Santa Rosa A Street neighborhood on display at annual arts showcase

A weekend showcase of paintings, photography, art installations, performance and music drew hundreds of visitors Sunday afternoon to Santa Rosa’s South of A Street, or SOFA, arts enclave.

The free two-day Artwalk event, held Saturday and Sunday, featured the works of 25 artists in numerous studios and galleries in a one-block radius whose epicenter is the corner of South A Street and Sebastopol Avenue.

“This is our biggest event of the year where the focus is primarily art,” said Christie Marks, a mixed-media artist who owns Christie Marks Fine Art Gallery & Studio inside the A Street Studios complex.

Marks, one of the principal organizers of the summer arts open house event, said SOFA’s biggest event is Winterblast, which is more of a festival or pre-holiday celebration.

But Artwalk, now in its fifth year, continues to draw attention to an arts enclave that’s been slowly evolving for nearly two decades, Marks said.

“It hasn’t happened overnight,” Marks said. “Some of the original artists have been here for 18 years.”

For her part, Marks displayed numerous mixed-media works using recycled paper and paper bags that depicted “backroad scenes of trailers and travel,” she said.

“I look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. That’s really at the core of my work,” she said.

In a handful of pieces, Marks depicted trailer homes parked on Lawson’s Landing at Dillon Beach. “As interesting as they are, there is also melancholy,” she said, “These are people’s actual homes.”

At Jam Jar, a South A Street shop, visitors browsed paintings and items made by local artisans, including jewelry, body products and glass stemware, along with vintage items. The shop, co-owned by jeweler Jaime Jean and painter Molly Perez, made brisk sales of “little items,” said Jean.

“Lots of little ones,” she said. “But those little ones add up.”

More importantly, she said, the Artwalk event “plants a seed” in visitors that will eventually bring them back later in the year for unique gift purchases.

“It lets people know that we’re down here,” she said.

For Susan Greer, an oil landscape and still-life painter, the Artwalk event is an opportunity for visitors to see her small 110-square-foot studio in a spotless condition, with hardly a stain of paint on the cream-colored carpet.

“I usually lay over a ground cover and make my mess here,” she said of her small studio.

Greer, who sells mostly to individuals and the occasional office buyer, said the arts scene in SOFA continues to thrive, even through recent hard times. “During the recession, art feeds our soul. People were still buying art,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.