Also showing in our project room:
"Plaits & Fringe" featuring new works from Kris Chau

Caia Koopman bio:

Caia Koopman is a native of California and was born in Livermore. Koopman majored in fine art and earned a B.A. at UC Santa Cruz, California.

In addition to receiving an academic education, Koopman also learned to skate ramps, street, pools, and Derby Park. Skateboarding led to skateboard graphics, and her first limited edition team T-shirt design for Santa Cruz Skateboards. After earning her art degree, she became addicted to snowboarding and spent many winters following the snow. It was this addiction that inspired her to strive for a career creating snowboard graphics and later branching out to become a commercial artist. Koopman’s artwork has been featured in numerous national and international print media including Surfing Girl, Mademoiselle, Details, Girl's Life, Snowboarder Magazine, Teen, Teen Style, Teen People, J-14, Fine, and others. Caia designed T-shirt graphics and promotional illustrations for many companies, such as: Roxy, Hurley, Volcom, OP, AT&T, and Casio.

Koopman's paintings have been used commercially for many years as graphics for snowboards, skateboards and wakeboards for major companies such as Rossignol, K2, Morrow, and Hyperlite. Koopman has also been featured on MTV, "mtv sports" as an athlete/artist for her snowboarding and painting and has shown her paintings in a number of galleries around the world. She is currently working as a freelance illustrator and painter in Oceanside, CA.

Artist website: www.caiakoopman.com

Kelly Vivanco bio:

Kelly Vivanco was born in Redondo Beach, CA. Vivanco’s father is a retired fire captain for the City of Redondo Beach and is now a tour guide. Her mother is an award winning ceramic artist and her brother is a photographer for The San Bernardino Sun. Vivanco has been drawing and painting since before she can remember and her family has always supported her artistic abilities.

In 1994, Vivanco attended the New York Studio Program through Parsons The New School for Design & AICAD. It was an independent studio program located in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan and meshed students and professionals making their way through the fast paced art world of New York City.

Vivanco received a BFA with a major in Drawing and Painting and a minor in Illustration from Laguna College of Art and Design in 1995, graduating Summa Cum Laude.

She currently works for a contractor in the wireless industry doing photo-simulations of proposed architectural projects. Photoshop is her tool of choice for adding a realistic element into the photographs she uses. The job has taught her a great deal about lighting, color and form and has helped her apply a better knowledge of those aspects to her work.

In 2004, Vivanco became a Studio artist at Distinction in Escondido, and maintains a working studio there to this day.

Artist website: www.kellyvivanco.com

Lilly Piri bio:

Lilly Piri was born on the east coast of Australia in 1985 and lived their her entire life until recently moving to Germany to be with her new husband and fellow artist Heiko Windisch this past fall ’07.

Piri studied with the Arts Academy in Brisbane. Piri draws and paints with acrylics, oils and watercolor, but her favorite and most employed medium is color pencil. Her work has been published in DPI, Black + White, Empty, Frankie, Hotpress, Marmalade, Voiceworks, Harper's Bazaar, Semi-Permanent books, Curvy books, Faest and Ruby Mag and her list of illustration clients include the Yes Men and Saatchi & Saatchi.

Artist website: www.littlegalaxie.com

Catherine Brooks bio:

Catherine Brooks has been working tirelessly to expand her artist "vocabulary". Through her successes and failures, Brooks feels like she has finally learned what is important to her art, and what it is to explore during the creative process. Brooks has developed her own personal mythology, based around the legends and tales passed down and weathered through oral tradition and the rise and fall of empires. They reflect her ideas on love, memory, and the inexplicable human talent for personifying assigning responsibility to the cycles of life, and its manifestations. It was, for the artist, a beginning, a birth. It is a collection of pearls and remnants, an allusive menagerie of natural diplomacy, sensual symbiosis, and hints of great tales and legends to come.

Brooks has a BFA in Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute of Art and Design in Brooklyn, NY and completed a residency at Campus Hanoi in Vietnam. She has shown regularly in galleries over the past two years. Highlights of her resume include a solo in NYC at The Proposition Gallery in 2007 and taking part in last year’s SCOPE London.

Artist website: thearborgeistproject.tumblr.com

Kris Chau:

Kris Chau was born and raised on the island of O'ahu. She moved to Philadelphia to see snow and hear the songs of ice cream trucks. She draws and dreams of girls all day long, and most times falls asleep at her desk.

Artist website: www.krischau.com