The Bay Area is home to an incredible array of talented visual artists and craftspeople. Not just painters, but sculptors, printmakers, mosaic masters, muralists, collage creators – the list is long. On the following pages, meet just a handful of local visionaries who have found abundant artistic inspiration in dogs. They have all been named by our readers as Best Pet Artists, winners and runners up in our annual readers poll, The Beast of the Bay Awards. Their fabulous works will excite your eye and lift your heart. In a word – stunning!
Michael Wertz
My name is Michael Wertz and I’m an illustrator, a printer, and a teacher. I’m lucky enough to make pictures for a living. My current body of work is informed by my love of all things screenprinted: posters, mostly, but also shirts, books, zines, and other products. If it’s created with ink, I’m ooh-ing and ahh-ing over it.
My husband and I co-habitate with a lovely Pit/Cattledog mix named Miss Olive. She keeps us not only busy, but inspired. I like to say that she keeps me human, walking, and away from the computer as much as possible. My first solo kids’ book, Dog Dreams, has been on shelves for a while now, and was inspired by Miss Olive.
Christene Pinter
While volunteering at a shelter in Mexico City, I met hundreds of abandoned and adoptable pets, many with horrific pasts. Yet they had hopeful futures, thanks to their innate resilience and the heroic humans who rescued and rehabilitated them. They are the inspiration behind Pinter Portraits.
The inherent value of being an artist is being able to portray what others might not be able to perceive. As a subject matter, dogs are timeless, unique, refreshingly authentic, joyful, and quietly dignified. My mission is to reveal the extraordinary character and virtue of all the pets I paint, so as to exalt their relatively short but meaningful lives.
I love all critters, but my BFFF (Best Furry Forever Friend) is Pinxo, a Mystery Mix (Chihuahuasaurus? Dobiepug?) who was found emaciated and leashed to a fence in a park in the middle of Mexico City. Now he’s well-fed and goes to the beach often.
Tim Racer
The “art of the carousel” was not considered a true art form until after roller coasters and more exciting rides took over in amusement parks, and the wooden animals started to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Some found their way into basements, sheds, and even barns, where they sat and decayed. In one extreme case an entire carousel was bought and burned as firewood.
Those who valued these wooden menagerie figures recognized that they were becoming extinct and began collecting at a fever pitch in the 1970s and 80s. During this period, the highest price paid at auction for a carousel figure was nearly $175,000. It’s no surprise that the figure was a dog! A Saint Bernard.
I began restoring many of these same pieces in the early ‘90s, which led to my eventual carving career. My first piece was a dog – my dog – and I’ve been carving dog portraits on commission ever since. I’ve yet to carve a horse, but the decade is still young.
There aren’t too many things more satisfying to me than bringing a dog’s personality to life in the form of a carousel piece. As a founder of BADRAP.org, my fondness runs deep for those four-leggeds known as dogs.
Gabriele Bungardt
My pet portraits are motivated by my love of animals. Painting my subjects from photographs and from memory, I draw on my life-long love affair with our furry family members.
It is most important to me that the portrait captures both the soul and the singular personality of each animal and I access this through the expression of the eyes. Looking into the eyes of your pet gives me a unique entry point into discerning his or her character.
As I replicate a gaze, I am drawn into that elusive moment of contact across the species and the deep and intimate bond between person and pet.
Samuel Price
I am a self-taught artist based in San Francisco and believe in the use of accessible materials to create art. I use everyday items such as recycled magazines and paper to create my unique pixilated animal portraits.
The technique is called collage or photo-montage, and requires many hours of hand cutting, assembling, and pasting hundreds of tiny paper squares onto canvas. During my 15-year career as a collage artist, I have created hundreds of custom-designed dog images for people who love animals as much as I do.
I was voted “Best Pet Artist” by Bay Woof readers in 2013 and will be showing my dog collages at the 2014 Sausalito Art Festival during Labor Day weekend. For information about the commissioning process or to see more of my work, please visit my website.
On weekends in The City you can see me and my family at Stern Grove playing fetch with our Boston Terrier, Auggie. He is the personal mascot and muse for my website and we love him like a second child.
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