classes

FAMILY ART MAKING CLASSES & EVENTS
ALL SATURDAYS BEGINNING OCTOBER 20TH FROM 10-11:30AM

Following a tour of Paradise… led by the artist, Heidi Hardin, portrait painting/drawing classes are provided on Saturday mornings from 10-11:30 a.m. Our artists guided projects that explore family roles: ancestors, grandparents, moms, dads, boys, girls, infants, adolescents and family setting: home, front yard, backyard. Family members worked together to make portraits from life or photos. A short group critique allows children and families to learn to speak about their creations in a safe place. Having fun and learning new things about each other and the world was our purpose.

FRIDAYS BEGINNING OCTOBER 12TH FROM 1-2PM
K-12 SCHOOL TOURS & ART ACTIVITIES

Teachers, please call or email Heidi for a date! Sample Vocabulary we’ll learn:  Art Words - Color Wheel, Composition/Science Words -DNA, Genetics
Art Activities: How to draw a portrait in oil pastels, and frame it!

SUNDAYS BEGINNING OCTOBER 21ST FROM 4-5PM
GUIDED WALK THROUGH MEDITATIONS

led by Heidi Hardin (for ten, any age)  Find your hooks and unhook from broken heartstrings or find your joys and celebrate them in this family-focused labyrinth by walking through Hardin’s paradise made up of front yards, backyards, queens, moms, kings, dad, boy groups, girl groups, adolescents, princes, boys, princesses, girls, infants! It’s a mindfulness meditation centered on your now with an eye to your future. After clearing your circle, you will be guided to centered within your body using short asana and pranayama exercises. Then, through an open-heart inner teacher practice, you will ask your inner teacher two simple questions: Where am I at right now? and What do I need to focus on to get where I am going? Your body will lead the way! You just need to listen and follow your heart to discover, there truly is “no place like home!”

DECEMBER 2ND FROM 10AM-4PM (LUNCH IS PROVIDED.)
MAGIC OF WHY

LYNNE HARDIN

Remember your soul’s intention this lifetime or heal broken heartstrings in this interactive journey within. For more information, please visit: www.magicofwhy.com.

HARDIN STUDIOS (soon to be Think Round Fine Arts) opened in October 2012 in the upper Fillmore district of San Francisco. It is a not for profit gallery showing the artwork of Think Round students, their families, and their teachers. Think Round artist instructors are primarily fine artists with private studios at Hunters Point Shipyard or the Bayview who have taught in our acclaimed Children's Mural Programs over the past twenty years. Interested viewers are invited to openings and receptions, classes and exhibits and by appointment throughout the years.

For an appointment to visit our gallery or to signup for Family Art Making classes, please contact Heidi Hardin by phone: 415-771-2198 or email: heidi@heidihardin.com 

october-december 2015: heidi hardin

HEIDI HARDIN 

speaks about the unspeakable...
This Saturday and Sunday, October 24 & 25 @ 4pm
 
You are cordially invited to attend Heidi's
Open Studio reception (noon to 6) &
Artist talk (4 pm) both days.

Additional hours are by appointment.
Email: heidi@heidihardin.com or
Call: 415.771.2198/415.602.9599

Learn firsthand of Heidi's shocking story that begins in her kindergarten sandbox and ventures through a forest of subsequent traumas that she finally has re-membered and now re-covers in this exhibition of 41 mixed media collages titled, Self-Portraits: K-12/Heidi, Then Then.

More than fifty years of silence and secrets are tempered and redirected in this sequential view of each year of her life. School and family photos from kindergarten through high school are combined with challenging To Do Lists, Coping Lists and found objects to reveal how the conscious and unconscious cooperate to survive. Discover, with Heidi, how unrelenting trauma builds as family addictions and her own drinking escalate. Wonder at her innocent, sometimes destructive, often hilarious coping strategies that face down the imperious demands of denial. 

Please join Heidi and her family (Richard and Bella) and friends (all of you), for this frank, friendly exchange of about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--even when the stakes are so great and the circumstances so grim. 

Heidi will be welcoming visitors to this exhibition every Monday and Wednesday from 3-6 pm until renovations begin--hopefully in mid-November.

