Photos and Article By Scott Pam
The Heather James Fine Art – Palm Desert gallery will have their 2013/2014 season’s opening on Saturday, November 30, from 6:00-8:00 P.M., with a special exhibition of original paintings and prints from Andy Warhol, original drawings and unique prints from Salvador Dali, as well as other artists. Greeting visitors at the main entrance is the famous Dali sculpture “Dance of Time III”.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987), whose painting of a Campbell’s Tomato Soup is now estimated in value at just over nine million or more dollars, made paintings of famous American products and celebrities. One of Warhol’s pieces on display incorporates the cover of a newspaper that announced the assassination of Kennedy, which happened just over 50 years ago during November. “Cover of Flash, 22 November 1963” conveys the emotion of the period in Warhol’s very unique style.
Kaoru Mansour and Luc Bernard, whose work will be on display at the gallery as part of the season’s opening, will also be at the opening to talk about their work and meet gallery guests.
The Gallery’s goal is to bring museum quality work to the desert, a goal that has been achieved through private collectors, the artists themselves, and partnering with other galleries. During the tour of the gallery, large crates that ship the artwork around the world were scattered through main exhibition area as the staff prepped the walls for the upcoming opening.
Kaoru Mansour, born in Japan in 1956 and currently based in Los Angeles, formally trained at Otis Parsons Art Institute and developed her own techniques for creating her unique style of painting. Incorporating paint, resin and her elements from her physical surroundings, her paintings are an homage in duality to her native Japan and her life in the US. Her work is collected in her own section on the second floor.
Kaoru uses a technique for her base layer that gives it a rich buttery, crackled and antique feel on her paintings. Using leaves from her surroundings, Kaoru scans them and then adds them with other materials into the collage painting in different layers, alternating paint and resin.
In the Abstract Expressionism gallery, works from Luc Bernard, one of the youngest artists represented in the gallery, will be on display. Luc’s paintings explore the abstract realm with color and texture in oil and sumi ink. Other artists in the Abstraction gallery include Berry Gold, David Hare, Arne Hiersoux and Norman Zammitt.
Norman Zammitt (1931-2007) painted bands of color in subtle gradations with shading onto various sized canvases and has a number of pieces on display. Some of the smaller works are studies that he eventually made into much larger canvases. His work has also been in collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
They have also procured works from David Mach, a celebrated sculptor from Scotland. David uses found objects including wire coat hangers to create the two large scale sculptures of a man and a woman on display. His other works include painting and arranging matchsticks to create small sculptures of human and animal faces.
In the same gallery as the sculptures from Mach, are works from Alexander Calder, the inventor of the “mobile”. Calder’s work was influenced by Mondrian and Miro and is both whimsical and colorful.
On the other side of the gallery space housing Mach and Calder and divided by a movable wall, sits a piece from Robert Rauschenberg called “Tree of Life Prune (Kabal American Zephyr)” a combination of a painting and a sculpture.
While artwork is always interpreted from an individual’s perspective, the gallery displays works of the highest caliber and art lovers can find anything from Abstract Expressionism to classical paintings by artists such as N.C. Wyeth and his son Andrew Wyeth, the first visual artist to appear on the cover of Time, in the Classical Room. Sharing the Classical room are works from Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Carl Frieseke as well as a sculpture of Matisse’s wife and Picasso.
The name of the gallery is from the first names of Heather Sacre and James Carona, who are married and started collecting antiquities in a shop on El Paseo in the mid- 1990s. The transition into collecting fine art happened when one of their best clients wanted to start collecting impressionist paintings leading them to an “Aha!” moment. James studied Art History at Harvard and together with Heather’s interest in art lead them to open up in their current space in the fall of 2009.
Heather James – Fine Art
45188 Portola Avenue, Palm Desert, CA 92260 • Ph. (760) 346-8926
