Two Painters: opens February 13

“Two Painters”
An Exhibit featuring Deborah Kirklin and Robert Poplack

Exhibit Dates: Feb 13 – March 19, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday Feb 13, 6-8PM
Artist Talk and Q&A: Saturday Feb 20, 3PM

Two Painters: Deborah Kirklin and Robert Poplack. Husband and wife, both professors of art and artists themselves. In their first show together. Still life and abstract, separate in subject but joined by a lifelong partnership.

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The Jennifer Perlmutter Gallery is honored to have two established painters on exhibit the month of February, 2016. Deborah Kirklin and Robert Poplack met in the spring of 1988, were married in 1991, and are both artists and professors at Santa Rosa Jr. College and Notre Dame de Namur University, respectively. Their first date was to see an exhibition of drawings at the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum where they both agreed that their favorite drawing was by Edwin Dickinson. Their first trip was a landscape painting excursion up the North Coast of Sonoma County. While their methods are divergent, Robert and Deborah share many of the same values in painting and teaching. They maintain separate studios, and the artistic dialog between them is ongoing. This is their first exhibit together.

Poplack’s current paintings are based on hikes with the naturalist William Feeley. Feeley has spent his life learning about Sonoma County. The hikes are not of the ordinary kind. They consist of going off the beaten path into areas that are not readily accessible, often on trails that he has built himself. These sojourns can include rock climbing, rappelling, or night hikes where they watch the setting of the sun from one location and the rising of the moon from another location. The hikes are based on celestial events, the tides, the seasons and the weather. “Through this partnership I am learning about the fauna, flora and geology of the area. These experiences have influenced my painting. I take a sketch pad and watercolors with me and make notations along the way. The rhythms, gestures, and movement of the studio painting are explorations of expressive possibilities found in nature, a kind of internalizing and re-externalizing of the event, a memory of the day, and a reverie on nature.”

Deborah Kirklin is a San Francisco Bay Area painter who focuses on light and color in painterly still lifes and landscapes. She graduated with a major in Art and a minor in French from Stanford University, and she spent her junior year in Paris studying fine art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. After earning her M.A. and M.F.A. degrees in Painting at the University of Iowa, Kirklin moved to San Francisco.
Kirklin investigates the tension between realism and abstraction, and works in oil and in watercolor. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions nationally, shows with the still life painting collective, Zeuxis, based in New York City, and had two solo exhibitions at Hackett Freedman Gallery in San Francisco. She has been teaching drawing and painting at Santa Rosa Jr. College, in Santa Rosa, CA since 1990. Kirklin was recently awarded an artist in residency and will be a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in April 2016.

The exhibit will be open to the public Tuesday-Saturday, 11:00AM-5:00PM and by appointment. Check website for additional hours. Jennifer Perlmutter Gallery, 3620 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette, CA 94549. Contact Jennifer Perlmutter at (925) 284-1485 or jp@jenniferperlmuttergallery.com.