Art Pop-Up w/ Erin Lee Gafill and Tom Birmingham 4.23

Join Erin Lee Gafill and Tom Birmingham at The Sea Ranch lodge for a pop-up Wet Paint art reception featuring work freshly painted on the coast of The Sea Ranch and Gualala.

This event culminates a two-week mini-residency that features a variety of creativity activities, and it is part of their spring California tour including events Sacramento, St. Helena, Monterey, Carmel, and Big Sur.

Artist Bio:

Erin’s work was featured recently in two museum exhibitions; Color Duets at the Monterey Museum of Art featured paired still lifes from a twelve annual painting retreats with her uncle, textile designer, Kaffe Fassett. California Atmosphere at the Morris Graves Museum of Art featured six wall size canvases Erin painted during her month-long painting retreat at The Sea Ranch and Gualala during the winter of 2021.

Born in Big Sur California in 1963, Erin is an award-winning writer, painter, and teacher with deep roots in the California arts community.For almost 30 years, Erin has taught arts, crafts, and creative writing programs to children and adults up and down California’s central coast. She co-founded the nonprofit arts education organization Big Sur Arts Initiative in 1998 to provide arts and cultural opportunities to local children and their families.

Erin credits her deep familial roots in the arts for her on-going work today. Her maternal grandparents Lolly and Bill Fassett built Big Sur’s famed Nepenthe Restaurant, a mecca for artist, poets, writers, and bohemians since opening day in 1949. Erin’s great-grandmother was Jane Gallatin Powers, a Modernist painter who had the first artist’s studio in Carmel in 1903.

Erin is on the creative arts faculty for Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, and teaches her “Passion of Painting” and “Art of Now” workshops throughout the United States, Italy, and online. She is the author of the inspirational memoir “Drinking From a Cold Spring, a Little Book of Hope”.

Erin’s work is currently exhibited at The Sea Ranch Lodge as well as The Carmel Art Association and Blackbird in Carmel, The Phoenix Shop in Big Sur, and the Ariodante Gallery in New Orleans.