San Francisco artist and Williamsport native Michelle Ramin is coming back to her roots, bringing her artwork along with her for a month-long exhibit titled “The Sky’s (Not) the Limit.” The exhibit opens July 14 and will run through Aug. 14, at The Gallery at Penn College. A “Meet the Artist” reception will be held from 4:30-6:30 p.m. July 14, with a gallery talk at 5:30 p.m.

Ramin explores the possibilities and limitations surrounding humanity’s insatiable search for happiness and contentment. Her highly-rendered, figurative pieces discuss the mundane concerns of the everyday, searching for the sublime in common occurrences. In her work, Ramin examines a particular socio-economic demographic: the “slacker” or “hipster” culture. In her pieces, the lifestyle of this group emphasizes lounging, partying and other inexpensive, perhaps ironic pastimes that young people can afford. Ramin considers many of these works to be self-portraits and portraits of her peers, and sees herself and her fellow thirty-somethings as a generation that is adrift, all the while searching for something that prior generations cannot help them to find.

Originally from Williamsport, Ramin attended Loyalsock Township High School, graduating in 2000. From there, she went on to attend Penn State University, where she received her bachelor’s degree in fine arts. After graduation, Ramin and her boyfriend at the time – now husband – moved across the country to Portland, Oregon, “kind of on a whim.” They had heard that it was an inexpensive, creative outpost full of great music and art.

“Living in Portland was fantastic and we loved our life there,” Ramin said. “After five years, I wanted to push my art career a bit further, challenging myself and my practice, so I applied to grad school.”

Ramin was then admitted into the San Francisco Art Institute, the oldest fine art institution on the West Coast. In 2010, the couple moved to San Francisco and have been living and working there ever since. Since graduating with her MFA in painting in 2012, Ramin has been teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute and City College of San Francisco pursuing her art practice and exhibiting throughout the country.

Art always has been a huge part of Ramin’s life. She said she is a problem solver by nature and always has been drawn to colors.

“My favorite film as a kid was ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” she said. “I would fast-forward through the black and white beginning to the part where Dorothy enters Oz and all of the colors of the flowers and sky and her ruby slippers are sparkling and saturated. I think this image viscerally affected me.”

Ramin also recalls spending a considerable amount of her growing up drawing with her grandmother.

“She bought me my first real set of colored pencils and she would buy me a new color or two every time I got a good report card,” she said. “I was also encouraged throughout my schooling by various teachers – Helena Meixel in elementary school and Joy Walls in middle school, and later Paul Barrett in high school, in particular.”

Ramin’s artistic influences are all over the map, drawing a lot from artists Storm Tharp, Nicole Eisenman, Josephine Taylor and Aurel Schmidt. More recently she has been introduced to Eric Fischl’s latest body of work portraying art fairs.

“Beyond painters, I take a lot of my inspiration from daily life – my own experiences, people in my life, and interactions with my surroundings,” she said. “I’m very much of the mindset that art should in some way reflect the artist’s life and their own observations – in a way, autobiographical and documentary.”

Ramin’s work has been exhibited nationally and has been featured in such publications as the San Francisco Chronicle, 580 Split and New American Paintings. In 2014, she received the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Goldie Award in Visual Art.

“The Sky’s (Not) the Limit” will be showcasing Ramin’s newest body of work, portraying tourists within famous museums in Europe. The oil paintings are a bit of a departure conceptually as well as within the medium from her past work. In addition, Ramin also will be exhibiting a series of watercolors and colored pencil pieces – all figurative with stark white backgrounds, which has been her compositional choice since graduate school.

“The work in ‘The Sky’s (Not) the Limit’ covers the last five years of my art practice,” she said. “Always with the figure at the focus, my drawings and paintings tend to deal with the psychology of the individual, sometimes alone but often within groups or crowds, contending with identity and place within their environment or lack thereof.”

In Ramin’s mind, there isn’t anything else in the world she could imagine herself doing other than creating something that is completely all her own and that brings her complete joy. “Art kind of chose me, not the other way around,” she said. “It’s always been a passion of mine and something I still enjoy very much. I don’t think I could live without it.”

For more information, visit www.gallery.pct.edu.