Makes six

It’s three and three at the Exploding Head Gallery, 924 12th Street, and we’re not talking baseball. The exhibit 3 Painters, 3 Potters fills the gallery with color and clay until March 3.

Gwyn Stramler brings the city inside with her “Urban Landscape” series. Large mixed-media paintings with sweeping blocks of color, including shades of cold-steel blue, red and yellow, come together for a gritty feel. In “Urban Landscape #95” and “Urban Landscape #100,” hung close together like a diptych, Stramler adds patterns reminiscent of manhole covers and grates inlaid into city sidewalks.

You can tell Ingrid Ellison listens to music while she works. It makes its way into her oil paintings in the staccato brush strokes that punctuate “Fly Away Home.” The definitive strokes are not dissimilar to Van Gogh’s technique in “The Starry Night.”

Audrey Welch’s mixed-media painting, “Random Thought #13,” mixes patterns—solid, striped and spherical—into a single stream of consciousness, with a strong sense of movement.

Rae Dunn has a way with words on her high-fire stoneware teapot “Disc Vessel.” Large and more flat than spherical, it becomes the perfect surface on which to attach different colored clay buttons with single, sagely words, like “Love,” “Give,” “Pause” or “Feel.” Dunn’s into pears, too, and the most fun are her eight individual, life-sized clay pears, of all sizes and colors, gathered together in “Small Pear, Medium Pear.”

Christa Assad’s little tugboat “Hercules” looks like a finely crafted toy, but don’t be fooled. It’s another teapot, a boat that could fill a dozen cups. Finally, don’t miss Mary Mar Keenan’s whimsically painted teapots either. With these, think Alice in Wonderland. For more information call (916) 442-8424.