April 29, 2005 (Friday) - San Francisco art blogging
I was at a gallery in North Beach recently when someone recognized me and started asking me questions, including, a.) why does Tyler Green link to me but not to Allan Bamberger? (Like I should know the answer to that.) b.) Why don't I cover more more gallery openings like Mr. Bamberger? I told her, he's already doing it - why do you need two of us? But here's the real reason: I like art and I hate crowds. Gallery openings are frustrating at best, downright torturous if I'm exhibiting and have to stick around for the whole evening. I prefer quiet, slow, one-on-one encounters with art, with people, with the world. So that's the kind of outlook you'll be getting from me. Greg Chadwick is in SF some of the time, and I love his art-centered view of the world, but it's not really a San Francisco blog. Isn't it odd that right here, right next door to Silicon Valley, there are so few art blogs? Maybe when Sarah Hromack recovers from her wedding and gets settled into San Francisco, the local art bogging scene will have a new voice and viewpoint.
Tyler Green has some terrific posts today about the Olafur Eliasson show in Pasadena and be sure to check out his Five Observations . Also, interesting discussion at DCist about art crit vs art blogs is thoughtful and worth a read.
I updated the art calendar (see side bar) with May events... I usually update in the last few days before the beginning of a new month, so if you think there's an SF art event I should know about and add to my calendar, put me on your mailing list. (1426 41st Ave, SF, CA 94122).
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April 28, 2005 (Thursday) - Unintentional Series
I've been painting another parking garage interior... it's a recurring subject of mine, for reasons I can't adequately explain because I don't completely understand it myself. There's no question that I find them visually interesting. But my understanding of their symbolic meaning has shifted over the years. I used to think of them as a kind of "church of the car," and as such, a powerful symbol of what this culture considers important. Now I see them more from the point of view of a pedestrian (I haven't owned a car for almost 20 years.) They are urban caves, and caves have been my theme for the past year. Caves and cathedrals... I can see that I'm still on the same track here, and I still don't know where it's leading.
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April 27, 2005 (Wednesday) - about new materials, from Henry Moore
From an interview with Henry Moore (in 1961):
Question: Don't you feel that all this hunting for new sources, new materials, new combinations has made the traditional ones obsolete?
HM: Walter Gropius once told me that he had a man to lecture at the Bauhaus, in the 1920s, who told the students that oil-painting and carving were worn-out, Stone Age procedures, and that the artists of the future would use the materials of their own day - plastics and so on, I suppose. And this so depressed the students that most of them gave up work altogether till they noticed that Klee, who'd also been at the lecture, had just gone on painting as before. then they recovered and thought it might be all right after all. Of course, like all liberations, the liberation from conventional materials has its over-done, destructive, gimmicky side. If an artist feels more free, more alive, with new materials, then his work may benefit. But a second-rater can't turn himself into a first-rater by changing his medium, or his style. He's still have the same sensitivity, the same vision of form, the same same human quality, and those are the things that make him good or bad, first-rate or second-rate.
from "Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations" edited by Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-23161-9
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April 26, 2005 (Tuesday) - Interview with Judi Gorski, Kelcie Tinker, and Marilyn Warden
 Interview with Sunset Artists Judi Gorski (painting), Kelcie Tinker and Marilyn Warden (fused glass). Photo at left is (l to R) Kelcie, Judi, Marilyn.
I met with the artists at Judi Gorski's home, which is where they'll be hosting an open studios show next weekend (details on the show at the end of this post.)
A: Kelcie and Marilyn, how long have you been working in glass?
K & M: About 4 years.
A: Where's your studio?
K: In my garage.
M: I'm on 28th Avenue, about 3 minutes away from Kelcie and I have a key to the garage so I can go in to work.
K: I have 2 kilns now. But we started out at Sharon Art Studio. I was very fortunate that somebody gave me a kiln and that's what really started the at-home studio. I didn't really know how to use it and it took me a couple of months to read the book and get up the nerve to fire it up on my own.
M: The firings are automated now, because we bought a controller. Before, we'd have to sit there and wait, and watch the temperature.
K: See, originally I was given a kiln that was designed for ceramics, and the firing for glass is a lot different, more controlled, so... in order to do that I had to stay and watch it, check the temperature every 15 minutes, and turn it up or down.
