Welcom to our artist's biography page. This is your opportunity to get to know our artists at Smith Gallery. There are four artists along with their portraits. Just click on the artist's name below and it will show that artist's biography on this web page. If you would like a printable PDF version, just click on PDF below the artist's name.

Vicki Asp

Steve Memering

William Tuthill

Don Dahlke

 

 

Portrait of an Artist:  Vicki Asp

One of the marks of good art is an absence of apparent effort.   Whether watchingdance or viewing a painting, when we can lose ourselves in the magic of the creation without a distracting awareness of the mind-bending or backbreaking work involved in the making of it, we’re in the presence of a master.  Artist Vicki Asp’s sense of awe for the beauty of the world, a well-developed work ethic and twenty years of daily honoring her craft have brought that level of mastery to her vivid and luminous landscapes.  Vicki was always an artist, but only began to focus on her art in her early twenties.
            “My husband was in the military and he was gone a lot.  I was at home with the kids.  Painting was a great ‘out’ for me.  Art was my vacation.”  Wherever her husband’s career sent her, Vicki not only continued to paint, but seriously pursued an education in art.  She studied portraiture at Olympic Community College in Washington, oil painting and animal painting at the Tulsa Triangle Art Center in Oklahoma, watercolor, portraiture and drawing at Old Dominion University and Tidewater Community College in Virginia and landscape, color theory and acrylic painting at American River Community College in Sacramento.  As a personal challenge, Vicki entered her work in art shows from Virginia to California, generating more than 75 awards in local, regional, and international competition. 
            At American River College, instructor Gary Pruner offered to help Vicki in refining her work.  “He’s a fabulous artist and a great teacher.  He gave me great encouragement, but never tried to change me.  He took me from where I was and pushed me further.”  It was her time at American River College that Vicki started working on her landscapes.
            “I was doing some surrealistic art then, and landscapes are king of surreal.  I got started, but I felt like I just couldn’t do it.  When I see things they just awe me.  Anything I looked at was just too grand for me to paint.  The world is so beautiful, and how could I ever convey all of that?  My paintings were always too dark.  But I kept going out into the open and painting.  It took me a couple of years, and then they started to get lighter.  I was starting to be able to show the color and light that I saw.”
            Light and color suffuse Vicki’s work.  Some artists can capture a picture of a place, creating a photorealistic image.  Vicki’s work has the magical quality of recalling not only the look but the feeling of a place, giving the sense that if you stepped closer to the canvas, you could smell the earth, and feel the warmth of the sunlight.  The effect maybe magical, but the actual process of creation is plain hard labor.
            Vicki specializes in plein air painting, creating small studies on location, and then recreating and enlarging them at home in her studio.  “There’s something that photographs can’t catch.  The light and feeling are different.  I have to paint on site to capture what is in front of me.   When I see something that awes me, I go out with the mission to paint it.  The actual work is non-thinking, taking in what’s coming in through my eyes and putting it on the canvas.  Sometimes I don’t get it right.  If I don’t get it right the first time, I have to go back and get it again.  Even when it doesn’t work, I have the experience of the attempt.  I think that if I can’t translate what I see, I have to learn more about it.  So I observe more.”
            “I have one piece that I worked on for three days of Sailor Bar on the American River.  I couldn’t get a riffle of water right.  I’m accustomed to doing still water, but on the first day the light kept shifting because clouds were passing over.  When the light changed, the whole aspect was different, and that just made me crazy.  I must have painted that a dozen times.  My friends kept saying ‘Oh, no!  She’s doing it again!’  But I told myself I wouldn’t let it beat me.  I kept going back until I got it right.”  Vick’s acute sense of place and observation, and her perseverance in conveying this in her art make her one of Northern California’s most impressive landscape painters.  Her work captures the essence of the rivers, hills and agricultural areas of the state, as well as the spots other painter’s overlook, where she sees beauty even in everyday things.  “There’s something about the feel of a place.  When you’re out there, you’re painting the spot, but you’re looking up, down, right, left and the feeling comes through on the canvas.  This world is such a beautiful place.  I’m in awe every day.”

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The Artist: Steve Memering

Having grown up in Sacramento, Steve Memering is proud to be a River City native.  He received his education at CSUS, Berkeley and Carnegie-Mellon.  He, then, returned to Sacramento to live and work.  Steve has had a long career as a teacher and artist.  Today, he divides his time between painting several hours in the morning and working full-time as a middle school art teacher. During the summer, he also teaches adult painting workshops both here and abroad. For years, Steve had developed a reputation as an accomplished watercolor artist.  Gradually, he discovered, for him, each painting was becoming a kind of journey.  Opaque mediums, such as oil and acrylic gave him the freedom he needed to re-
evaluate and explore his ideas along the way.  Never really abandoning the demanding constraints of watercolor entirely, he now works predominantly in oil on canvas.
Sacramento subjects are a major theme in Steve’s current paintings and all of his latest work has acquired its own unique look.  The dramatic play of light and dark has become a persistent theme in his work along with bold, emotion-based color schemes.  Uncomfortable with photographic realism, Steve prefers to “interpret”, rather than “report”, a subject.  “I paint what I remember; not what I see” Steve explains.  “I try to edit out everything not essential and get to what is really there.”  He finds conventional photographic realism mundane and misleading.  “What a camera records is not what I see.”   
Steve’s work can be found in galleries, businesses and homes all over the state.  Sports fans might have seen several of his paintings hanging in the hallways of Raley field and in Skyline Restaurant at Arco Arena.  Downtown Sacramento is becoming increasingly peppered with his paintings and limited editions.  A prominent downtown restaurant, for example, has a wall of his large Sacramento scenes.  Recently, Steve entered the Crocker Kingsley Exhibition and won the People’s Choice award.
Steve Memering considers Smith Gallery - on 11th and K Street – his “home base” where his originals and limited editions can be seen, enjoyed and purchased.  For more information, or just to see further examples of Steve’s work, visit the gallery or get a quick overview at smithgallery.com or stevememering.com.

