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Arts & Entertainment

Corte Madera Photographer Makes Old Techniques New Again

Jan Gauthier is showing her timeless sepia-tone work at Marin/Scapes.

Looking at Jan Gauthier’s sepia-tone photographs—at, for instance, Larkspur’s Marin/Scapes event this weekend—a person is tempted to wonder about her technique. Gauthier, who lives in Corte Madera, concentrates on floral still life and landscapes, photographing most often in Marin. She has beautiful images in color; but her signature style is in the more labor-intensive sepia tone, which adds a haunting, timeless quality to her work.

One example (which you can see in her booth at Marin/Scapes) is the serene “Apple Blossoms”—a lone tree with a gnarly, damaged trunk, its waving, wild branches filled with blossoms, mist-shrouded evergreens in the background. Gauthier shot this somewhere in Sebastopol one spring, using traditional black-and-white film that she develops in her darkroom. Still in the darkroom, she puts the photo in a bath of photographic bleach, which takes out the darker shades, then adds warm hues with brown toner in a sepia bath.

Wait, we’re nowhere near through. Once the print is thoroughly dry, Gauthier adds a glaze of oil and wax. Striving for delicacy, she adds a wash of oil paint, sparingly adding touches of umber, ochre, sienna. Once that dries, she covers the print with an artists’ wax and buffs it smooth and smoother.

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Gauthier became a photographer in the tomato fields of the Central Valley, where she grew up. While attending junior college in Stockton, she had a summer job inspecting those fields. “I was enamored of the landscape and of the people working in the fields,” says Gauthier. “I thought, ‘I should take someone with me to photograph this.’ Of course, I couldn’t do that, so I started bringing a camera to work.”

That led to San Francisco State University and a degree from the fledgling photojournalism department in 1983. Gauthier was its first female graduate.

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After she married John McCormick—a landscape painter whose work is also in Marin/Scapes—the two opened a commercial art studio in San Francisco; here, they rented commercial art products and painted backdrops to filmmakers and photographers for 15 years. (Their clients included Time/Warner, Disney, Lucas Films, the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, Apple Computer, and Microsoft.)

Once digital photography had transformed the business, they sold the studio 11 years ago and focused on their art. Locally, Gauthier is represented by Elins Eagles Smith Gallery, in San Francisco, where you can see more of her work.

Of course, this weekend, you can find Gauthier and McCormick among the 40-some artists at the 23rd annual Marin/Scapes Fine Art Exhibit and Sale, a fundraiser for the Buckelew Programs. It’s their tenth year.

 

July 2-3, Marin/Scapes Fine Art Exhibit and Sale, Escalle Winery, 771 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur; $15 admission includes wine, “specialty beverages,” and light snacks; www.buckelew.org/marinscapes.

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