A Legacy in the Arts

Erin Lee Gafill, who will be at Gualala Arts for a February workshop will also host “A Legacy in the Arts – Slideshow & Talk” on Friday, February 25 at 7pm. Tickets are $10.

Erin Lee Gafill is a fifth generation California artist and granddaughter of the founders of Nepenthe Restaurant, in Big Sur.  She is an artist member of the Carmel Art Association. Her color-rich oil paintings are exhibited nationally, and have been exhibited in several museum shows.

Her most recent museum exhibit “Color Duets – Kaffe Fassett and Erin Lee Gafill” with her uncle, internationally renowned designer Kaffe Fassett, was the Monterey Museum of Art’s featured summer show. Currently, Gafill’s work is featured at The Sea Ranch Lodge and is represented locally by LyndonDesign Gallery.

During her month-long art residency in The Sea Ranch as a guest of The Sea Ranch Lodge, she and her husband Tom Birmingham have organized weekly free community offerings including plein aire paint-outs,  Make and Mend textile gatherings, and on-line creativity sessions with Peggy’s Place on KGUA 88.3 FM.

In the February slideshow/talk, Gafill will share stories about growing up in Big Sur in the 60’s and 70’s, her encounters with the likes of writers Henry Miller, artists Emile Norman and Edmund Kara, and some of the Hollywood elite of the day including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Kim Novak.

Gafill will present almost 100 images tracing her lineage in the arts back to her great great-grandmother artist Jane Gallatin Powers, one of the founders of Carmel-by-the-Sea and the first artist to have a studio there. Powers won prizes for her plein aire work but found her artistic voice in European Modernism.  It was the discovery of these forgotten paintings in a basement in Carmel almost 40 years after Powers’s death that ignited Gafill’s own interest in painting.

The artist will also share her experiences of over a decade of painting retreats in Big Sur with her uncle Kaffe Fassett, the lessons she has gleaned from those special contemplative sessions, and how she weaves the threads of her creative and artistic family legacy into her teaching and community work.

Gafill will also share images of new works she has created during her time here for her upcoming summer exhibition at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka.”

Purchase tickets online at EventBrite.com.