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Artist Biography & Statement: William Tuthill
Born July 31, 1926

Education/Experience

2 years Aeronautical Engineering and Drafting
2 years Free-hand drawing and painting (college level)
2 years Chouinard Art School in Los Angeles, California

Intermittent watercolor workshops with:
Rex Brandt, Phil Dike, George Post, Richard Yip, E, John Robinson, Jane Hofstetter, Jane Burnham, Judi Betts, Charlotte Britton, Jeanne Dobie, Marie MacDonnell Roberts, Ted Goerschner, Marilyn Simandie, Robert E. Wood, and Gary Pruner.

15 years working with the Bridge Department – Bridge and Architectural Models and Architectural Renderings and Structural Drafting.
20 years working with the Department of Water Resources – Technical and Structural Drafting.
Numerous shows and awards over the past 20 years throughout Northern California.

Artist Statement

“I’m consumed by the perfect watercolor.  Failure is a nightmare of every artist with ambition and with students of watercolor in particular because you can’t go back and make changes the way you can with oil.  For every successful painting there are dozens never seen.  I like to paint in the horizontal and vertical that architecture creates.  We live in a world of horizontals and verticals, the horizontal of nature and the vertical of man. This is what I’m comfortable painting.  I like the control and precision of the architecture of a city or a bridge, a train or a car.  So I paint in a tight, controlled style that reveals their structure.  I push the colors that are already in the environment to achieve an unexpected drama that emerges from an intense realism.”

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Caribbean Fantasies: Don Dahlke

Don Dahlke lives in the Caribbean, a long way from his native Oregon. The son of a feed and garden merchant, Don chose painting over the store.  He set off to California then Mexico before finding his home in the Caribbean.

Don loves the light and the smell of this world.  His paintings reflect the surroundings.  A palm tree casts its shadow upon the cottage.  The dimly lit interior beckons closer inspection.  We enter the house and discover a book and some glasses on a table.  To the left is the bedroom.  Directly ahead is the back porch window where a sun-drenched ocean is revealed.  There is a breeze and the air tastes like salt.

Here lies the power of Dahlke’s art.  He reminds us of lazy summer days.  We view his work and feel warm.  His houses invoke our curiosity.  Lay back in the hammock on the deck and dream.  Surrounded by books, quiet conversation, warmth and shadows you marvel about simple things.

As a child, Donald Dahlke loved to create his own worlds on paper. Today he's still creating his own  worlds and happily for us, they are worlds we love. Donald Dahlke is an oil painter with two distinct styles. First, there's his naive style that depicts the spirit of the West Indians. These paintings show fantasies such as steel drum musicians floating over a turquoise sea. Then, there are Donald Dahlke's idyllic scenes that capture the, warmth, serenity and mystery of the Caribbean. They are surreal views of doorways and windows you might see anywhere in the Caribbean but they are in truth, our own fantasies of the "perfect peaceful place."

I first discovered Donald Dahlke through his painting, We Be Poppin! that was featured in the "Year 2000 Caribbean Art Calendar" In this painting market women, pulled up by their parasols, float into a summer sky. The painting, he says was inspired by the movie, Mary Poppins. "But," he adds, " I used the West Indian image to portray the whimsical feeling of life in the Caribbean. The people
here have a more relaxed, carefree attitude toward life than people in the States or in Europe." This feeling is also captured in his painting, "Jump Up and Sway" in which West India musicians are lifted into the air by the sheer power of their music.

An art graduate of the College of the Cayman Islands and the University of Oregon, Donald Dahlke considers all his paintings "pure" in that they come from no pre-conceived intent, but are made fresh at the moment of creation.

I am often surprised by what I create because I'm always looking for new ways to interpret the subjects. Sometimes an accident will turn into a new way of doing something. For example you know oil and water don't mix but I like to mix an oil base medium with a water-based one and what I get are swirls of colors that don't mix. This produces a whole new look.

Living in the Caribbean, Donald Dahlke has created his own symbols for what he believes is important to Caribbean culture. Carnival for example... and fish.
In the Caribbean, fish is an important part of the culture. Fish creates food and jobs. To depict this importance, I created a painting in which a West Indian man is on the back of a brightly colored fish, riding it like a bucking bronco in the sky. In the foreground stand women looking on as the man attempts to tame the fish. "I call this painting West Indies because I think it sums up the preoccupation here...

Donald Dahlke is a busy man. Not only does he paint, but he creates all his own posters and prints. And then of course he saves a bit of time to dream up inventions such as a vending machine that would dispense photocopies of art. The concept is the same as a newspaper vending machine. It would sit on a sidewalk corner next to the newspapers and when you get your daily news, you could also get your daily art.

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Smith Gallery

1020 11th Street, Ste.100, Sacramento, CA 95814

Give us a call to discuss these exquisite images.