January 2025 Artist Bios

BROOKE HARKER
Brooke Harker is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, California. Her lively paintings of cities and coastal scenes are characterized by energetic brush strokes in ink and thick oil paint applied with palette knives. These vibrant depictions of daily life capture a sense of motion and highlight moments of synchronicity. 

Harker calls herself a historian of the ordinary. Her paintings are a collaboration with all of the people who’ve contributed to a place over time: architects, engineers, and pedestrians whose colorful fashion landed in view at the perfect moment. All of their individual actions brought together one moment, fated to be captured on canvas.  

Harker’s paintings live in collections all over the world, including with the Prince of Morocco in the Royal Palace in Rabat and as part of The Chase Center Art Collection in San Francisco, home to the Golden State Warriors. Her artworks are part of the cultural heritage collection of The U.S. Embassy Tokyo, Japan in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies. Her art also resides in numerous private collections of Hollywood creatives.  

In 2022, Harker’s paintings exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and during the 2021 Olympics, debuted at The Chiba City Museum of Art in Japan as part of the 20th Japan International Art Exchange. Exhibit curators, Katsu Shimmin and Julienne Johnson, placed Harker’s art in The National Art Center of Tokyo, in 2019, with an Award of Excellence.

Harker’s solo exhibit, An Eclectic Perspective, painted on a several month residency on a farm in Paliano, Italy toured Italian galleries from 2015-19, including locations in Rome, Genoa and Frosinone, with curator Alfio Borghese of the noble Borghese family. 

A selection of her artworks also appeared in numerous group exhibits and Bienales curated by Borghese in Italy and California since they first met at the Oceanside Museum of Art for the opening of California Dreaming: An International Portrait of Southern California. Borghese first featured Harker’s art in Italian press, in 2014 when he hosted the exhibit (juried by art critic Peter Frank & museum directors Daniel Foster and Drew Oberjuerg) at Palazzo della Provincia di Frosinone, Italy. It went on to tour to the Oceanside Museum of Art and the Riverside Museum of Art in California from through 2015. Harker has exhibited in various galleries in Los Angeles and has been represented by Lu Martin Galleries in Laguna Beach, CA since 2014. She is a member of the International Association of Art USA and InterNations. She is one of the co-hosts of Saturday Night Live Art Shows, a project she started during the 2020 pandemic which encourages artists around the world to have art shows from home. She is a lifetime member of the Bundelkhand Art Society in Jhansi, India.

Fascinated by other cultures and languages since childhood, Harker has lived abroad and participated in projects and residencies throughout Europe and Asia.  She continues to travel for inspiration, yet always returns home to Los Angeles to paint in an outdoor studio in the California sunshine. 

PATRICK HAEMMERLEIN
Immersed in a layered urban paradigm of reality versus fantasy, Patrick Haemmerlein creates a visual soundtrack as a backdrop to his stark silhouettes. Splashes of water colors punctuate the delicate balance between urban sprawl and rural wildlife. He explores their coexistence through the beauty of contradiction. As the metropolis itself is submerged in introspect, Haemmerlein breathes life into these unique time capsules with images that mimic arteries and measured rhythm, intertwining past, present, and future.

Haemmerlein begins his journey by taking countless photos of his environment, exploring both urban and rural perspectives. He then manipulates the photographs, layering the images over torn pages of poetry, dictionaries, & sheet music from the 1800s and early 1900s. The result is a timeless tangible sonnet to the world he loves and his thirst to rediscover it endlessly.

JUDY OSTRO
For over 50 years, Judy Ostro has worked as a professional artist, creating pieces that have been shown and sold across the United States and internationally. Judy’s professional career began in the late 1960’s and attracted attention from high profile patrons like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. She is best known for her acrylic on canvas abstract paintings, surreal landscapes and human forms, and collections of painted river rocks. During her career, Judy also worked as a public school elementary art teacher, inspiring youth and mentoring young artists. She currently lives and creates in Los Angeles.