Exhibition opens Thursday night, March 18th, from 5:30 to 7:30pm at the Nelson Gallery, Room 124 of the Art Building, UC Davis. Runs through May 23, 2010.

Owen Smith will show drawings, paintings, New Yorker covers, and other work. Blake will show cartoon drawings, on paper and in digital video format. “Fine art no longer need come exclusively from the inherited traditions of European forms. Some of the most dynamic work being done today is purely from popular American inventions like the 1930’s style pulp fiction used by Owen Smith, or the comix and cartoon tradition in these works by Nayland Blake,” says Nelson Gallery director Renny Pritikin, of his upcoming exhibition.

Owen Smith is a nationally respected Bay Area illustrator and artist. He is on the faculty in the design department of the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco. On view will be a range of recent drawings and paintings in his signature pulp fiction, 1930’s style of realism. Owen Smith’s illustration clients include Sports Illustrated, Time, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker, for which he has created 15 cover illustrations. He has recently completed work on a new children’s book for Simon and Schuster.

Nayland Blake is a noted New York artist who spent a decade living in San Francisco into the late 90s. Known primarily as a sculptor, a large part of his current practice is blogging. He has kept up a near-daily diary of texts, photographs and most recently, cartoons on www.naylandblake.net for several years. This is the first-ever off-line exhibition of his autobiographical drawings cum cartoons, in which a philosophical character appears who resembles Blake but also suggests Yogi and Smokey, the Bear(s). Original black and white drawings will be on view as well as digital images, in color, on a video monitor. Blake is represented by Mathew Marks Gallery in New York and is the chair of the graduate program in photography at the ICP in New York.

ALSO ON VIEW:
· In the Entryway Gallery (Room 125, Art Building): 18th & 19th Century British Satirical Prints from the Fine Arts Collection
· At the Buehler Alumni Center: Youth Voices for Change, work by teenaged artists from West Sacramento

For further information or images please contact Katrina Wong at kliwong@ucdavis.edu.