Big plans are afoot for the ArtLife Gallery
“I got the keys on the 19th,” says Vanesa Andrade; “on the 20th in the afternoon the door was open for business and 60 paintings were up.”
Indeed, things moved very quickly for the ArtLife Gallery, the South Bay’s newest venue for showing art. That initial exhibit, which ran from this past November until the close of the year, featured quite a few of Andrade’s own paintings, but altogether a dozen local artists, most of them culled through Andrade’s own contacts as well as those of Royce Morales, who owns and operates Harmony Works in Redondo’s Riviera Village. The two women are at the helm of the new gallery, a large and airy space nestled into the Edge in the El Segundo Plaza.
How it got started
Andrade, who has previously exhibited her paintings at Harmony Works, approached Morales one day and, according to the latter, said: We need to do a class together. “We just sort of brainstormed,” Morales says, “and came up with the idea that what’s needed is something that helps artists to market their works.” That’s how they conceived their one-day seminar called “Marketing Your Art, Getting Off Your Butz.”
At the completion seminar, Morales continues, “we got together with the same group of people and presented them with the idea that we’d love to have them do a show at Harmony Works… You have 20 minutes to come up with an idea and promotion and theme.”
What happened next was that, coordinating with Ya Ya’s Boutique in the El Segundo Plaza, they put on a little art show in one of the corridors between buildings. That was sometime last spring.
The owner of the plaza took notice and contacted Andrade, telling her that he was impressed by the quality of the show and letting her know that he wanted to have a space in the plaza devoted to the arts and to culture. Not only that, he had a vacant space to show her, and Andrade, laughing as she recounts this, immediately told him yes.
“Vanesa does not say no, ever,” Morales adds. “You’ll never hear the word no from Vanesa’s mouth. She called me up and said, ‘Oh guess what, we’re gonna have a space.’ And I’m thinking, Are you crazy? November and December, that’s the crazy time for my store.”
To reiterate, things moved very quickly from that point and the ArtLife Gallery was soon open.
More than pretty pictures
The idea from the very start was to reach out and embrace the community, and to that end the ArtLife Gallery holds events and classes and poetry readings in addition to showing art. And the intention was not only to make the art accessible, but to have the artists themselves be accessible.
“If they have their work here,” Morales says, “they have a certain hour that they have to come in and be here so that people can come in here and meet them, and have an experience of the artist and the art.”
Andrade elaborates: “We have music, poetry, painting demonstrations, talks with the artists, classes on how to paint from palette knife to acrylics to photography sessions and portrait painting.” When people stop by from the corporate world, as she puts it, Andrade tells them, “This is what your neighbors are doing while you are in your office.
“The colors, the subjects of the paintings,” she adds, “are connected with nature, connected with life and beauty. So it’s a great adventure for the community to come and experience these, and to take a piece that is from a local artist, from somebody that they can approach at the gallery or up the street.”
“I think approachable is a good word,” Morales says. “I don’t think that art has to be highfalutin.”
“Even the way that it has been put together in this kind of cabinet,” says Andrade, “is much more easier and a softer approach to art so we can get much closer, and it’s warm.”
Unlike most galleries, which hang them from the walls, the art here is placed on shelves, in a series of little alcoves.
“It’s great to work with artists in general,” Morales says, “because they’re also so humble. They don’t get the magnificence of who they are and the beauty of what they’re here to create. I feel like it’s my [obligation] to nurture that out of people and say, ‘Oh, this is good, it’s beautiful; no, you shouldn’t charge $50 for it, it should be $500.’ I think that was our intention in marketing our art class, to really shake people up and say, ‘No, this is not a little hobby that you’re doing, this is important.’”
Andrade says they’re now looking forward to making contact with a larger portion of the local community, from the Chamber of Commerce to the Girl Scouts. Living across the street from Parras Middle School in Redondo Beach, Andrade also points out that she’d like to get the school district involved as well, to have students perform in or use the gallery space as a studio. In other words, “to inspire the next generation of artists.” She continues: “The main reason why we are together is because we want to have as many events as possible; we want to have a place to feature our events in the South Bay.”
