Photographer Jill Sanders and Painter Joshua Serafin Bring Their Big, Vivid Nature Works to the South Bay via Gallery JS
When Jill Sanders breezes through the door of Gallery JS on Catalina Avenue, her hair is still wet from the shower. The photographer has recently gotten back, just an hour earlier, from an impromptu photo trip to Yosemite National Park, where she camped out to catch fresh snowfall on the mountains and produce a new crop of her signature landscapes. A peek at just one of the images shows it to be, like her other depictions of the natural world, loaded with clarity, grandeur and larger-than-life luminescence.
“If this is a church, this is it,” she says of the shot.
Not much later, a smiling Joshua Serafin strolls in after a seven-hour session in the Huntington Beach studio where the painter produces the dreamy renditions of ocean life that he’s been bringing to life for over 20 years.
Together, the two artists make up the “JS” in the welcoming new hub of fine art that opened in late 2015 along a main drag of Riviera Village. If you’ve chanced to stroll by their gallery windows, particularly at night, you’ve no doubt experienced the blip of pleasure that their illuminated works bring to the eye.
“The gallery is open from 6 to 9 at night,” remarks Graham Sanders, gallery manager. “People finish dinner, they come in and they love it.”
Whether it’s a South Bay lifeguard stand, a dazzling night scene of Catalina Harbor or a mysterious, verdant tangle of Oregon forest, Sanders’ works are nature—elevated. Romantic renderings that become super-representatives of the real thing under the alchemy of her eye, lens and shutter. Nature is the perpetual theme; one that has persisted in her works since she was a child, and has her heading off in her car on instinct to catch a storm-soaked shoreline or trek a dense forest path. It’s an urge that might be traced to a series of childhood cross-country trips she took in a station wagon with a teacher and family friend to reach a 200-acre Vermont farm where she would spend the summer.
“She took me to every single state in America by the age of 7 to 9,” says Jill Sanders with a smile. “I had my Instamatic camera. It was great.”
Joshua Serafin’s work, on the other hand, is more perception and less depiction. A Southern California native and lifelong waterman, his paintings are meditations of the world on top of and under the sea.
“I’ve always been an expressionist painter, which leans towards a little bit of abstract qualities, but with realism mixed in a little bit,” he describes. “Depending on the subject, and as a painter, I think it also depends on mood. Sometimes you’re in the mood to bring out a little more reality. Other days you want to sort of go off the spectrum and slash the paint and get more expressionistic.”
Of note is the fact that Joshua Serafin seldom paints on canvas these days, and much more on glass.
“I’m bringing back an ancient art,” he says, describing how his paintings are rendered, layer by layer (sometimes up to 15 layers in a single painting, with gold leaf, silver or bronze on top) on tempered glass. “It’s been around since the Middle Ages,” he says of the process. The effect is a visual luminescence that approximates the brilliant clarity one experiences when penetrating the ocean’s depths. “I just can’t get what I want on some of the ocean stuff on canvas.”
With timing often being the essence of commercial success, one wonders how Gallery JS might be settling into Riviera Village, which has been trending solidly upmarket with every new bistro and boutique.
“We’re selling a lot of art,” Graham Sanders says, describing sales that are strong locally and have come as far as Australia and France.
As experienced artists who could ostensibly have opened up shop in a variety of gallery-friendly locales in Southern California, Riviera Village instinctively drew them and is where they are enjoying success.
“Catalina Avenue is still, to me, a little bit of 1978,” points out Sanders, a South Bay native. “I still feel that. It’s that mellow beach vibe but they appreciate art. And it’s my home.”
GALLERY JS
1733 S. Catalina Avenue, Redondo Beach, CA 90277
310.918.1965 | GalleryJS.la
Photography by Paul Jonason
