Art Farm Official Celebration & Open House
- Danielle Elins
- Sep 25, 2025
- 3 min read
ERICKSON FINE ART GALLERY gallery artists are proud to feature Dog Face Butterfly and Wild Hyacinth by Kate Van Dyke and Electric Forest 5 by Laine Justice at Art Farm at West Dry Creek. Official Launch, Celebration and Open House 4 - 7PM at September 27, 2025. 321 West Dry Creek Road, Healdsburg. RSVP.
Kate Van Dyke, formally known Kate Halpin, was born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1983. She received her BS in Biology from Portland State University in 2008, and her Masters in Botany from Oklahoma State University in 2011. Halpin's MS thesis, a focused study of serpentine soils and rare and endemic species correlated to the ecosystem, led her to Northern California, and ultimately to her home today in Sonoma County.
Botanical Illustration was integral in Kate's early drawing/painting and continues to this day. Beyond going out in nature to find the subjects to create her compositions she plants native, endemic and naturalized plants in the yard beside her home in turn cultivating her own backdrops for her paintings. From the pileated woodpecker pecking into the side of her house in the early morning, to the crawling ten lined June Beetle over a Calochortus (the Mariposa Lily), to the Anna's and Allen's hummingbirds, feeding, resting and exploring, Kate's artwork encapsulates the observer and explorer of our most intimate and immediate natural world.
Details and accuracy are forefront for Halpin, and yet this foundation of scientific accuracy is not what stands out most. It is in her use of light and dark. Her subjects feel as though they are illuminated from within, glowing, eerie and sublime; the observer immediately transported to her intimate world. Sharing in her discoveries it is as if we the observer are following in the footsteps of Halpin as a young child, exploring the dark thicket of the wilderness in the Kenai Peninsula, and now arriving to the foothills of Northern California.
Laine Justice was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1981 and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Summers spent in the South with her grandmother, a ceramicist, and her aunt, a painter, nurtured her early love for art and making. At age 11, she began formal life drawing classes at the Portland Art Museum along with self study, using a treasured, inherited correspondence course from the Art Instruction School. Both experiences were unexpectedly cut short during her early teens.
At 14, Laine’s life took a stark turn when she was forcibly taken—by strangers in the middle of the night— to North Idaho, where she spent her formative years in CEDU, a network of group homes and wilderness programs rooted in Synanon, a cult known for its harsh behavioral modification tactics. The program imposed extreme restrictions on autonomy, education, and personal identity, using pseudopsychology and ritualized control to reshape children's behavior and beliefs. Laine’s sense of self was dismantled and redefined in this isolating environment—an experience that continues to inform her work, where she explores the evolving nature of identity, the hidden inner worlds we create to survive, and the deep connection between memory, place, and transformation.Returning to Portland Oregon at 18, she immersed herself in life drawing at Pacific Northwest College of Art before transferring to Pratt Institute in New York, earning her BFA in painting in 2003. Supported by a Gilman travel grant, she studied painting over a period of two years in Lucca, Italy. It was here that she was introduced to traditional paint making practices, and became enamored with the sculptural qualities of paint.
Laine is a San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award Finalist and recipient of both a Community Foundation Sonoma Award and Chalk Hill Residency Fellowship. Her paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Sonoma Valley Museum and Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is held in permanent collections at The Oliver Ranch and Denver Health Medical Center, and has been featured in major publications including House Beautiful, Luxe Magazine, Sonoma Magazine, and San Francisco Magazine.
Her studio practice focuses on working within disability, and what that allows on any givenday. Laine is autistic, and lives with lupus, me/cfs and pots. She creates a limited series of oil paintings and commissions every one to two years, alongside water based works in the form of scrolls, artist books, textiles, and works on paper. Laine lives and works in Northern California with her husband, son, and their pug, Bernie, surrounded by open space and its creatures who are an ever changing inspiration.
Laine Justice - Electric Forest 5, Kitten Forest, Kitten Sky, Oil, powdered pigments, yellow glass chips, interference paint, fluorescent paint, crayon, pencil and graphite on primed and wrapped panel. 41 1/2 x 41 1/2" .
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