A: For how long?
 K: For six hours. If it was a fast firing, maybe only 4 hours. But sometimes I'd turn it on in the afternoon and then I'd have to keep watching it late into the night, and I'd take little naps in the car... I was so exhausted... so then I ordered this thing called a controller. You plug the kiln into the controller and then you can program the firing. That just changed my life.
M: It's collaborative in many ways. I could never do it without Kelcie helping me with the firing. We have different styles, but we feed off each other. (The green vase, city scape and oval platter are Kelcie's and the rectangular platter and two florals are Marilyn's)
K: I see myself as more the technical side. Working the kiln, and stuff like that. I keep the mailing list and take all the pictures. Marilyn's the creative energy, and she's more prolific than I am. I work slowly. She's very fast and her pieces tend to be more wild and more wimsical. She inspires me... I tend to do more plain designs. I do all the accounting. Everything we make goes into one checking account and we just use that to go buy more glass. We don't make any money on this...
M: You know, glass is very expensive, so we try to be as economical as possible.
A: Do you ever use recycled glass?
K: No, we use art glass. It's specially made to do fusing. You can use any old glass, but you could only fuse it to itself. If you melted an old bottle and used it, you would risk having that piece crack. It could crack later, even though it looked OK at first. In other words, take that window glass - you don't know what its coefficient of expansion (COE) is, because every glass expands and contracts at a different rate. And they have different firing temperatures.
A: So, it's something like a painter not being able to mix oil and acrylic on a canvas?
 K: Exactly. This is made by Bullseye Glass Company and it has a 90 COE, so we can buy another company's glass as long as it has a 90 COE. I've had some disasters, like if it heated up too fast, or I didn't design the piece properly, I'll open up the kiln and see that the thing exploded. I had one that, due to thermal shock, it exploded about 4 inches and ran over the edge of the shelf.
A: How do you clean "exploded" glass off the inside of a kiln?
K: I painted the inside of the kiln with "kiln wash." It comes as a powder, you mix it with water and paint it on, and then when it dries it goes back to powder. So when the glass is on top of it, the glass won't stick.
M: It's a resist.
A: How do you get those metallic-looking bands imbedded in the glass?
K: It's a special kind of glass we buy, called "dichroic glass" - dichroic means two colors. We also buy iridized glass which has a different coating (it has an iridescent sheen, similar to the look of acrylic interference violet.) It's one of my favorite kinds of glass.
A: So, take a piece like this one that's so smooth and regular on the edges... do you put this in a mold?
 K: No. It's hand cut.
M: It takes a lot of years to learn how to cut glass.
K: We buy the sheets of glass in pieces of about 20" x 30". We buy hundreds of pounds... it's real heavy. We buy our glass from C & R Loo in Pt. Richmond, whenever we have enough money. Usually after a sale. It's a big, huge warehouse. My husband built a rack, I designed it, and it holds all the glass colors so we can just go pick what ever color we want. I took over his workbench, I pretty much took over the whole garage.
M: There's just enough room in the garage for two people. We'd be bumping into each other with one more person.
K: We do it all together. We work there at the same time, and we ask each other, "does this look right, do you have any other ideas, what about this glass..."
M: The chemistry's really good, and we work well together.
K: Because we don't talk. We just know each other so well... we come in and drag the table out to the middle, turn on the lights, turn on the grinder and then we start working.
A: What do you do with the grinder?
K: We use it to round off the edges, and if we're doing a pictorial piece with flowers or whatever, we use the grinder to help us get the shapes that we want.
M: What we do is: Tuesdays and Thursdays we do oil painting with Chester Arnold in Marin, Wednesday nights I do ceramics at at the Sharon Art Studio, and Monday/Wednesday/Friday we work on our glass. So we're busy...
A: Do you think your painting has an impact on your glasswork, or the glasswork affects your painting?
K : You learn color and composition in painting that can be applied to glass. I do a lot of... I call them abstract landscapes. I just have fun laying out the colors. In fact one of those landscapes just sold at the Artist-Xchange. Our work in is two places - at the Artist-Xchange on Valencia in San Francisco and in the Vibrantz Gallery in Half Moon Bay.
