CREATIVE MINDS—From left, painters Dan P. Sherer, Scott Michael and Mouse Rawk in front of an installation they created together for the Winter Art Show at the Agoura Hills Event and Recreation Center gallery. Their display runs through March 18. EAMON MURPHY/Acorn Newspapers
If you haven’t yet made it to the gallery at the Agoura Hills Recreation and Event Center to check out the city’s Winter Art Show featuring three exceptional local artists, just a few days remain: the exhibition closes March 18.
On display are works by Thousand Oaks painters: Scott Michael, Mouse Rawk and Dan P. Sherer.
Michael, a lifelong resident of T.O., paints abstract horizons using acrylic on canvas. His work focuses on the horizontal, in response to “the idea that we live in a vertical world, where everyone’s growing up and up and up,” he said. “My artistic choice is to be horizontal, firmly planted on the ground.”
Michael said he approaches a blank canvas with whatever feelings and emotions he’s experiencing at the moment: “I don’t want to be too intentional with it—I’m not trying to say it is a horizon, it could be whatever someone wants it to be.”
In one painting in the show, titled “Riders on the Storm,” an abstract, cloudlike shape rises above the horizon, resembling an Arabian horse. Michael calls it “a happy accident,” since he doesn’t typically paint figures or forms such as animals.
While the shape represents a horse to Michael, “it doesn’t have to be that, which is what’s so great about abstract art—it’s up to the viewer to determine what it is and to feel whatever they want to feel,” he said. “It was just fun to participate in the process,” he added, likening the act of artistic creation to being a passenger—“which is kind of weird to say, but that’s what you feel like: you’re a passenger and your art is just coming out of you.”
Mouse Rawk is an abstract painter working primarily in spray paint and acrylic mixed media, creating both large-scale murals and canvas works. He singled out as especially meaningful to him a painting in the show that includes the phrase “How about this weather?”— something his mother used to text him whenever it was raining. She had recently passed away when he made the piece in his studio during a downpour.
The experience brought out a lot of emotion, Rawk said, reflected in the flowers and sun that emerged on the canvas. “It’s kind of a mix of a bunch of different styles that I’ve been developing over the years in one piece,” he said. Another work incorporates, collage-style, instructions from an erector set his father owned in the 1960s. Old printed pages have been a go-to source of materials for Rawk over the past year, as reading has also become a favorite hobby of his.
Dan P. Sherer was born and raised in Ventura County. Art became his life at the age of 14, he said, beginning with graffiti. He later decided to study design at California State University, Northridge. One of his paintings in the show depicts, in bright colors, a portion of the I-5 Freeway by Dodgers Stadium where he once painted a graffiti piece.
“With my work, it all speaks of a specific experience,” he said. “Having been a graffiti artist for a number of years, there are a lot of misconceptions (around) it—it’s obviously frowned upon. But If you stand back and look at the value you can get from it, from an artist’s standpoint, it’s huge. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to communicate that story—a way for the average person, who maybe doesn’t like graffiti, to appreciate it.”
Accordingly, Sherer’s painting features only the location and the perspective, not the graffiti itself. The color scheme represents the artist’s creative experience—warm, abiding and energetic. He uses acrylic latex—“basically like the typical house paint, rather than artist’s acrylic,” reflecting his graffiti background.
The artists were somewhat reticent to discuss their own work, reflecting the delicate, nonverbal nature of the creative process. But there was nothing abstract about their appreciation for the chance to share their work with a local audience—or their admiration for each other’s talent and dedication.
The gallery at 29900 Ladyface Court in Agoura Hills is open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.