By Sue Fagalde Lick
Villa Montalvo's Artist Residency Program will host an open studios night on Feb. 20.
Living and working at Villa Montalvo this month are artists Raina Bajpai and Nicole Lenzi, poets Mandy Richmond Dowd and Jill Gonet, and composer Joelle Wallach.
The artists' studios will be open for tours from 6 to 7 p.m. Readings will follow at the Villa from 7 to 8 p.m., and the evening will conclude with a reception. Admission is free.
Bajpai is from Ohio. Her works combine elements of abstract painting with the human figure. While at Montalvo, she is working on a series of paintings of women. She was the first recipient of the Lois Nellie Gill Award in painting, and last year she received a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant.
Lenzi, visiting from Maryland, is working on paintings that investigate the relationship between sensuality and decay, linking the organic and cyclic world of life and the under-riding mystery of death and the unconscious. She studied art at Carnegie Mellon Institute and has taught drawing at the Appel Farm Arts and Music Center.
Dowd, who comes from Oakland, is finishing her third collection of poems. Having lived for 10 years with a life-threatening illness, her work often addresses the boundary between life and death.
Gonet, a Seattle resident, is writing a collection of sonnets titled Cross-Eyed. Her focus is on the intersection of two different worlds, one random, the other more ordered and reassuring. She has received a fellowship from the Seattle Arts Commission and the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
New Yorker Wallace is completing In Memory the Heart Still Sings, a rhapsody for clarinetist John Bruce Yeh of the Chicago Symphony. Since 1980, when her choral work On the Beach at Night Alone won first prize in the Inter-American Music Awards of 1980, her work has regularly placed first in international composition competitions. The New York Choral Society commissioned her secular oratorio, Toward a Time of Renewal, for 200 voices and orchestra in 1994 to commemorate its 35th anniversary season in Carnegie Hall.
Villa Montalvo is located at 15400 Montalvo Road. For more information, call 741-3421.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, February 14, 1996.
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