Friends

Friends

Cover | Gail Ragains

Friends (acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48). Gail Ragains compares her style of painting to the improvisations of a jazz musician. She begins each painting with a strong foundation of color, and abstracts it in subsequent layers of paint. She considers herself an extremely physical and expressive painter. “The more I can move and dance around the canvas, the more connected I am to the painting,” she says. Her use of bold, gestural brushstrokes and colors puts her work in line with the history of Abstract Expressionism, yet her depiction of the human body evokes the style and subject of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. The artist lives and works out of Redwood City. She has exhibited her work in multiple solo shows throughout the Bay Area and group shows in California, Boston, and Canada. In 2012, San Francisco Magazine featured her as one of the “Eight Artists to Watch.” Ragains is represented by SLATE contemporary (473 25th St., Uptown Oakland). Open Thursday through Saturday, noon–5pm, and by appointment. Learn more at www.SlateArt.net and www.GailRagains.com.


NEXT MONTH: The East Bay is full of creative characters, and Paul Kilduff catches up with one, Bryan Ware of Danville, for the inside scoop on how recycling Crayons for the Crayon Initiative colors the lives of those it touches. Restaurant reviewer Ethan Fletcher heads to Sweetgreen, the seasonal fast-food chain and interloper that’s now in the space of iconic Oscar’s in Berkeley. And an excerpt from the recently published Hiding in Plain Sight recounts the torture horrors of Abu Ghraib.


Faces of the East Bay