LA Brewery Walk - April 18 and 19, 2009.

[Pete Harris]

Last week I spent five nights and four days at the The Brewery in Los Angeles. The 22-building complex on 23 acres, some structures dating back to 1888, was an old Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery that was converted into the "the world’s largest live-work art colony." My close friend Philip Horvath resides there and just launched his own business out of the brewery. For more information see Center for Conscious Creativity.

This past weekend I had the fortune to be present at their biannual Art Walk, where over 100 resident artists open up their studios to the public. Here I had the opportunity to walk through their studios, speak with the artists and, yes, purchase artworks directly from the artists at studio prices.

It was during this art walk that I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Ann Erpino. Ann earned a bachelor's degree in Fine Art from U.C.Berkeley, and studied painting with Anne Pierce and Salvatore Casa. Her work is also currently influenced by Remedios Varo, a relatively unknown 20th century female surrealist painter. Ann taught art classes for five years and worked as a muralist, scenographic artist, curator and portraitist before becoming a full-time fantasy painter in 2001.

Until I reached Ann's studio there were very few works of art that captured my attention. Ann's work, however, was much different than what I had seen at the Brewery. Her images capture both the light and darkness that is present in the artist's mind and all minds that are struggling with the challenges that face humanity in the 21st century. Her work is concerned with the fate of humanity and the plight of the planet. Her fantasy images are drawn from visions and lucid dreams and contain the "metaphors for this ephemerality, and for the interconnectedness of all that exists." To me her works express both the horrors of humanity's darkest moments but also the initiatory rites of passage to transcend our own inhumanity to the life on this planet.

More recently and of greater interest to some Theosophists is her collaboration with Erik Winfree, an assistant professor in computer science and computation and neural systems at the California Institute of Technology. Some sixty small paintings surrealistically detail DNA programming, mechanical thinking, life's mineral origins, nanotechnology, and other research projects of Dr. Winfree. She is also working on ten paintings which illustrate consciousness. These were commissioned by Dr. Christof Koch at Caltech and will be published later this year.

Before I left LA, I ended up purchasing two limited edition prints of her paintings for my study. If you have an interest in surrealism and fantasy I encourage you to check out her website at www.AnnErpino.com. Ann's painting at the top of this discussion is called "Listen".