Gualala Arts Promoting public interest and participation in the arts since 1961
Abstraction demands more from me than realism. Instead of reproducing something outside of me, now I go inward and use everything I’ve learned thus far in my life.
–Susan Avishai
Coastal artists Mirka Knaster and Paula Haymond are keen on abstract art. They offer beautiful and engaging works that appeal aesthetically and arouse curiosity. Presenting new ways of looking at what’s all around us and inviting viewers’ imaginations to roam freely is what makes their abstract art so intriguing.
Both artists work with a mixture of media and techniques. Paula sculpts, burns, pierces, and paints wood, metal, and stone to create three-dimensio
nal objects. Mirka combines textiles, handmade paper, thread, paint, dye, and ink in her 2-D and 3-D pieces.
Abstract art often triggers pareidolia, our tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. Like the magic of seeing an animal in a cloud or discerning a face in the moon, abstract art stimulates our capacity to create a story. Our mind takes over when the artist does not provide a mimetic representation of a place, person, or object. Abstract art encourages us to go beyond what reality presents and interpret the shapes, lines, colors, and designs through a different filter. We can get lost in the abstract images. Then, as we fill in the gaps ourselves, feeling and thinking what the artwork means to us, we’re gifted with finding something unexpected in the relationships between the shapes and spaces.
About Paula Haymond
Paula Haymond is a mixed media sculptor who works with wood, metal, resin and stones to create 3-D objects of art. Her works incorporate imagination, whimsy, enhanced by color, lace piercing and surface texturing.
As a sculptor, Haymond is always looking for new materials to be used in her structures which spark the curiosity of others to explore those materials and designs closer. Paula uses a wide variety of power tools, hand tools and micro machines to create her subjects.
About Mirka Knaster
Mirka Knaster creates 2-D and 3-D pieces using textiles, paper, and other materials in a studio overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where she witnesses with awe how the ever-changing light transforms land, sea, and sky from dawn till dusk. Her award-winning work is in collections in the U.S. and England and has been exhibited internationally. As an independent curator, she has highlighted artists from other cultures. She also helped organize and co-lead textile tours to South Korea. She reflects on diverse aspects of art in her blog: mirkaart.com/exploringtheheartofit/.
Born along the Adriatic Sea and educated in the U.S., Mirka earned degrees in three cross-cultural fields. Research
and writing have led to global adventures that deeply inform her sensibility and exploration of fiber art. Nature, East Asian aesthetics, and 20th-century abstract art are significant inspirations for her contemporary creations. Her decades-long meditation practice is the foundation for her inquiry into the intersection of the arts and Eastern philosophies. Expressions of simplicity, serenity, and spaciousness are the result. She finds it exhilarating to engage with color, texture, line, shape and space, pattern and design and approaches the creative process as an open-ended improvisation, allowing pieces to emerge intuitively and serendipitously. Along the way, she embraces and celebrates the surprises.