Join our sign-up list to display your art at the cafe
Here at Mishkas Café, we showcase a different artist’s work every month. We get a variety of artwork: photographs, drawings, paintings, and prints. Below are the artists that displayed their art at Mishkas in the past.
If you would like to sign up to show your art at our café, please come by in person to provide your contact information.
Justin Goad
I grew up going on vacations with my parents where they would capture and record the things we would see and do. Later on in high school I took a photography class that educated me on the basic skills in multimedia and camera operation. From there I purchased my first DSLR and started taking photos anywhere I could. I fell in love with being able to bring my equipment anywhere and record what I saw and felt based on my surroundings.
As of recent I have been shooting and learning about film photography but sadly none of them have made it to the collection that I am displaying. The pieces that I have up are from my travels a few years ago when I was abroad in Europe. I have never displayed, sold, or publicly advertised my work besides the occasional posts on instagram but maybe this is a good opportunity to see if people are interested in my work! I try to focus on capturing interesting textures and always have fun experimenting with unique variations of lighting or the lack thereof. Enjoy!
Justin Goad
Bianca Levan
Bianca Levan is a San Francisco-based artist and has been creating papercuts since 2012. Bianca explores the concept of journeys, the periods of contemplation and decision in one’s journey, and the pervasiveness of time through imagined landscapes and scenes utilizing the binary quality of black handcut paper.
Despite the meticulous attention to detail, her handcut work does not seek perfection, but rather revels in the imperfections that arise from a manual process with a precise instrument. Bianca uses the contrast and binary quality of black paper and space to explore, distill, and illustrate the complexity in a moment, a feeling, or an open-ended, internal question.
Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions nationwide, including MarinMOCA, Secession Art & Design, SOMArts Cultural Center, and Voss Gallery. Her passion for art and the arts community has extended to roles as a board member for the Guild of American Papercutters and a volunteer artist at the Kids and Art Foundation.
Her work can be found at biancalevan.com or you can contact her at hello@biancalevan.com
Ross Journée
Ross Journée (RJ) is a digital painter with a fervor for creating pieces that cultivate love, hope and healing.
As a self-taught artist, she’s been able to exercise her creative muscle since the onset of the pandemic after not having picked up a pencil/brush/you-name-it in ten years. While life was looking bleak with the world shutdown, she grabbed her sketchbook again as a way of relaxation, eventually experimenting with digital programs, using friends and dreams as portrait subjects.
After taking the plunge and curating an art-only IG, she’s now a one-woman-band in her small business of loving people through this craft, which for her is joy at its purest.
She aspires to paint uniquely-created and meaningful pieces for people to hang in their homes, display at wedding venues, gift as cards and beyond. Thus, the majority of her portfolio is made-up of commissioned pieces, each telling a story about the real people who inspired them. Her favorite kind of work involves getting to know her subjects and immortalizing their quirks, favourite places and things into one idyllic scene.
She is as inspired by the of sleekness of the mid-century modern movement as the visual nuance of Tim Burton for most of her work, but allows unique styles to transpire depending on the emotion she’s aiming to capture.
To work with RJ, please reach out
here: @rjournéepaints
here: rjournéestudios@gmail.com
or here: etsy.com/rjourneepaints
Take a contact card, let’s be in touch.
Christopher Alam
Christopher Alam originally comes from Fresno, CA, and he now studies at UC Davis with a major in English and a minor in Professional Writing. His main medium is pen + ink, with a focus on line work, hatching, and pointillism, and the genre tends to vary from aesthetic abstractions to character design. He enjoys depicting surreal or cartoonish subject matter. His art has appeared in KDVS radio station’s quarterly zine KDVationS, as well as on the walls of Mishka’s Café during the month of November 2020. Christopher is active posting his art on Instagram under the name @thelocalhakim. In the coming future he plans on illustrating and publishing a comic, while also exploring the animated medium. He can be reached at christopheralam19@gmail.com for potential collaborations or exchanges.
Stephanie Thayer
Stephanie Thayer was born is Woodland, CA and grew up in Davis. She began enjoying art in nursery school where she loved to draw people with ten fingers on each hand as well as rainbows. As she grew up she continued to enjoy drawing and painting, as well as sewing, beading, and other crafts. In high school she took watercolor, drawing and painting classes at Davis Senior High School. Recently she created a portrait series of community members in Davis and Sacramento who give back to the community through, art, dance, activism, education, politics, education etc. That show can be found at internationalhousedavis.org under its title “Comunidad”. The portraits were done with colored pencils (her favorite medium) and acrylic backgrounds. Stephanie loves color and finds so much joy in art. She hopes her art brings joy to you too and thanks Mishka’s for hosting it.
Erik Mora
Erik is an artist based out of Woodland, CA. Specializing in portraits, Erik enjoys photographing
”the known and making it unknown”. Erik’s work was on display in the month of February 2019.
