Z Cafe offers new art for the holidays

BONSALL – Lynn Gertenbach, Marsha Meers, Heather Delenela and Neill Ketchum have joined artistic forces for a new show at Z Cafe that is running through next February.

Gertenbach's career included her studies at the Colorado Institute of Art, the Art Center of Los Angeles, University of California Los Angeles, studies with Arul Raj in India and Bernard Dunstan in England. She's had 40 one-woman shows, exhibited in Japan, taught and received multitudinous medals and awards.

Gertenbach has traveled around the world five times painting indigenous people, and this list is only part of her artistic accomplishments. Her paintings are in the collections of many celebrities and represented in several galleries in California. She is a signature member of the following art organizations: The Oil Painters of America, The Plein Air Painters of America and the California Art Club.

Meers started out as a painter and exhibited her work in the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts. She spent many years in commercial art and part of that time was spent paintings backgrounds for animation working for Hanna Barbera, Filmation and several smaller studios.

She enjoyed making pottery and started creating sculptures on them. Meers' first sculpting job was for Silvestri Studios where she sculpted life-size mannequins. Later she joined the sculpting teams at Mattel and Hasbro, designing and sculpting dolls and toys. She did freelance sculpting for the Danbury Mint, Ashton Drake Galleries and more recently Dreamworks. Meers focuses most of her sculpting on human anatomy and has received numerous awards, first prize, Best of Show and the Director's Award in the California Art Club's Gold Medal Exhibition where she is a sculptor member. She has recently become fascinated with encaustic or hot wax and incorporating it with assemblage.

Delenela's artwork story starts a slightly different way: at home and through high school and college. She joined the business world for 20 years.

It wasn't until she began homeschooling her autistic son that her art potential was awakened. The experience of teaching him to focus on his talents, strengths, belief in self-worth and that all gifts are valuable helped her recognize her own potential. She said that it is a choice to have courage to view one's worth in that light, and she believes God works through her hands and a piece of herself goes into each painting.

Delenela is currently illustrating and writing her first children's book, illustrating for other authors and creating commissioned paintings.

Submitted by Z Cafe.