Prominent among these is a proposed art walk to take place on the second Saturday of each month. They have 25 artists right now, Andrade says, but hope to have about 25 more. These artists would be situated all around the plaza, not just in one central location, and there would be live performances and music as well. “We’re going to do it all through the good weather season,” she says. “Hopefully we’ll start in February or March.”
Where they came from
“Originally I’m from Buenos Aires, Argentina,” Andrade says, “the city of the tango. So there’s a lot of nostalgia, drama, and the culture of the arts there is fabulous.” The country, as in neighboring Brazil, was under a military dictatorship during the 1970s. Artists of all persuasions had to be careful of what they said or how their message was interpreted, and many simply opted to live overseas. When the dictatorships were finally phased out, so to speak, democracy returned and with it the exiled artists, who now had many worldly experiences to share with those who’d remained behind.
Andrade’s father, being a jeweler, was friends with many artists and musicians, and helped further her budding interests in the arts. She was, she says, involved with art from the time she was a child. Later, she was not only studying painting, but sculpture and photography. When she worked as an optician, she painted murals in her office.
“Basically,” Andrade says, “I’ve been presenting my work in art galleries since I was a teenager, so I know how to navigate through the process of putting myself out there. I teach art, I paint, I show in galleries. I was an art director giving classes for art academies. I’ve donated murals to several schools in the South Bay.” Naturally, she teaches a class at Morales’s store in Riviera Village. “If you want to show art in Redondo Beach, that is the place to show. Everybody knows Harmony Works! It was just the right time that we met each other and that we were having this in our souls that we needed to express. Definitely. That’s why it grew so fast, because we really had it in depth.”
Don’t worry, Richard Stephens, no one’s forgetting about Cannery Row Art Studios, truly the last of the bohemian art spaces in the Beach Cities.
As for Royce Morales, she’s been a fixture in the South Bay for a very long time.
“Fixture!” she exclaims, with a laugh. “I know, it feels like I’m an old timer already. 16? years. I always feel like the new kid on the block, but yeah, it’s been 16 years.”
Like her good friend Vanesa, Morales has always been an artist.
“I was an art major in college,” she says, and this was where her heart was. “But I never was a real, practicing artist because I was raised with the notion that you could not make a living at it. That was drummed into my head by my mother my entire life.” So she fell back on what her mother had suggested, which was to get married and have a child. And in the meantime, with certain exceptions, her artistic talent lay fallow for many years.
Morales, who teaches spiritual classes, recalls what led her back into the arts:
“One of my students had gone on a weekend camping trip. She was asleep under the stars in Big Sur and she had this lucid dream. The dream said you need to open a place and you need to call it Harmony Works. So, as her spiritual teacher, she called me up to tell me this dream, and I said, ‘Oh, well that’s nice, you should do that,’ and I hung up the phone.
“And my heart started to pound. And I said, ‘Oh, you’re supposed to do it with her!’ and I had no idea what it was we were going to do. To me it was real important that it have some sort of art and spirituality, and I was a very active environmentalist. It had to have those three aspects.
“So we created it. She got very sick of it after a year and handed it over to me, and it’s been my dream ever since. I feel like those three aspects are the most important aspects of life – spirituality, who we are as beings, and the art, the creative aspect of who we are, and taking care of the planet. Those are the three things that I bring to this. And then I met Vanesa, and it’s all history.”
ArtLife Gallery is holding an artists reception for watercolorist Irene Guimera and photographer Jim Guimera on Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. The Third Thursday Poetry Night takes place on Jan. 20 at 8 p.m., this one featuring Royce and Michael Morales. On Friday, Jan. 21, painter Chris Antonelli gives a talk, “Creative Process and Inspiration,” from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. Cost, $20. On Sunday, Jan. 23, there is an artist reception for Karin Civit Johnson from 2 to 6 p.m. For information on art classes by Joel Luna and Vanesa Andrade, call the ArtLife Gallery, located at the Edge in the El Segundo Plaza, 710-C Allied Way, El Segundo. (310) 938-2511. ER
