"Different Paths Taken" is an exhibition by three mid-career painters who have a somewhat abstract perspective but remain strikingly different. A shared outlook lends cohesiveness to their different styles and presents them in a way that complements each artist's work.

Steve Long's vibrant use of color has been a consistent theme of his career. Like every artist, he is developing a unique style, blending emotion with his chosen medium. His love of abstract design and solid color first emerged in his early watercolors on paper and instills today's paintings on canvas as well as his four-sided pylon sculptures. He constructs his current paintings with multiple layers of colors and mediums that are then polished, glazed, scraped, or scumbled over a textured surface, using a variety of tools. From this mastery of color, design, and texture emerges the freshness and feeling viewers find in his work.

Steven has been working full-time as an artist for four years, and his work appears in both public and private collections across the United States.

For Mervyn Seldon, design, shape, and color inform everything around us, and the first task of the artist is to see them, and the next is to shape that vision into creations with meaning for oneself and others. An abstract perspective is in part a reaction to the technological impact of contemporary life, but it is also an awareness of unexpected beauty and humor. She works in acrylic on canvas, often using multimedia elements from indoors and outside. The paintings respond to real experiences many share.

Mervyn has been painting since the late 1980s, and her work has been widely shown, primarily in California. Treasurer of 57 Underground from 1998 to 2013, she has just completed a two-year term as the gallery's Director.

Chris Toovey is a product of his suburban surrounds and the middle ground view they provide between environments urban and rural. The hedges that inhabit this territory are the subject matter for this short series of paintings in acrylic on unstretched canvas. They are geometric abstracts on the one hand and representational objects on the other.   

Chris has been a muralist and studio painter since the 1970's. He is the co-founder (1984) of the dA center for the Arts in Pomona, current President of its Board of Directors, and a Milton Avery Scholar.