HARDIN STUDIOS is proud to present new mixed media collage portraits by Heidi Hardin in her current exhibit, Self-Portraits: K-12/Heidi, Then Then. Originally from Oklahoma City, Heidi Hardin received her MFA in Painting in 1979 and her BA in Biology and Visual Arts in 1976, both from the UCSD. For thirty years she has exhibited her paintings nationally in galleries and museums and has taught art at all levels. All of Ms. Hardin’s work as a community-based artist and a practicing fine artist are now held in trust in the vision, mission, and objectives of Think Round, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that she formed in 2004. Think Round, Inc.'s office and gallery are currently under renovation and will re-open in 2016 with a new, expanded: exhibition space and roster of exhibiting artists.  In addition to directing Hardin Studios (soon to be Think Round Fine Arts), Heidi Hardin will focus her attention in the coming years on the completion of her “birth vision,” The Human Family Tree/A Walk Through Paradise... and the creation of The Center for the Human Family.

For more information please visit www.thinkround.org

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Artist's Statement

Keeping family secrets (by using sugar and alcohol) left me without a childhood and teen years that I could remember. To remember, “What happened?” in my disturbing childhood, to re-center and reignite my life, I present 41 (31 new and 10 old) mixed media collages in: Self-Portraits: K-12 Heidi, Then Then. Photos from each year of school (K-12) combine with objects to reveal a personal symbology that give meaning to those difficult, forgotten years…a personal symbology hidden to me, that was revealed over the past 28 years in my art, recovery, and various trauma therapies. Titled with the TO-DOs from my “chapters” written about them, the demands placed on me by my parents and perpetrators to protect them are revealed. Coping to keep the truth a well-guarded secret were my fantasies (mostly unconscious) that protected me from this harsh expectation.  In ...Then Then, the secrets and silence of my family give way to the truth for myself that I have struggled for nearly three decades to uncover. The denial penetrating my own childhood (suck it up, keep your mouth shut, get over it) "gave my life that edge of nonreality, of literal craziness"  that is often found in the homes of alcoholics, addicts, and the mentally ill.
 
This new work is a meditation on the dualities between truth and denial that reshape boundaries between consciousness/unconsciousness, awake/asleep, good/evil, visible/invisible, reality/fantasy, now/then, sanity/insanity and how these dualities can be created within negative and positive spaces of artworks, and between artworks on the gallery walls. The shared cultural understanding of image, text, and objects provide viewers inroads to the humor, irony, poignancy of my own stories, struggles, and a deliberately pointed message about the common struggle of families faced with mental illness and addiction. [Alcoholism and co-dependence entwine to form] "a conspiracy of silence, not only for the person who is suffering [from mental illness and/or addiction], but for everyone else who's forced to interact with that person. That's why they call [alcoholism] a family disease."
 
As a fine artist working in Southeast San Francisco community arts for the past twenty years, I have taught art and environmental science to children about the clean up and reuse of Hunters Point Shipyard. From this work and the thousands of children I have taught, I learned that no matter how traumatic or toxic one’s childhood might have been, there are those (visible and invisible) willing and able to help with the clean up and reuse of one’s life. My awareness of and trust in these processes were the heart of staying resilient as a human being while facing the darkest realities of my past, accepting them, and developing emotional maturity after 57 years of being a numb, disassociated five-year-old girl and a blacked out drunken teen.    

--Heidi Hardin/October 2015
 

7th  Grade To Do List:

1. Fake it ’til you make it! (My girl-next-door good looks makes that easy!)

2. In the meantime, don’t stare in the mirror of your first vanity when listening to your younger brother being beaten during an insane spelling lesson perpetrated by Mel, your stepdad, a small town medical doctor (and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic) whom the police do not care to reign in.

3. Don’t visualize blowing your mother’s head off with a shotgun between the eye for not stopping this abuse, because thirty years later, you will find yourself in a Halloween costume with dead vines surrounding your face and an oozing gunshot wound between your eyes. You will then realize you have committed a psychic suicide, and have been among the true walking dead since you were thirteen years old.

