Ruth Marion Saunders has never shown her artwork in a commercial gallery before, but when she decided it was time to put some of her paintings up for sale she went all out. Saunders opened her own art gallery in San Juan Bautista, named the Zen Art Gallery Plus, on Third Street. She has one wall devoted to contemporary work and one wall devoted to more traditional pieces.
“I haven’t sold it before now,” she said. “I’ve never wanted to sell originals and I’m still agonizing over it. I spend an average of six weeks on a painting.”
Saunders’ gallery space has a patio behind the building where she has set up a table to paint on weekdays when there is less foot traffic in the gallery. (For more on the gallery see the related story in the Pride section.)
Her own pieces she has on display are bright and bold, filled with geometric shapes.
“I paint very large and each one is very different, but you can tell they are done by the same artist,” she said. “They turn out to be surprisingly bold even though I don’t intend them to be.”
She said her Hungarian gypsy ancestry brings out the boldness in her art. Her father was a landscape artist who was very accomplished.
“As I was growing up, I was pretty much by his side,” she said. “He told me to try not to copy – to try to be original. I switched from linear and logical thinking to more abstract. Once I entered that world I found it was lovely.”
Saunders sees her paintings as expressing music, spirituality and other feelings “for which there are no words.”
“There is a graceful, elegant beauty that I don’t think can be expressed any other way,” she said.
As she was preparing her gallery to open, Saunders said her daughter who lives in Portland, came to visit with Saunders granddaughter. The pair said they loved the space and the improvements she had made to get it ready for displaying artworks.
Saunders artwork contrasts with that of the other artists she has on display in the shop. Most of the other artists create more traditional pieces, such as charcoal portraits, acrylic scenes of migrant workers, or watercolor landscapes.
Gayle Sleznick, a longtime artist who is known for her watercolor paintings of national parks, has two pieces on display at the gallery.
Sleznick has been involved in a variety of arts organizations and cooperatives through the years. She said Saunders has offered a chance for local artists to display their work at the gallery without paying the high-priced commissions required at some other regional galleries. Saunders charges a 25 percent commission and allows the artists to set the price for their pieces.
“Ruth has been really kind,” Sleznick said.
The two met through Oriana Chorale, a singing group in San Benito County.
“She said she was starting a gallery, a nice high-end gallery,” Sleznick said.
Like Saunders, Sleznick has a long history as an artist. She first took a watercolor painting class when she was a young mother living on the Virgin Islands, where her husband Jim was stationed with the National Park Service.
Many of Sleznick’s pieces evoke the national sites at which she has lived throughout her life, first as the daughter of a National Park Service employee, and then as the wife of an NPS employee. She has lived at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Pinnacles National Monument (recently upgraded to a national park,) Morristown National Historical Park and Yosemite National Park.
Sleznick got more involved in watercolor painting when she lived at Yosemite for six and half years. She took a workshop with master teachers there and also started attending a workshop in Asilomar.
Her studio is full of completed pieces as well as pieces in progress that she has put aside for the time being, in hopes that someday she will be inspired to work on them. Sleznick paints some items in the field, with an easel, some from photographs and sometimes she uses a more abstract technique of washing her canvas with three shades of paint until something starts to emerge from it.
“The fact is I’ve painted so long I have shapes in my head so if I go outside in a scenery, they dictate the painting,” she said. “If I do something like this (the three shades wash,) the paper dictates what it becomes.”
In addition to her artwork, Sleznick also maintains the wooden paintings of the Saints that are put up around San Juan Bautista during the holidays. On a recent day, she was working on the image of Jon the Baptist, the saint for which the local mission was named. She sanded down the wood to remove any chips or blemishes and then she will repaint the wood.
Sleznick has her own studio in her home, which she will open in June as part of the Open Studios Tour put on annually by the San Benito Arts Council. She frames her completed paintings herself, cutting the glass and boards to fit the frames. She prints high-quality digital prints of some of her pieces to turn into postcards and greeting cards, all signed by hand.
Recently she visited a local sixth-grade class to give watercolor lessons to the students, passing on her knowledge to the next generation.
Saunders, who continues to paint even as she runs her gallery, said she wants the gallery to serve as a place to expose visitors or local residents to the artwork of local artists. She has planned an artists’ reception from 1 to 4 p.m., on April 13, at 404 Third St., in San Juan. She said she had given out hundreds of invitations and was expecting a nice turnout for the event.
Zen Art Gallery Plus:
For those interested in seeing more of Saunders or Sleznick’s work, along with that of other local artists, the Zen Art Gallery Plus is open at 404 Third St., in San Juan Bautista Thursday through Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The artwork on display rotates as pieces are sold or have been on display for 90 days. The gallery will also host the Monterey Bay Plein Air Painters Association jury exhibit in the fall. Details: Call 831-636-2858.
