I was born in 1963, in Big Sur, California, and grew up at my family’s restaurant, Nepenthe. I remember so many moments from childhood, like stills from a film. Peeking through the curtains to see everyone dancing down below. Astrology parties with free birthday cake and champagne and dancing under the stars. Beating tin can[…]
Studies and Glimpses
We’re coming back! Join us at Carmo on Julia Street for Tom’s “I Can’t Draw and You Can Too!” class December 28 1-4pm. The class is $60 and includes all materials. My slideshow “Awaken The Artist Within” follows at 4:30-5:30. Also at Carmo, it’s free and will send your home dreaming in full color! Meantime[…]
Stealing Time
Before I was a painter, I was a writer, and the mother of two, a dedicated volunteer, and a community activist. When I picked up the brushes for the first time, I had to steal one day a week out of my already hectic schedule. I’d put my kids on the school bus and head[…]
Color duet – painting with Kaffe Fassett
Kaffe taught me to seek beauty, and to find it in color. The beauty of a weird beige plastic card table against an array of singing red bowls in my mother’s house. The hallucinatory pink wall in a sea of white on a walk through winter in Vermont Before I was ever a painter he[…]
Kaffe Fassett and Erin Gafill Color Duets 2020
Monterey Museum of Art May 14-August 23, 2020 Influences When I was a child I remember my uncle Kaffe returning from his travels, hanging a bedsheet from the rafters of Nepenthe and projecting slides of his knitwear to the collective gasps of the audience – dinner guests, employees, and family members all. In my twenties,[…]
Techniques – Color Duet with Kaffe FASSETT
How do we paint together? Kaffe lives in London, I live in Big Sur. He works in acrylic, I work in oil. He is a textile designer, I am a fine art painter. We come together around color, and we find all the color we could want in the still life. In my mother’s house[…]
The Art of Now – a Meditation on Painting
This year painting has become for me a form of meditation — the studio, a sanctuary — the work a solace. These new pieces come from a place of sinking into the moment, using the tools of observation and rendering to center me in the now. A new way of working with color has made[…]