Instinctual energy

Trusting an instinct and not overthinking every color choice, every brushstroke and every shape is part of why Susan Tonkin Riegel admires the way children make art. The Sacramento-area artist employs that kind of instinctual energy in her mixed-media work, which often include numbers, symbols, words and simple figurative forms with layers of materials—paint, sewed thread, encaustic, cardboard—to create a peepholes into the artist’s dreaming life.

The 2013 de Young Museum artist-in-residence has been showing her creative output regionally, nationally and internationally—China, France, Mexico, Sweden, among other places—since the 1980s, and this month, she shows new works closer to home at Artspace 1616.

Some others who will also be exhibiting at 1616 are ceramicist Linda S. Fitz Gibbon, photographer Richard Gilles, painter David Hollowell, mixed-media artist Tomas Nakada, painter Kim Scott and printmaker Mick Sheldon.