M: We like galleries. As we get older, it's really hard doing shows... carrying the tables and boxes of glass that weigh a ton, setting up and breaking down... exhausting.
A: Are your pieces one-of-a-kind?
K & M: Yes, they're all different.
A: So how did you two get together and get started on glass work?
M: We were both taking watercolor classes with Barbara Jackson...
K: The watercolor class meets upstairs and to get there, you have to walk through the glass studio. so, we'd go through there and watch all the people working with glass and say, "That looks like so much fun." But for years we just stared...
 M: I was afraid of it. I was afraid of getting cut.
K: But she gets cut now, I can tell you that! I see blood everywhere...
M: I'm not afraid anymore.
K: ...and I say to her, "Are you bleeding?" But she's so into it, that she doesn't even notice.
A: No kidding. So you're both still painting with Chester Arnold? Did either of you participate in his recent "1000 Faces" project?
K: Yes - I painted eight...
M: I only did five. It was so cool. I said, "Chester, this assignment has really helped me." Now, I can paint portraits.
K: It was a sad project to do, but a beautiful thing to memorialize someone who's passed away. I mean, the soldiers were alive when they had their pictures taken, and to capture that, everyone was so... the class was real quiet. Everyone was focused very hard on their work, and trying to do justice to the image. But because of the effort and focus that went into it, everybody said they learned so much from this. And I never wanted to do portraits before that, but now I have a lot more confidence.
A: Have you ever tried to do portraits in glass?
(They look at each other and burst out laughing.)
K: Yeah, there is a collaborative piece... I started out making this funny face with frit ... I mean, we buy all kinds of glass. We buy the sheet glass, but glass also comes like sand, big chunky pieces, medium and fine grain. You can use that to add color and texture. Glass also comes in "noodles", like a fettuccini or spaghetti...
M: ... all sizes and colors...
K: ...and then sometimes we bend the glass over a flame and make curly-cues. Marilyn's good at that - I'm not. But I took the frit over a clear piece of glass and started to make a face with pink and orange and a funny nose made from a bent noodle... but when I fired it I thought, "I don't like the way this looks." So she took it and worked on it, and we're going to fire it again - we don't know yet how it will turn out. That's another really exciting thing about doing glass - you arrange it and before it's fired, it's all just pieces of glass. After you fire it, it looks different. It depends on how hot, how long, whether it melts fully... see, this is not a full fuse. You can still see the texture and seams, whereas, this other one is almost flat. If you fire it really hot, it will flatten out more.
 M: We're talking 1450 degrees.
K: Usually, I turn the kiln on one day and open it the next day. I wake up in the morning and think, "I wonder what it looks like?" I go down to the garage, open the kiln and sometimes it's just fabulous....
M: Most of the time it's fabulous.
K: ... and then other times, like recently, Marilyn worked on this beautiful plate with flowers - it was turquoise and it was iridized - and it got a big bubble right in the middle of it. And I don't know why. It might be some of the glass had a slight imperfection. But we're going to try to fix it.
M: We're going to break the bubble, put glass over the hole, with designs that cover the hole... but, it'll be a surprise.
A: What kind of work inspires you?
M: I like more modern, abstract work. Right now, my favorite artists are De Kooning and Frank Lobdell. But then again, I love Matisse - especially the cutouts when he couldn't paint any more...
K: I've bought work by artists that I know, like Barbara Jackson, Chris Kidd, and Christine Cohen. I think Judi has found that people buy from her because they get to know her.
J: That was something that I learned when I took a class from an art coach. People are more comfortable buying from an artist they feel familiar with. So I try to show an interest in people and get to know them...
M: But some artists are kind of wacko, and you don't want to get to know them..
J: Those people aren't necessarily the best sellers, unless someone else is selling the work for them. But when you're trying to do it all on your own, your personality is an important part of selling your work. So I'm finding that I'm much more comfortable showing work in my home, and that way people can see where I live, and work, and eat and sleep, who my family is, what inspires me... and then they know what my work is about and how it's made.
M: It's wonderful that you have the confidence to allow strangers into your home.
J: My husband's a big guy.
A: So what made the three of you decide to do this together?
K: It was Judi's invitation.
