by Jonah Raskin
Herbst brought Downing and Craig together in her gallery for the first time in the summer of 2022. Then, in January 2023 she arranged their work on opposite walls so they feed into and bounce off one another. They show how different and how similar two San Francisco artists can be. "There's a dialogue between the two," Herbst said. Craig painted images of the ocean at Ocean Beach for an international conference about water held in Germany in the summer of 2022. Ken Downing leaned forward, gazed at Craig’s work and said, "She muscles out the paint. Unlike me, she's not afraid to sling it." Born and raised in San Diego, right on the water, Craig lives in the Marina District in San Francisco, though she has also spent considerable time on the Atlantic Ocean. "Every ocean has its own personality," she said. "I think of the Pacific as passionate and engaging. The Atlantic is docile until a storm comes in and then it's fierce." Her Ocean Beach paintings, which she created at different times of the day, and from dawn to dusk, capture the feel of the surf, the churning of the water and the beauty of the sand and the shore. “Each work is a meditation on a moment in the day,” Craig said. “My expressionistic images are meant to capture my sensitivity to the ocean’s beauty which can be tame, treacherous, and wild.” In 2020, Craig published her sketches and photographs in Caminando, Walking. She made the sketches with pen and ink brush in Spain, France, Romania, Scotland and San Francisco. Art has taken her around the world. Once a year, Herbst takes all the wall spaces in the gallery and shows her own work. For now, it's in a small room behind the large front room that features Downing’s and Craig's paintings. "At FOG we're not trying to compete with the big commercial galleries," Herbst said. "I show artists whose work moves me and that isn’t in the regular art world." She has put the stamp of her own warm and engaging personality on FOG and made it a sanctuary for edgy work where neighborhood folks, who are often hesitant to come in, learn to understand and appreciate art. While it's often foggy on Taraval Street, it's always crystal clear inside the walls of 3004, that art really matters. When you're in The City take a look.
Art and art galleries are two wonders of The City, my friends North of the Golden Gate tell me. That observation has been true for me over the course of the last two years, ever since I moved to San Francisco. When Anne Marguerite Herbst founded Far Out Gallery, aka FOG, on Taraval Street seven years ago with her partner Peter Munks, a singer, she wanted it to be, she said, “a sanctuary, a place to go in the mind and the imagination." It has been all that and more. "Art saved my life," she added. "It has gotten me through traumas." San Francisco gallery owners such as Collier Gwin, at Foster Gwin in the Financial District, complain that art isn't selling. "COVID really did us in," Gwin said. The same works by well-known Bay Area artists like Wally Hendrick, who painted the American flag long before anyone else, hang on the walls of his gallery month after month.
Anne Herbst tells a different story about art and artists, including the two painters, Natalie Craig and Ken Downing, whose work is currently at FOG. The show opened in mid- January and ends February 26.
Natalie Craig's canvases explore the Pacific Ocean at Ocean Beach where she often walks, sketches and enjoys the sand, surf, wind and sun if it happens to be sunny. At the edge of The City, Ocean Beach isn't for everyone. For years, Ken Downing wouldn't go near it. “I was a snob,” he told me. Born in Napa, he served in the US military in Germany and in the 1970s settled in San Francisco where he says that he fell among artists, and refused to go west of Twin Peaks, a City landmark. After a while, he explains he "started fiddling around with oil paint and got the bug."
Natalie Craig Sunset, Low Tide mixed media on yupo paper, 48 x 30 in. 2022, unframed $1000
Ken Downing Nasturtiums watercolor, ink on rice paper, 57 x 17 in. 2012 Scrolled (sold)
Ken Downing still has the art bug. His paintings at FOG tend to be long and narrow with Asian influences and with nods toward the surreal and the whimsical. For decades, he made Japanese-style woodblocks. Five years ago he switched to acrylic on paper. One of his canvases on exhibit at FOG featured white bananas; in others raccoons peek out at viewers and invite them into their fugitive world.
His watercolors on rice paper offer fantastic shapes and spectacular colors and they match Craig’s shapes and colors, though that wasn’t his intention.
Seventy-six-years-old and with hearing aids to help him follow conversations, Downing can be self-deprecating. "I'd rather look at Craig's work than my own," he said. When asked what he'd like art lovers, as well as the cautious and the curious, to take away from his paintings he said, "I want them to take them home. I don't want them back." His prices are as low as can be, perhaps because this is his first gallery show. By the start of February, he'd already sold three of his canvases: he was a happy camper at Ocean Beach.
Herbst brought Downing and Craig together in her gallery for the first time in the summer of 2022. Then, in January 2023 she arranged their work on opposite walls so they feed into and bounce off one another. They show how different and how similar two San Francisco artists can be. "There's a dialogue between the two," Herbst said.
Craig painted images of the ocean at Ocean Beach for an international conference about water held in Germany in the summer of 2022. Ken Downing leaned forward, gazed at Craig’s work and said, "She muscles out the paint. Unlike me, she's not afraid to sling it."
Born and raised in San Diego, right on the water, Craig lives in the Marina District in San Francisco, though she has also spent considerable time on the Atlantic Ocean. "Every ocean has its own personality," she said. "I think of the Pacific as passionate and engaging. The Atlantic is docile until a storm comes in and then it's fierce."
Her Ocean Beach paintings, which she created at different times of the day, and from dawn to dusk, capture the feel of the surf, the churning of the water and the beauty of the sand and the shore. “Each work is a meditation on a moment in the day,” Craig said. “My expressionistic images are meant to capture my sensitivity to the ocean’s beauty which can be tame, treacherous, and wild.”
In 2020, Craig published her sketches and photographs in Caminando, Walking. She made the sketches with pen and ink brush in Spain, France, Romania, Scotland and San Francisco. Art has taken her around the world.
Once a year, Herbst takes all the wall spaces in the gallery and shows her own work. For now, it's in a small room behind the large front room that features Downing’s and Craig's paintings.
"At FOG we're not trying to compete with the big commercial galleries," Herbst said. "I show artists whose work moves me and that isn’t in the regular art world."
She has put the stamp of her own warm and engaging personality on FOG and made it a sanctuary for edgy work where neighborhood folks, who are often hesitant to come in, learn to understand and appreciate art. While it's often foggy on Taraval Street, it's always crystal clear inside the walls of 3004, that art really matters. When you're in The City take a look.