Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Los Gatos ceramic sculptor Janet Fullmer Bajorek shows "Around the Corner," one of her works on display at the Los Gatos Museum of Art and Natural Science through Sept. 22.

Exhibit ranges from fun to photographic

By Bob Aldrich

Two artists working in different media have their work on display in the Los Gatos Museum of Art and Natural Science through Sept. 22.

"Serious Fun" is the overall title Los Gatos ceramic sculptor Janet Fullmer Bajorek gives to her part of the exhibition. "Photographic Medley" is Virginia Sorci's description of the photographs she makes from negatives in her own darkroom.

The two media make for a nice contrast in approaches to the two women's diverse subjects.

Not many artists could say they've been threatened by the Hell's Angels. That's what Bajorek (pronounced Ba-yor-ek) says happened to her when she was showing her three-foot ceramic "The Outlaw Elite" in a gallery she ran in San Francisco. Bajorek, who fires her ceramics in a kiln at her Los Gatos Iguana Galleries, says Hell's Angels threatened to sue over the piece, which depicts a motorcycle and three riders with the Angels' logo on their backs.

"They told me the logo was copyrighted," Bajorek said. "I was surprised they would even come into an art gallery."

Though some of her ceramics are deeply serious in theme, like "Gulf War Pieta," a piece she made during the first days of the Gulf War, picturing a mother holding her dead soldier son, others are humorous. Figures like "Skateboarders" are made with small heads, large feet and eccentrically designed bodies.

Of the Hell's Angels piece, she says, "I have known several motorcyclists, my own brother being one. Although I had not met any club members, I was fascinated by their reputation and appearance." She was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga. "I was amused by the conflicting sides of their personalities."

Her amusing "Frank and Lola on Their Second Honeymoon in Pensacola" won a People's Choice award at the California Clay Competition in Davis in 1995.

On the more serious side, Bajorek shows her sympathy with the homeless in pieces like "Around the Corner," depicting a homeless man with a shopping cart close to luxury shops he can't go into. Another piece, "Maternal Love Lost," refers to "the waste of human lives in the American ghetto," according to her notes. A stonelike outer sculpture depicts the head, breast, arm and hand of an African-American mother cradling an infant's head. Inside, the son is revealed as a young adult imprisoned by addiction.

"Mirror of Time" pictures a young woman and an older woman facing one another. Whether the older is seeing herself when young, or the other way around, is up to the viewer.

Some of the 16 ceramics, like a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or one titled "Blue Waltz," merge two dimensions into three, with painted figures combined with the original cast. But many of her colors are achieved by firing liquid clay to bring out the hues. She may fire a piece a number of times for special effects.

With a background of art studies in California and Mexico, Bajorek has shown her work in galleries in St. Paul, Minn., Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her Iguana Galleries may be contacted by phoning 356-7865.

After retirement from teaching elementary and junior high school in Santa Clara, Virginia Sorci and her musician husband took art classes at San Jose City College, where Sorci discovered a talent for photography. A flutist, Sorci has played with area orchestras including the Oakland Symphony. Joe Sorci played the clarinet at a museum reception for the artists Aug. 25.

The photographs she made as a student were of such quality that she was invited to show them in the president's office and the English department at the college.

"I started with black and white, then moved into color," she said of her photographs, mainly scenes of nature, orchards, flowers, the seaside, trees and other outdoor scenes. Rather than glaring colors, her pictures make subtle use of natural hues: A human figure lies, apparently asleep, in a field of yellow flowers with a blossoming orchard in the background. Some--of gnarled trees at a Point Lobos seaside; autumn colors around Nevada City; Colorado mountain tops; the yellow-brown leaves of chestnut trees--give vivid, realistic impressions of nature.

A sparse orchard in a foreground with the mountains near San Jose on the horizon suggests the now-diminished orchards that once flourished in the Santa Clara Valley.

The museum at Tait Avenue and West Main Street is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.