 J: Yeah, I came away from the last Hall of Flowers show, and I realized that I was collecting quite a bit of work by Kelcie and Marilyn... and I do like showing in my home, but it's been a difficult year personally and I haven't had time to do much painting, except for commissions. So there were several reasons for doing this. I wanted to have a Spring Open studios that was not associated with ArtSpan, just so I could see how I would do without ArtSpan behind me. I've been having these shows and inviting pretty much the same people off my list and I thought it would be good to have something different. I know a lot of painters, but Kelcie and Marilyn's work won't take any of my wall space. I think their work looks good here because I have big windows, and a lot of light in this house. And, finally, it will be helpful and fun to have two other artists with me in this three level house. I've got some special surprises for people this year, one of which is that I'm having a web-cam installed on my roof so that surfers can log in to WaveWatch (click on North Ocean Beach) and see a live video of the surf conditions here in front of my house. There are cameras along the coastline all the way from San Diego to ... right now, I think I'm the most Northern point. It'll be up and running tomorrow.
K: That's a great service - my daughter surfs and she'll drive all the way down to Half Moon Bay, and then come back and say, "The surf sucks."
J: I'm still enjoying painting the surfers here. (Judi in her studio, above right.) I've found out that some of the people who I've photographed to paint are actually well-known surfers. I take it as a compliment that people look at the painting and say, "Hey, I know her!" because I've painted the likeness well enough that they can tell which person it is. I had a couple come over yesterday, and they brought a couple of friends with them and they left with three pieces. I've made more sales this year in the first four months than in any of the years before and I've really been focusing for the last six months on marketing. Wise Surfboards has been carrying my work and he sends a lot of people over here. The gallery in Burlingame that was showing my work... that hasn't really worked out so well, but now he's trying to market our work overseas, so I don't know how it will work out. It would be nice to have a professional gallery who would do that because it takes so much time that I don't have time to paint. And I'm really ready to get back to just painting and being quiet in my studio.
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2005 Spring Art Show at JAG's Art Studio at the Beach
Surfer and Beach Paintings by Judi Gorski
Fused Glasswork by Kelcie Tinker and Marilyn Warden
Saturday & Sunday, April 30th & May 1st, 11 am - 6 pm
2366 48th Avenue, (between Taraval & Santiago) San Francisco, CA 94116
for more information call Judi: 415-716-3004
or e-mail: jagspaints@aol.com
preview some of the work at www.jagsart.com
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April 25, 2005 (Monday) - Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream
... I'll spare you the details, but my conclusion is:
Art is my lifeboat. To give it up for a job that might pay better would be like jumping out of the boat and swimming back to the Titanic.
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April 22, 2005 (Friday) - Letters re: Ted Kooser & Christian de Cambiaire
 Hello Anna,
Your site came up in a Google search for comments about Ted Kooser being named as the Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry. Interesting point you make about his references to and familiarity with art and painting. He is an exacting painter who works in a photorealistic style, and his work appears on a cover of one of his books, Winter Morning Walks.
Regards from Stockholm,
S. Hahn
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Hello Anna,
On March 11, 2005 you published a text on the show I was having at the Newmark Gallery. This text was titled "Art generating software", and I want tell you that is a perfect title, featuring exactly my aesthetic research. In the French part of my Website ( Cliquez ici > Position théorique ) you will find a text "Ce qui entre en présence en se déployant de soi-même" (Heidegger 's quotation) which is an explanation of my theoretical position. Unhappily this text is not yet translated. Your article is the demonstration you perfectly understood my works. And I thank you a lot.
 To prolong my San Francisco artistic experience I'd like to be in touch with people who are interested in this kind of artistic research. It'd be kind if you could you help me there.
(News : Steven Miller, designer, asked me to participate in the San Francisco Decorator Showcase, April 30 - May 30, showing 3 of my Small 3D Blocks )
Best regards,
Christian de Cambiaire
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April 21, 2005 (Thursday) - The Real Deal
 As the internet matures, both chronologically and socially, it's evolving like most cultures into a more organized hierarchy. Less freedom, more repression. It's normal, not necessarily bad (until it tips over into rigidity, but we're not there yet.) You can't stop the process of evolution although it's theoretically possible to influence the change and there's no shortage of people trying to do just that. Right now, shaming seems to be the dominant style of enforcement but sooner or later even the shameless will find it hard to step out of line.
