"Contemplation" by Larry Lurie.
More than 50 San Francisco artists, including Larry Lurie, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF, will exhibit their works at the third annual art show and sale at Golden Gate Park's County Fair Building, known as the Hall of Flowers, located at 9th Avenue at Lincoln.
The show, titled "Art in the Avenues," will run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 4, and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, June 5. The event will feature works from the Sunset Artists Society and the Park Presidio Art Association, artistic demonstrations and musical entertainment. Admission is free to the public.
The artist groups will donate a portion of the proceeds from their silent action to support the de Young Art Center, a nonprofit organization which houses the education resource centers for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
The show is organized and produced by the artists for the community to promote art awareness, make original artwork accessible to the public and provide a forum for well-known and emerging artists to share their work with a larger audience.
Lurie, an artist from the Richmond District, captures a variety of feelings and moods in his clay sculptures. He believes that change in psychotherapy comes from seeing things with "new eyes" and he extends that idea to encompass the different viewpoints, directions, angles and positions of his sculptures.
Asked what inspires him, Lurie said, "I have looked at faces and their expression of emotions for over 40 years in my profession and I find that trying to capture the facial and body structures and the expressions in clay is tremendously challenging. I've always known how hard it is to move from what we see to what we can mold with our hands, but making the effort is worthwhile and occasionally satisfying and successful."
Lurie was trained as a psychiatrist at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute (LPPI) in the early 1960's and served a fellowship in Community Mental Health at UCSF. He has been a member of the clinical faculty ever since. In the 1970s, he became the director of the District V Community Mental Health Center serving the Sunset and Richmond districts. Lurie later went into private practice in San Francisco, but has always been an active consultant in the residency program at LPPI. He retired from private practice a year and a half ago, but continues to teach and be active in professional organizations.
Lurie began sculpting about 12 years ago, when he began to ponder what he would do in retirement.
"I often worked with patients, some of whom faced retirement as a crisis and I wanted to be prepared," he said. "I talked to my friends about wanting to sculpt and one of them got tired of my talking and gave me the name of a sculptress, who teaches, Harriet Moore. She, in fact, has a sculpture of Hygeia, which sat at the entrance the to UCSF emergency room for many years."
Lurie started attending her weekly classes. After he retired he began working with clay, including learning about ceramics, five days a week.
"I find myself as intensely interested in sculpture as I was in the practice of psychiatry."
Source: Lisa Cisneros
