “Being an artist is a way of life that brings me great joy. When I’m in my art studio creating, I immerse myself in the process of making art, and time flies. I’m drawn to painting landscapes and other nature-related subjects. I love using bold colors in my art. I’m inspired by the mystery that exists in nature and in life itself.” As a clay artist, Rona creates both functional and decorative pottery by hand using the slab method. “There is always self-discovery, growth, and unlimited reward with the creative process. It’s my greatest pleasure to assist others in discovering their creativity and joy through art”.