Sonoma Art Directory
painting and drawing
The artwork of Don Van Amerongen is influenced by art history, music and travel. Art history gives him perspective and music often matches his personal energy while he works. Living and traveling in several cultures, Don has developed compassion and empathy for other peoples, cultures and experiences, and the gift of seeing another perspective”
Don has a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and also studied painting and printmaking at Sonoma State University. He also holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Kendall School of Design, Michigan.
Tony Speirs is known for vintage and pop-culture inspired paintings and collaborative work, acrylics, silkscreens, life drawings, illustration, and circus posters.
Victoria Kochergin is a botanical artist and illustrator, specialized in drawing with colored pencils. She also works in charcoal, ink, painting, pastels, sculpture, watercolor and lithography.
Caroline Hipkiss is an artist from Sonoma, California who paints with acrylic paint on birch mounted to wood frames. Caroline received her BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a concentration in Scientific Illustration. Her subject matters include the natural world, people, buildings, foods and other nonscientific images.
The artist Terry Sauvé from Western Sonoma is an oil painter of “luminous archetypal California landscapes”. She studied at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.
Wendy Brayton is a native from Sonoma County and a plein air oil painter who has often painted tractors and trailers, both rural and urban landscapes, as well as figures and portraits. She has a degree in sculpture from the Sonoma State University and is working on her masters degree at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
Ellie Portner is an artist of graphite drawings, oil painting, monoprints, paper collages, welded steel, and other mixed media.
Michael Coy is a painter and illustrator, who blends realism with whimsy. His flora and landscapes are whimsically surreal.
Stanley George Miller, better known as Mouse and Stanley Mouse, is an American artist notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs and the album covers of Grateful Dead and Journey music records. By 1958, Mouse had become fascinated by the Taint movement that had begun in California a decade earlier. Having developed skills using an airbrush he began painting t-shirts at custom car shows. His work is featured in the book Freehand: The Art of Stanley Mouse
. (photo credit: “Grateful Dead: Skull and Roses” scan of LP cover, licensed under fair use of copyrighted material, via wikipedia.org.)
Sara Bell’s paintings, drawings and sketches are inspired by the world’s natural beauty. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, cum laude. Her subject matter includes children, people, landscapes, botanicals, creatures and symbolics.
Janet Moore lives and paints in the northern California fishing village of Bodega Bay. She paints the coastal landscapes in a minimalistic style.
Frank Krueger (1926-2003) was an architect and artist who worked in various media. He was a member of the National Watercolor Society, a prize winner in various shows, and an officer and member of the Arts Guild of Sonoma for many years.
Peggy Sebera is a painter of landscapes and seascapes. Her artist statement begins, “At the Heart of my Paintings is the Earth, the Land.” She works in oil and acrylic paints.
Susan Proehl is an abstract artist. Her work is colorful and often depicts an aerial perspective. She lives and works at her studio in Western Sonoma County, Sebastopol.
Susan R. Ball paints still life and landscapes in a realistic and impressionistic style. A quote from the artist: “With paint I have the tools to illuminate my subject and convey a tangible personal interpretation to connect with my audience.”
Susan Greer is a plein air artist and currently serves on the Steering Committee for the Arts Council of Sonoma County. She has also served on the Art Trails steering committee and the Sonoma County Museum Board. “I love exploring the transient light of California coastal lands, and ways in which the ordinary become extraordinary with each passing hour. I paint out-of-doors, or plein air, whenever possible.”
Paula Matzinger is a Northern California artist, designer and writer. Her favorite subject is a brightly hued California landscape, and she enjoys oil painting in the Sonoma County countryside.
Artist Anina Porter Fuller comes from an artistic family on the East Coast, that includes the painter Fairfield Porter and photographer Eliot Porter (her uncles and mentors), and the poet Anne Porter. Anina resides in Sonoma County and specializes in oil painting directly from nature. She also leads Art Week trips each summer to the Great Spruce Head Island, Maine.
Celeste’s primary mediums are charcoal and watercolor, and her water art features expressive, fluid and feminine forms. Born and raised in Northern California, Celeste has also organized the Artists of Sonoma Facebook site. Check it out!
The artist Joan Hoffmann uses oil paints to render landscapes of Sonoma, “wild habitats” and western skies. She has written several art books, available for Kindle readers: Paint with Intention, Paint with Purpose, Back to Nature, and Off Trail.
Diana Lee (died 2016) created fine art scratchboard renderings, and taught for the International Society of Scratchboard Artists. Her etchings are on white kaolin clay (porcelain) and sprayed with a layer of thin black ink.
Lee also wrote the book Starting From Scratch, about her techniques with black and white and color scratchboaring.
Sherrie Lovler offers a combination of nature art and poetry. Her poems and calligraphic paintings are featured in her books, Two As One: Poems From a New Love, and On Softer Ground: Poetry, Poems and Calligraphy. In her newest book, twenty-four paintings and poems illuminate the magnificent possibilities of creation.
Vicki Folkerts-Coots is known for her oil and pastel landscapes with sweeping brushstrokes. Born in Oregon, she now lives and has an art studio in Sonoma County.
Tom Berto is known for crisp, colorful and photo-realistic paintings. His medium of choice is acrylic paints, and he offers Giclée prints in signed and numbered limited editions.
Soo Noga creates oil paintings, abstracts and modern expressions.
Serena Hazard creates expressionistic and abstract paintings. Here subjects include the forces of nature in landscapes, and birds in flight.
Ruby Newman works in a variety of mediums on canvas, paper and prepared panels, also on custom mural designs. She enjoys creating abstracts, contemporary Plein Air landscapes, and figurative and still life studies. Ruby majored in Theatrical Design at the Carnegie Mellon University. She worked for the Santa Fe Opera, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and the International Opera Barga in Italy. She also worked over ten years on public projects through the San Francisco Art Commission, including several mural works and the restoration of the 1914 Golden Gate Park Carousel.
Robin Purcell is a Sonoma County plein air artist, and watercolorist.
Popi Tyler is a Sonoma County watercolor artist.