Field Paoli

On October 9, Field Paoli is having a party: the theme is “Food, People, Art.” For the art part, we invited artists who work here (and some of close friends and relatives) to display their work. We asked some of them to tell us a little about their pieces.



CHRISTEN SOARES is a principal at Field Paoli.
“My daughter (who is four) and I have been painting together for a couple of years, but typically we have just been painting on paper, not anything as permanent as canvas, until recently. We have used these paintings on paper as wrapping paper in the past. Now that we are using canvas, we paint the body of it together with a background color (each one with a different color from our palette of three tempera paints) and wait for it to dry. Then we each have a paintbrush and stick with the theme of the painting. One is lines, one is hearts, and one is dots. I chose shapes that she can do on her own, for the most part, with minimal edits from me. It’s been a lot of fun, and we will probably continue to do them as she gets better at making different shapes with a brush.”



JENNY PHILLIPS is principal of the graphic design firm Jump-Studio and married to Yann Taylor, principal at Field Paoli.
“I had been working for a few years with encaustic and oil paint and then started playing with Japanese mulberry paper separately because I love how inks and watercolor look on that paper. I first started to combine the paper and wax simply by embedding the paper in the wax surface. One day, as I was cutting many strips of paper that I had planned on painting and then ironing into the wax, I noticed and liked the curve of the rolled paper. It somehow captured a feeling I wanted to convey, so I started to work with the paper coming off the surface of the wax. I really love the play of shadows that the third dimension creates, and I love that the pieces change depending on the light.”



KATHERINE BLANNER is a designer at Field Paoli.
“I took the photographs for an assignment in an architectural photography class while obtaining my master of architecture at the University of Kansas. I cannot recall what the objective of the assignment was, but within the series, I found myself documenting the splendor and beauty of seemingly ordinary objects, places, and events. The images were captured on 35mm black-and-white film, and I hand-developed the prints myself in the architectural photography lab at KU.”



RICHARD C. COOLEY, D.D.S., is the late father of Robert Cooley, associate at Field Paoli.
Robert says, “Richard survived a battle with cancer in the 1960s, but a four-year battle with a heart virus ended abruptly on May 17, 2012. My dad had many hobbies, including photography and film. We had a projection booth, movie reel editor, black-and-white developer, and color developer in a darkroom in our home when I was a kid. Richard was one of the first skin divers off the California coast, and his obsession with the ocean lives on in his paintings. The painting is acrylic on canvas. The waves were painted from a photo my dad took at Point Lobos in Monterey.”



KATIE HANDY is an associate at Field Paoli.
“For ‘Off the Rocker,’ I was given the challenge of designing and building a chair frame with three meters of tube steel. After exploring a number of ideas, I ended up building the first design I sketched—a single continuous tube of steel wrapping around the back, rolling into rockers, and folding under the seat. I created ‘Adaptive Cup’ with my partner, Dinesh Perera—we work on a variety of design-oriented projects outside of the office. Dinesh has been studying glassblowing after hours for seven years now, and so we wanted to collaborate on something that would mix high-tech architectural processes with glass blowing, which is a very traditional field.”



MARY LONERGAN is a Bay Area artist and a cousin of Maureen O’Neil, Field Paoli’s business manager.
“My painting ‘Great Peacemaker (Iroquois),’ acrylic on canvas, originally started as a landscape, and then a face started to appear, so the final piece came about that way. The legend of the Great Peacemaker varies. Basically, he was commissioned to show his people how to establish peace and justice through developing unity amongst the various tribes. More info on that legend here. The other works were inspired by an Elton John/Bernie Taupin song, a trip to my cousin’s horse farm in Maine, and a desire to do something modern with lighting and flowers.”



JAIME SHEN is an associate at Field Paoli.
“I usually have many little projects in the works, but ironically, none of them lately are in the mediums included in the art show. Recently I’ve been dabbling in sewing/textiles and jewelry. I’ve done many pieces in ink, pastel, and watercolor, but these are by far my favorites. Each piece has a calming, soothing effect on me. The stool is the one and only piece of furniture I’ve ever built. I currently sit on it while I work on my ongoing sewing projects. Building models was my favorite part of studying architecture, and I’ve built far too many to count. The one in the show is my favorite.”



JOHN FIELD is a retired founder of Field Paoli.
“These images are not about architecture but about those spaces great and small between buildings or carved out of buildings. Nature and man’s skill shaping nature can also create this kind of sense of place, just as architects and planners try to create them for important buildings in our cities. But in Venice and its canals, we have, one after another, a series of accidental spaces with superlative senses of place. We see and feel such places, their sounds, their cavernous height squeezing us in their width, their shafts of sunlight, and their unexpected greenery. As an architect who has specialized in the design of public places and who has been a documentary filmmaker focusing on why we like some spaces and not others, I wanted to capture, in these photo-based images, not the actual image showing on film or in the pixels the camera generated, but something that involved all of the senses.”