■ Java Point hosts new exhibit

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

One of the most appreciated things about Benicia is the likelihood of walking into a downtown establishment and finding on display some work by a local artist.

Java Point Café on First Street is one of those places. Walk in there today and you’ll see displayed on one wall some artwork from Bonnie Weidel’s kids’ art classes. On the other will be several small paintings of owls created by local artist and Herald contributor Les Overlock.

Overlock’s portraits are part of an ongoing, ever-changing exhibit he will continue to add to as he creates the paintings.

For him, the owls are also part of a journey.

“Take a little square out of an artist’s canvas and see if you can identify the artist by his mark,” he said. “Just enough to get a little bit of a flavor.”

From the beginning, Overlock has had his mark. “It always used to give me a very good feeling because people used to say, ‘Oh, this is yours.’ Not like it was a Van Gogh or brilliant or anything, but it had my mark on it.”

The former teacher always encouraged his students to develop their mark, too — to answer the question, “What is your signature?”

“Mine stays very consistent, whether I’m drawing or painting or anything else,” he said — or whether his paintings depict African themes or, most recently, owls.

“This is owl awareness year for me,” Overlock said. He is embarking on a personal study of owls in Benicia, and painting them along the way, with help from people who have shared their stories of hearing owls in their yard or seeing them flying around at night.

Owls, Overlock said, “bring out a certain spirit in people.”

That spirit has also informed Overlock’s art therapy work at the Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in Martinez. He recently brought in a lot of black-and-white pictures of owls to show the patients, and “after they did their owls, I had them give their owl a name.”

The work made the veterans look inside themselves, he said, using the owl as a focus. “Then on the back of the owl, they had to write down some word of wisdom that either they knew or made up on the spot,” he said.

“When you are looking into the eye of an owl, you are looking into that reflection of that part of us that needs to contemplate, deal with the dark, and realize that the dark is not a place of fear,” he said. “And that the darkness is a different world.”

Overlock plans to add to the owl paintings on display at Java Point as he continues to learn more about them, which he hopes Benicians will help him do by contacting him at lesartist@yahoo.com.

“This is a little niche. Those owls are just nesting at Java (Point). They’re not anywhere else, they’re not out there as art. They’re just kind of in the corner there.”

If You Go
Les Overlock’s owl paintings can be seen at Java Point Café, 366 First St. Java Point is open daily until 5 p.m. Call 707-745-1449 for more information.