Whether it be sewing handmade dolls for 30 years, making artwork as a way to move forward after a separation from a partner, or doing robot based paintings for over a decade, artists from all sorts of backgrounds came together to participate in the Patchwork art show in Long Beach.
Tatiana Redin does hand-built earth clay jewelry, which is a special blend of clay from Long Beach that has iron and sand in it that creates a very unique oxidation.
Redin’s entire line is inspired by the journey of finding worthiness within, “because clay is a really humble material that you have to honor it to find its preciousness within it,” Redin said.
She originally started making these for herself out of seeking grounding in her life. A separation between Redin and her partner helped Redin discover how ceramics was like a wise teacher and an outlet as well.
“There’s three parts: grounding, growing and glooming, which is kind of the journey of when we encounter hard things in life so it’s inspired by that,” Redin said.
Jose Vargas and his wife have been creating handmade dolls for around 30 years now.
Their dolls bring together different cultures in pop culture, such as Princess Leia from the Star Wars movies and El Chavo from the Mexican TV show, El Chavo Del Ocho.
Matt Spangler illustrates robot paintings with the robots doing many different things. In 2010, Spangler wanted to draw a robot every day for a year, and at the end he really liked what he was doing, so he just continued doing it and one robot started to emerge into everything else.
Spangler has been drawing the robot in his paintings today since 2011.
A lot of the illustrations start off digitally, usually designing them on Procreate or Photoshop. He used to do a sketch everyday and that was all digital work in an attempt to better his techniques. He uses acrylic paint, typically on a canvas or paper.
For paintings, if there’s a concept Spangler really wants to flesh out, he will do it on a small scale first to see if it works.
Once he sees it is something that’ll work, he then will go to a bigger canvas, which takes anywhere between two to four days.
The Patchwork art show was held from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday and the next ones will be held in Oakland, CA on June 11 and Santa Rosa, CA on June 25 and 26.