As an artist, my sympathies are with the shameless folks in the more loosely structured territories. Which is why I have no problem with artists who curate shows, or write gallery reviews, or suggest shows to see, or run galleries themselves. Because of course I can see myself in all those roles and I think I could maintain my integrity if I found myself in one of those pursuits. So I generally try to extend the same benefit of doubt to curators, reviewers, and gallery directors who want to participate in other aspects of the buzz around art.
That said, it's all just buzz... the real deal is when the paint slides onto the canvas. And that's what's happening around here, as you read this.
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April 20, 2005 (Wednesday) - We are all joint-workers
 Last night I watched the DVD, "How to Draw a Bunny" by Andrew Moore and John Walter. It's a documentary about the collage artist, Ray Johnson. The movie is good but the DVD is even better. In the "Extras" folder is a slide-show of Johnson's work. I could watch it over and over and over again... trying to figure out: what is it about his work that I find so appealing. It's not the pop culture references, and it's not just the puns. There's the plain, raw, visual power that's hard to explain in words. Yes, it has something to do with his composition, and colors, but it's more than that. David Byrne hinted at it in his blog on April 16th. He was referring to music, and the way that, "the music comes first and words are eventually found to fit the existing meter and melody. " I think that this is what artists do - they find the connections between things, and between non-things. Lewis Hyde says this about the origin of the word artist:
"A single Latin word, articulus, can mean both a joint in the body and a turning point in the solar year. Why exactly this word has such reach becomes clear if we do a little digging in the history of Indo-European languages. Articulus belongs to a large group of related terms preserving an ancient root, *-ar, that originally meant "to join," "to fit," and "to make." Many words in Greek, Latin, and modern languages come from this root, all of them having to do with joining in one sense or another. A number of current English words still echo these classical prototypes. We have, for example, "artisan" (a "joiner" or maker of things), "artifice" (a made thing), and terms having to do with bodily joints such as "arthritis." "Articulate" nowadays usually has to do with speech, but it also means joining bones together.
When these words describe joints in language, they again connote clarity and precision. "Jointed" speech has clear divisions to it, just as a good masonry wall has clear lines between the bricks; these divisions turn the sounds that any animal can make into intelligible human language. In human speech, the tongue and the lips are the organs of articulation. They do the joint-work in a stream of sound. In written language there is joint-work to be done as well. To break an uninterrupted flow of letters into words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters (or the older "articles"), to divide it with spaces, commas, periods, and indentations, is to articulate it, to make evident the places where thought itself has joints or points of demarcation."
from "Trickster Makes this World" by Lewis Hyde, ISBN 0-86547-536-9
I interviewed a contemporary collage artist today - Heather Robinson. (That's her at right, looking through her paper collection. I may not transcribe the interview for a week or so - am swamped with other stuff right now.) But I was struck by the similarities between Heather and Ray, and maybe it's because collage artists are more overtly involved in joint-work.
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April 19, 2005 (Tuesday) - Katherine Michiels School fundraiser
 The Katherine Michiels School is holding their annual art auction fundraiser event and they're looking for artwork donations. The school (which used to be in the Sunset but is now located in the Mission) provides a strong arts focus for its pre-school to 5th grade students. Check out their web site - it's a great place. The fundraiser will (among other things) help support student scholarships for the children of working artists. This year the fund raiser will be held at the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio of San Francisco, May 22, 2005. Last year I gave them one of my big Trickster paintings. I haven't decided yet which painting to give them this year ... maybe I'll let Katia decide. If you can donate a work of art, contact Katia Fuentes by email or phone: 415- 621-1107.
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April 18, 2005 (Monday) - Seeing the Forest Williams show at Heather Marx Gallery with Sandra Yagi
 I interviewed Sandra Yagi last year, and thought she might be interested in the Forest Williams show. They both paint figurative work with a fair amount of emotional content. She agreed to accompany me to the Heather Marx Gallery and before we went in I hooked her up with my nifty little digital voice recorder. (Photo at left: she's on the left in black and I'm in the middle in Hawaiian shirt, in front of William's "Blue Bar.") Neither of us had seen Williams' work before, or knew very much about him. Here's how it went:
(We have entered the gallery and are standing in front of the diptych "Green Alley")
Anna: Wow, they're much more painterly than I'd realized from the web images. At least the figures are... the ground is smoother.
