With beautiful scenery and slower pace of life, the Central Coast is home to a plethora of skilled artists but not everyone gets the opportunity to showcase their work. The Central Coast Artists Collective aims to give its members that chance.
The collective of painters, sculptors, crafters, photographers, and more formed in March 2021 after the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art’s (SLOMA) mission changed to focus on national and international artists and exhibitions, collective member Charlotte Daigle told New Times.
“The artist groups lost their venue and services and were left to fend for survival on their own,” she said. “A few members of the artist groups came together to form the Central Coast Artists Collective with the goal of providing the lost services.”
The group accepts local artists who pay a $30 membership fee. The collective promotes creativity and offers their members free range on their work, Central Coast Artists Collective treasurer and stone carver Carl Berney told New Times.
“Basically, the only rules that we apply to exhibitions is that art can’t be pornographic,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you can’t have naked bodies because naked bodies are a big part of art. We don’t espouse a lot of political statements just because we see that’s too divisive, and we want people to have a good time observing art. But yeah, there’s very few restrictions on anybody joining and what they present.”
The membership fees are to help fund services such as exhibition showings, Berney said.
“We now provide the artist groups with a bank account that each artist group controls,” he said. “The idea is that we provide the services that a small or even medium sized group can’t, and we make contractual arrangements with the limited venues that we have here for exhibiting art.”
However, photographer and collective member Ralph George told New Times that the collective still lacks a permanent meeting place.
“We never really did have a place where our stuff could be on show all the time,” he said. “It was just a matter of some people like to show their work to the public and other people not so much.”
The collective works with various galleries on the Central Coast to show its members art, including an upcoming show at Art Center Morro Bay that will run from May 16 to June 24.
The show will host work from the photography group, sculptors’ group, and the craft maker’s group. Berney said that alongside wonderful pieces of art, he will present a stone carving that he’s been working on for five years—RajaKapotasana—depicting a woman in pigeon pose.
“I had a piece of stone leftover from an earlier project. It was basically a triangular-shaped piece, and if you think about that pose, it’s essentially a triangle because the front leg and the back leg are sticking out and the arms are up over their head and the top of the triangle was kind of the points of the elbow,” he said. “I had a piece of stone that was roughly that shape, and it would fit in here.”
Those who practice pigeon pose in yoga often sit on the floor with one leg in front, bending inward toward their body and one leg behind bending up toward the ceiling. Some to reach their hands back and grabbing the foot that’s toward the ceiling, while others prefer to keep their arms reaching long to the sky.
“The story you hear about sculptors’ stone carvings, staring at a piece of stone and they visualize what’s inside and then take away everything that doesn’t look like that is kind of an urban myth,” he said. “Basically, what happens is it doesn’t have to be very detailed, but it has to have the exterior dimensions of the piece you want. Then I look around my studio and say, ‘Yeah, what would this fit in?’ And of course what you want to do is make the sculpture fit in the piece of stone and you want to waste as little as possible.”
Berney said he’s thankful that he can bring stone carving to the Central Coast because it’s a dying art that not many young people take up anymore.
“You have to have patience and persistence to do it, and people today want immediate results, but stone carving doesn’t work that way,” he said. “They want to sit down at the beginning of the day and make something, and ship it out for an art show that afternoon.”
Photographer and collective member George said 69 photographs from various photographers will be hanging at the art center alongside the sculpture. These include Denise Taylor’s Half Dome on a Winter’s Night and Mimi Ditchie’s Tree and Spectacular Sunset.
An opening reception with food, drinks, and artist awards will be held on May 19 from 2 to 4 p.m. at Art Center Morro Bay. Δ
Reach Staff Writer Samantha Herrera at sherrera@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in May 9-19, 2024.