4. Drink, blackout, throw-up, then drink to get drunk until you are 34 years old.

5. Don’t trust your local priest. He says he wants to help you unburden about the violence between your mother and Mel, when he takes you out to a Gas Lamp dinner theater in Tulsa alone. Really, he wants to get drunk with you and see if you are easy. Clearly, certainly, unequivocally, you are NOT, so fortunately, he relents.

6. When your mother stands up for you against Mel by taking you to buy you two suits of beautiful White Stage outfits (for buying his daughter hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes for school and gets you a torn pair of pedal pushers from the sale table), make the white stag your patronus by feeling the deepest affinity for him. Grow antlers on the spot--you're going to need them! When you realize that Mel beat mother up for doing this, know and finally feel, that she always really did love you very, very much. Years later, be broken hearted that finding this out is what it takes to understand this about your mother.

7. Save the labels from those clothes (and a tub full of personal other memorabilia from junior high and high school) so that God can remind you as you make this collage of just how much your mother loved you, in spite of her frequent actions to the contrary.

8. Be amazed at how God, just as you were promised, makes all your broken places your strengths.

2014 Exhibition Schedule:

January              Nikki Lau
February            Marc Ellen Hamel
March                 Pernilla Persson
April                   Rebecca Haseltine
May                     Elaine Michaud
June                   Josefa Vaughan
July                     Jennifer Ewing
August               Jennifer Ewing
September         Closed
October              Closed
November Heidi Hardin
December           Heidi Hardin

november & december: heidi hardin

HEIDI HARDIN

THE BIAYE FAMILY
TEN NEW PORTRAITS

NOVEMBER 8 - DECEMBER 27, 2014
OPENING RECEPTION:
EVERY SATURDAY & SUNDAY IN NOVEMBER & DECEMBER, NOON-6PM

ADDITIONAL HOURS ARE BY APPOINTMENT.
EMAIL: HEIDI@HEIDIHARDIN.COM OR CALL: 415.602.9599

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artist’s statement

Snapshots from family photo albums offer an unexpected window into the shared human experiences that bridge the personal and the universal. Over the years I've re-imagined family photos in iconic collages and triptychs, created murals defining community interactions, and uncovered surprising beauty in views of flowering trees crisscrossed by utility lines. Inspired by commonalities found in family photos, my extended project Human Family Tree/A Walk through Paradise…seven installations is an evocative multimedia meditation on the experiences we share, regardless of faith, culture, or ethnicity.

Paradise… centers on families who are followers of various major world religions. Each successive installation focuses on a single religion, presenting 78 paintings along with touching objects, environmental displays, and original music. The paintings are based on photographs of the past century of families of different ethnicities, who stand as icons for all peoples who have journeyed to America to make their home. A labyrinth of footpaths and columns replicating the mythic Tree of Life creates a ‘walk through paradise’ among the paintings for the viewers. On a symbolic level these installations explore ideas about cultural self-definition, the pervasiveness of the American dream, and the universality of the human family.

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To see more of Heidi Hardin's artworks, click the image below:

HEIDI IS ALSO EXHIBITING…

PLUM BLOSSOMS/VALENTINE'S DAY 2010, SF, CA
NINE NEW PASTEL DRAWINGS ON SANDED PAPER

OCTOBER 25 - JANUARY 3, 2015

INVISIONS OPTOMETRY
1907 FILLMORE STREET
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115

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To see Plum Blossoms/Valentine's Day 2010 drawings, click the image below:

july 2014: jennifer ewing

SPIRIT BOATS-ASCENDING

PAINTINGS, PRINTS, & SCULPTURES

JULY 5-31, 2014

RECEPTION & POETRY READING
SATURDAY, JULY 26TH, 5-7PM

POETRY @ 6:15-7PM
"A POCKET OF POETS", FOUR SF WORKING POETS, NANCY WAKEMAN, JANE RADES, STEPHEN KOPEL, AND AL AVERBACH WILL JOIN THEIR VOICES WITH THE ARTWORK.

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artist’s statement

The Spirit Boat is my vehicle for moving through life and a way to explore the unseen through my paintings, sculptures and prints.
I am a Spiritboatist, one who is on a journey to honor my ancestors. Along the way, I use the boat as an invitation for transformation in the way it has been used cross culturally over time as an archetype for passage. The boat is moving up and out of time and space so this exhibit references a kind of ascension that is enhanced by the presence of a mysterious set of stairs.

