William Merrill Gallery resurfaces, to pique ‘curiosities’ in South Laguna
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Longtime Laguna Beach residents and art collectors will recognize the name recently installed in the window of a South Laguna storefront, off the beaten path of the arts district and gallery row on the other side of town.
After taking the business virtual for roughly the past decade, the William Merrill Gallery, first established in 1992, is resurfacing, this time with an eye toward building community and stirring the imagination.
“The gallery was built on the concept of curiosities,” said Paul Ecke, an artist who has shown work in the gallery owned by Bill Merrill from its earliest days. “Every piece of art in here is about a curiosity, discovering something about the art. Artists want to tell a story, and sometimes, they don’t want to explain what they’re painting, but you can kind of get into it.”
For its reopening, the gallery is featuring 17 international artists, many of them museum-collected. The contemporary works were created in a variety mediums.
“We think of contemporary art as an artist’s way to approach a subject, or to approach a canvas, or to approach a sculpture,” Merrill said. “It’s their interpretation of what they’re seeing, what they’re creating.”
Ecke, among a handful of artists working within the gallery space, has varied his projects, too, jumping around between abstract and figurative works. He showed one of his recent sculptural pieces, which he called affirmation boxes.
“The gallery is a total experience, and [guests] can talk to the artists, watch them paint and have a conversation with them about art,” Ecke said. “We’re not a high-pressure gallery. We’ve been in this almost 40 years. Yes, do we want to make a living at it? We don’t need to, so we’re making it an experience. It’s almost like we’re doing exactly what we want to do now. We don’t want to do what we think sells.”
William Merrill Gallery is currently open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and by appointment. When a customer takes home artwork from the gallery, 10% of the proceeds go to the American Cancer Society, Ecke said.
The experience, as Ecke called it, includes working space for three. Joining Ecke in the gallery’s studio space are San Clemente resident Esther Montagner, known in the art world as Glina, and Loree Werner, who formerly taught art at El Modena High.
Beyond that, Merrill has designs on being able to host more people during gallery openings. The property, retained following the sale of his floral gallery and giftware business, the Black Iris, in January after 43 years, is equipped to hold receptions with additional exhibit space on the upper level.
“When I had my gallery downtown, I’d have 200 or 300 people within four or five hours, and there’s just not enough room in this space to be able to do that, but we can extend it [to the upper level],” Merrill said. “People can take their time and look at the art up there. We can have the artists up there speaking with people.”
While this gallery is removed from the downtown area, Werner said galleries can be active in their communities, and even serve as educational spaces.
“They could interact with the schools a little bit,” Werner said. “I used to bring my students to the William Merrill Gallery when it was a little further downtown, as a field trip, and they would interact with Paul. We used to do things like that.”
Glina’s “Puzzled” series of oil paintings is prominently displayed in the front window and on the gallery wall.
When asked what the experience is like to work in a space where she is surrounded by the artwork of her contemporaries, Glina said it’s important for the artists to pay attention to what they’re absorbing, “but that it doesn’t become a part of your psyche. Any artist who tells you they haven’t been influenced by another artist is lying. We’ve all been influenced, even subconsciously. It’s just impossible to walk through a museum and not pick up a color, or pick up a stroke, or pick up a line. It is a compliment when someone says, ‘Your work reminds me of.’ …
“It’s a little bit of this artist and that artist, and we blend it all together, but at the end of the day, it’s mine. It’s my interpretation, and it doesn’t look like theirs. You know what I mean? But you are a blend of all of them.”
One collector has approximately 20 pieces of her work, Glina said, and he enjoys taking guests around his home and asking them to venture a guess at the artist behind each one. They learn, to their surprise, that they’re all by the same person.
“They’re that different,” she chuckled. “That’s his biggest joy in life. He just can’t wait to get a new person into his house and do that tour.”
Glina said the resident trio of artists at Merrill Gallery serve to “enhance each other” as they work under the same roof.
“We speak to each other about what we’re doing,” she said. “We never say, ‘You should do this,’ or, ‘You should do that.’ We evaluate just from a technical, not an emotional perspective, and we work together really great. We’re in a giant warehouse together, but this is really wonderful — and look at the other artists that are coming in. It’s very good.”
The new Merrill Gallery is located at 2950 South Coast Hwy., Laguna Beach.
