Linda Sorensen has been drawing and painting the world around her as long as she can remember. In her grade school days, teachers would often catch her sketching portraits of her classmates.

(The teachers were less than pleased.) Undaunted, Linda developed her art from drawings, to tempera, and onward to oil paintings, and from realism in her early teens, to abstract expressionism in high school and through college and law school, the latter in Berkeley, CA.

These days, Linda is a studio painter of landscapes that blend impressionism and modernism. She is best pleased to evoke the exhilarating moods of the natural world, and human story in that world, by paint.

She travels and records compositional ideas with her own photography, but frequently alters the scenes, combining points of view, changing light and color, emphasizing what is iconic. She enjoys studying the works of American Regionalist painters, especially the works of Taos' Ernest Martin Hennings, Iowa's Marvin Cone, Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton and California's Ray Strong, and enjoys museum trips to view works by California's painters of the past.

Linda and her husband Dan Rohlfing are owners of Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery, specializing in Early California Art and also featuring Linda's paintings.

Linda's favorite painting locales are the coastal and pastoral scenes of Sonoma and Marin Counties, the beaches and mountains of Hawaii, and whenever possible, the deserts and canyonlands of the Southwest.

As Jean Warren looks toward her artistic future, she says with confidence that she's never felt she's arrived. With wide bright eyes, an unmistakable smile and an adventurous spirit, she confidently says, "I'm always striving for that 'next,' whatever that next is."

Jean recalls when she was a child, her grandmother would ask, "Jeanie, would you make a picture for me?" Of course Jeanie eagerly agreed and her grandmother displayed her paintings all over the house.

Later, Jean's teachers encouraged her more and she came to see herself as a painter. She was always looking at shapes, natural rhythms and colors in the natural world and expressing them in paint. She says, "After a while, I just had to do art, it was part of my life."

Today Jean recalls how important encouragement was to her, so she in turn encourages her students that they can do it. Jean believes they too can know the joy of exploring what is around them and "make a picture," just like she did as a child when she was encouraged by her grandmother.

Jean says, "I learned to leave some things unsaid in a painting to let the viewer complete the picture with his or her own experiences."

She says, "Representational images spark the interest in the viewer while the abstract involves their experience and interpretation. It always has been my goal to challenge the static image, to paint more of what's going on, both on the surface and below the surface, drawing on people's different levels of consciousness."

When teaching watercolor, Jean says, "The one thing I love to get through to my students is that watercolor is so versatile, it gives you ideas what to do next, to be able to respond to what the paint is doing on the paper is a gift watercolor gives us like no other medium seems to do.

Josh was Walt Disney Studios Director of Animation Effects for nearly 30 years. Ever humble, he referred to his ground breaking work in animation as his "day job," while stating clearly he was, first and formost, a landscape painter. He often said, "I'm an impressionist, but impressionism can be informed by modern art."