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To see more of Jennifer Ewing's artworks, click the image below:

june 2014: josefa vaughan

artist’s statement

Come reflect on the influence of mentor-ship through my photographs and related objects that belonged to Leo Steinberg, one of the most brilliant and controversial art historians of the last half of the 20th century. Leo was also a dear friend and founding Advisor to the Board of ArtSeed. Sales will benefit two arts education nonprofits: ArtSeed and Think Round.

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To see more of Josefa Vaughan's artworks, click the image below:

may 2014: elaine michaud

artist’s statement

In this latest body of work, I explore both the formal structure of flowers and the often archaic meanings attached to them by different nations and groups of people—how cultures identify with particular flowers. I find the etymology as interesting and beautiful as the forms themselves. Meanings sometimes migrate from one culture to another, or are completely different from one language to another, and often morph over time. I use image, word and metaphor to try to open up meaning and understanding.

Exploring organic form in this botanical series, I forage in the strange and beautiful forms found in the plant world, whether in plain sight or hidden in the microscopic inner-workings of an organism’s life-cycle.

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To see more of Elaine Michaud's artworks, click the image below:

april 2014: rebecca haseltine

REBECCA HASELTINE

GROUND WATER

April 4th through the 29th
Reception: Saturday April 12, 4-7pm
Artist talk at 6pm

Hardin Studios
2140 Bush Street, Suite 1B
(between Webster and Fillmore)
San Francisco, CA 
 
Additional Hours by Appointment:  415-318-2233

 Ground Water is a show of
new pourings inspired by questions about
ground water in the ground and
ground water inside our bodies. 

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artist’s statement

Disturbed by the water crisis in California, I felt the need to talk about water through art making.  As usual it didn't turn out to be linear.  I have been reading about the way fracking can contaminate ground water, and for decades we've been aware that agribusiness use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides pollutes our ground water.  Recently I've read that because of the series of drought years Central Valley and Salinas Valley wells are dropping dramatically – up to 50 feet or in one case 80 feet in the past couple of years.  So deeper wells are being drilled – as if this could continue forever.  Another interesting phenomenon is happening in the Salinas Valley:  drawing more out of the aquifer is sucking salt water from the Pacific Ocean into the fresh water aquifer.  I don’t know if there are any ways we can reverse any of these issues.

I set about asking what inside the body constitutes ground water.  I came up with multiple answers:  The blood, the cerebro-spinal fluid, the interstitial fluid, and so on.  With this body of work I am exploring overlays between multiple ground waters of the body, and exploring the connection between them.  What emerges is the interlinking of systems – how one system intricately interacts with another system.  This is not political art.  It is an invitation to become aware and to become curious.  Whatever we are made of is what nature is made of.  Whatever processes happen in nature happen inside of us.  How much are we clueless about?  What happens when we are clueless?  What havoc are we wreaking inside and out by being oblivious?

 Ultimately we stumble into beauty because – I don’t know – it’s there to be uncovered.  We need reasons, apparently, to change our ways.  Why not the preservation of what is beautiful?  The infinite ways that water and flow sustain life is a good reason. 

Rebecca Haseltine approaches visual art from a somatic perspective – exploring body-based and sensory-based mark-making.  Her art investigates questions about being in a body, and recent themes include fluid pathways, the brain, and embryology. She began the estuary project a decade ago, exploring the reflection of that ecosystem within the body. Now curious about ground water she continues the inquiry about inner ecology.

Over the past 25 years she has worked in several media, beginning with large-scale movement-based drawings, to prints, to ‘pourings’, then to kinetic sculpture, photography, and now weaving ‘pouring’ and drawing together. 

Rebecca has shown her work extensively in the Bay Area and has worked collaboratively with dancers, composers, and filmmakers.  She also has a practice in bodywork and movement therapy: www.bodylearning.net.

