Local Artists Share Work and Inspiration at Farmers Market Art Event

San Bruno's first-ever Art at the Market, organized by the San Bruno Chamber of Commerce, featured seven local artists who displayed their work on Sunday at the farmers market. The following profiles show the people who were behind the artwork and where you can find their work in the surrounding area.

Boris Koodrin, San Bruno

For all the time he has been an artist, Boris Koodrin only has a few words to describe his style. "Eclectic, at best," he said Sunday. He is most known for his silk screening shop, The Image Co., which he runs out of his garage. He also runs the San Mateo County Fair art department, in which he works with all the fair's fine arts competitions (His wife, Bardi Rosman Koodrin, who is the chairwoman of the San Bruno Culture and Arts Commission, runs the fair's creative writing competitions.).

But in San Bruno, he's known for his five-piece mural on the grounds of the old Wells Fargo bank on San Mateo Avenue. The piece was completed in 2008 and commissioned to represent five aspects of San Bruno life: a red-tailed hawk, Seabiscuit, a gray fox, female pilots at Mills Field and the pre-World War II flower growers. Each mural holds a corresponding meaning that goes along with the poem that inspired the piece, Koodrin said.

He has some work showing at Aspect Gallery in San Francisco as well.

Stationed near his mural, Koodrin said Sunday he enjoyed participating in the event, even though he knew the current economic downturn might have affected some people's ability to buy the art shown at the market. With that knowledge, however, he had one piece of advice for other local artists: "Many come with empty pocketbooks, but exposure is everything. So I encourage all artists to do this type of thing."

For more information, visit www.home.earthlink.net/~artika.

Deepali Gosain, Redwood Shores

Deepali Gosain has always found art to be a great way of expressing her feelings. Indeed, she has discovered that she has a knack for using colors and the complexity of human emotions to bring out the essence of those feelings. But painting is just a hobby for her.

Gosain works full-time as a manager at Oracle, and she has only been painting for the last year and a half. She has loved art since she was a kid, she said, but now that her children are grown she spends her free time pursuing her true passion. "I find it so stress-relieving," Gosain said Sunday. "It's like meditation. I love the colors. I like to see how people see different perspectives. And it's a great way to express my inner feelings."

Her style of painting is abstract art. One of her abstract paintings, which she calls "Ecstasy," is a five-piece acrylic on canvas that displays a "rupture of joy" through the colors spread across each canvas. That piece one first prize at last year's San Mateo County Fair for the fine art category. She can usually be found displaying her work at art and wine festivals throughout the Bay Area and at Palo Alto's Open Studios events. Her work will also be shown soon in a gallery in San Francisco, she said.

What's next on Gosain's artistic plate? Sculptures, she said. More specifically, portraits of human expression. "That's a challenge," she said, chuckling over the thought of trying something new. "But I want to do that."

For more information, visit deepaliart.com.

Brian Madden, Belmont

Brian Madden is in the middle of finishing his Ph.D. in philosophy from City University of New York. But since moving to the Bay Area two years ago because his wife got a job as a fundraiser for Stanford Hospital, he has been pursuing his photography full-time.

Madden's work focuses on macro photography, a style that emphasizes looking closely at objects. Speaking in front of a tapestry of his photographs on display at the market, he said he likes this style because "it's fun to appreciate the things that go unnoticed." Since he began selling his work in 2008, his work has been shown in galleries and art shows in New York and in the Bay Area.

Madden, who recently had a son, has work currently on display at Avenue Art Gallery in San Mateo. When asked about the inspiration for his photographs, he said he is driven by looking at local surroundings as places that can be just as exotic and beautiful as a Serengeti in Africa or a famous structure in Italy. "Wherever you live," he said, "you have to discover the beauty of that place."

For more information, visit www.maddenstudio.com.

Alisan Andrews, Redwood City

Recently laid off from her job as an office manager at an education publishing company, Alisan Andrews has used the opportunity to get back into something she has been doing since she was 5 years old: painting. Taught by her grandmother, Andrews is an impressionist watercolor painter who uses her art to bring seemingly everyday things—an old truck at a gas station, an abandoned boat—to life. Many of the subjects in her paintings come from places she has actually seen while taking everyday trips throughout the Bay Area.

In addition to her work, Andrews is big on her involvement in the Society of Western Artists, in which she is currently coordinating an art show with Sequoia High School at the art organization's gallery in Redwood City. This show will be exciting for her, she said, because it takes her back to her teaching days. "I believe that we've got to support children in all areas," she said. "That's why I continue to support the schools." Look for Andrews' work at the PortFest on Oct. 2 and on display at Café La Tartine, both in Redwood City.

For more information, visit alisanandrews.com.

Cait Collins, San Bruno

An art teacher at Alta Loma Middle School in South San Francisco, Cait Collins has been doing photography for as long as she can remember. She has mostly been showing her work online or through word of mouth, but she finally decided to do something different by showing her work for the first time at an event like Sunday's Art at the Market.

She was bubbly and congenial as she explained to onlookers how she photographed the gorilla at the San Francisco Zoo sitting Indian style or her chocolate Labrador McCovey sitting like a human on her couch. "I just do things that make me smile," Collins said. She is working on a website for her work, which is expected to launch soon. Until then, her work can be found on Flickr and Etsy.com.

For more information, email atuesdayinjanuary@yahoo.com.

Missy Morrill, Newark

Missy Morrill, who was born in Venezuela and grew up in the Bay Area, has captured some amazing photographs during her travels throughout the United States and the world.

She once waited hours to capture up-close the short moment when a hummingbird flew up to her fountain for a drink. On another occasion, she saw a hawk serendipitously land on a fence, so she whipped out her camera and quickly snapped a photo before it flew away. The result was a perfect spur-of-the-moment image. All of these vibrant and perfectly framed shots, and she has never used Photoshop. "I don't even know how to use the program," she joked.

As most can probably tell, Morrill's work focuses mostly on nature and animals. Sunday's event was her first showcase. If it weren't for some friends who compelled her to do the event, she said, most of her images would still be in scrapbooks. But now that she has done an event at a farmers market, she said, she is looking into doing more showcases at farmers markets.

For more information, visit missymorrill.smugmug.com.

Janet Arline Barker, San Bruno

Janet Arline Barker has a motto she likes to go by that describes her approach to painting: bringing A.R.T. (amazing representations of truth) to people. She does this through plein-air painting, which means she likes to paint outdoors instead of cooped up in a studio. "For me, it's about observing the details in nature, being totally absorbed," she said.

Most recently, she put her motto into practice by doing 50 paintings in 50 days for the Art Guild of Pacifica's 50-50 exhibition in July. Her inspiration for that piece, she said, came from an oak tree she saw with no leaves. That led her to paint parts of 50 different types of trees and put them all together to form one painting of a tree. The endeavor also has inspired her to write a book about the trees, which, she said, all have interesting stories behind them.

In addition to having her own studio, Barker is vice president of the Monterey Bay Plein Air Painters Assoc.

For more information, visit www.janetarlinebarker.com.