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To see more of Rebecca Haseltine's artworks, click the image below:

march 2014: pernilla persson

artist’s statement

‘String of Life’ is a series of work where the artist explores the impact of infrastructure within our lives.  Pernilla brings out multiple paths of what exists in her imagination and her vision of the subject. Combing her knowledge of darkroom printing and Photoshop skills she creates a result that might be similar to an alternative process photograph or an ultra modern high tech image. 'String of Life' is a series where I explore the digital medium.  I focus on simple lines and pattern that make an impression of flowers and leafs on paper, says Pernilla. 

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To see more of Pernilla Perrson's artworks, click the image below:

FEBRUARY 2014: MARC ELLEN HAMEL

artist’s statement

For this exhibit I selected a number of works that reflect memories of my family or hometown.  Raised in Seattle and moving away in my early 20’s, I have maintained close relationships with family and friends back there through frequent visits. I live here, not there, but some part of me works to close the gap. I often harken back to place, to people, locations and events that are an integral part of me. These recollections often surface to my awareness and become manifest in my artwork.  Hence, the works are my mementos.

Besides the obvious actions of holding a brush and applying paint, an important element of the creative process for me is looking, brooding, mulling, and reconsidering.   An artist working in her studio has uncharted time and space to herself as she goes about manipulating materials and creating images.  As I paint I allow myself to be in a very open place where I am as indulgent and intuitive as possible, first loosely setting out the beginnings of a painting with strokes and colors that appeal to me that day.  Once I start, the paint and my hand/arm movements lead me to the next stroke.   What I see in the marks I make then engenders thoughts in a stream of consciousness.  I grab from these what feels important, and make marks that represent the feeling-­‐sense that is surfacing.  At the same time I am quite in love with the deep colors, the buttery texture of oil paint, the surprising areas where one color meets another I keep going until a scene forms that intrigues me and pushes me onward to define it.   It’s exciting (and sometimes frustrating) to watch it unfold and then figure out how to finalize it all.

Memory is a major contributor to stream of consciousness.  At times I have wondered if perhaps I am “working out” moments in my life that did not get enough attention while they were happening or that I did not understand at the time.  Or, perhaps it is simply that I want to pay homage to those moments.  Much of the urge to create the work is about declaiming: “I exist. This is me, my view of the world.”*

Many pieces here are reminiscent of the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, which I can still visit.  Others are outright keepsakes of family members who have passed on.  I created something for myself that represents them,  to “hold on to them.” The assemblages are probably obvious: “He Built A Life” and “Glen’s Candies” for my difficult father, “Little Sylvia’s Dollhouse” for my treasured mother. “Two Wildernesses” is a painting honoring my brother, who died at the young age of 65.  He loved to hike in the wilderness and when we lost him we were left in our own wilderness.  As I mention these creations, see them here in public, it feels good to recall and share these loved ones again.  

”….what I do is me, for that I came.”  Gerard Manley Hopkins

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To view more of Marc Ellen Hamel's paintings, click on the image below:

JANUARY 2014: NIKKI LAU

ARTIST’s STATEMENT

“Chinese Thanksgiving” is a series that explores the immigrant experience, assimilation, and what it means to be a Chinese American female. The installation showcases a meal that portrays the challenges of immigration and celebrates the strength and love of family. I am in the very unique position of having a predominantly female family. We all represent so many diverse backgrounds, but we are all a part of the Asian American experience. We are first, second or third generation. I am very interested in what each member of my family “brings to the table.” The ceramic plates of my family tells a unique story about that person. For example, my grandmother (Paw Paw) is the Mahjong tiles as that is my first memory of her. My Aunty Daisy is the mysterious and ominous black cat. Cousin Michi is a Criminal Justice Lawyer and her mother my Aunty Betty taught me how to sew. My Aunty Gina is more traditional and has had the longest and most difficult journey to America. This piece gives voice to my desire for cultural understanding and meals that bring us together.

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To view more of Nikki Lau's artwork, click on the image below:

DECEMBER 2013: HEIDI HARDIN

Our first exhibition in 2013 is Families of Abraham...three installations featuring selected paintings from Parts I and II of The Human Family Tree/A Walk Through Paradise...seven installations by fine artist Heidi Hardin.  (See invitation below.) To see more images from The Human Family Tree and Families in Paradise please visit: www.heidihardin.com