Sandra: Yeah, it's almost Lucian Freud-like, in the face. I like the scumbled look ... is this on panel? (yes)
Anna: Yeah... actually, it reminds me of Odd Nerdrum.
Sandra: But way more colorful. I like the way you can see the underpainting in that shirt.
Anna: The red underpainting is the same pigment as the red in that rectangle on the side, and in the tie. I really like the diptych thing he's got going - it's an intelligent use of the form. You often see artists using it because a big canvas is hard to handle, or .... boy, the eye of that guy on the right is just great. The paint in the faces is very sculptural. And look a the texture in the green background, here along the edges it looks like he's used that technique that Max Ernst used to do when he pressed something into wet paint, what was that called? (decalomania)
Sandra: It's just globbed on with a short bristle brush. I'm not usually a fan of green, but in this case, it really makes these guys pop out. It's a good use of opposites, here.... you know, without the figure, this background composition is reminiscent of Diebenkorn.
Anna: Ehhhh, maybe. The guys would have to morph into graphic shapes. Otherwise it's more like a Mondrian.
Sandra: They're really two separate spaces - see the way the white across the bottom is broken, it doesn't match? These guys are never going to be in quite the same space, psychologically. Even though they're only a quarter of an inch apart, they could be worlds apart. The fingers are amputated. They're trying to reach across that space and they never will. They're slightly mis-matched, just like the background. There's a real sense of reticence in this guy on the left. That's a definite truism. You can't leave yourself totally wide open. It's about vulnerability. I'm really wondering if this is the artist in these paintings.
Anna: (to gallery guy, actually Assistant Director Steve Zavattero) Are any of these paintings, of the artist?
Steve: No, none of them are self portraits.
(We move to the diptych, "Blue Bar")
Sandra: That's funny... that little green square, there...
Anna: Oooo cool, look at that effect on the striped bar at the bottom. Love it. You know, he's really got two paintings going here. He's got this real warm, natural figure painting and then he's got this cool, graphical...
Sandra: ..abstract...
Anna: ...symbolic...
Sandra: OK. I just figured this out. This blue is a bar, the green square is a drink. It's a gay bar, they're checking each other out. ... I just love how he blurs the figure into the background. It makes the figure integrate with the ground... otherwise this wouldn't work. When I'm working on a painting, I try to make it consistent. If you're going to have a crisper outline, you can't have something scumbled in one section and perfectly rendered in another. But by blurring his figure edges, he drags that scumbling into the more controlled areas that you mentioned.
Anna: You're right. If he hadn't done that, this would look like a paste-up.
Sandra: It pushes the figures into the painting and makes them part of the painting. So, it had to be done that way. Even though I I like it for the nebulous, ethereal effect it creates... which is something that Lucian Freud doesn't do. I'll be honest with you, I think this guy's work is more interesting.
Anna: In what way?
Sandra: I can't explain it. Lucian Freud often does psychological studies... but I think it's the color. Freud's painting has this raw meat look to the flesh. I like the color in these more.
Anna: Yeah, I'm with you there. The brushy pinks in that shirt are nice. And those blue shadows in the faces. And look at the little scrapes in the hair, done with the brush handle... beautiful, beautiful job. But, I'm not that fond of this hand here (guy in pink shirt in "Blue Bar") but the hand of the guy on the left - now that really works. The knuckles push toward us...
Sandra: And yet, the whole thing works. It's very one-dimensional except for these guys. The "bar" is just a line. It's an interesting juxtaposition.
(We move to the painting, "Diver", which has two figures on the same canvas.)
Sandra: Now, here's another example of that blurring, but in this case it also creates a sense of motion in this figure on the right (guy in red striped trunks, posed in diving position.)
Anna: Unlike the diptychs we've been looking at, these two guys are in the same space... kinda.
Sandra: One of them is already leaving the space, though. ... I wonder why he put the same stripes on one guy's shirt and the other guy's shorts? And my next question is, are those really swim trunks? Because if they're at a pooI, why is the guy with the cigarette in street clothes? I hope it's a pool and not that the guy in trunks is going to jump off a building while the other guy just watches. I mean, this artist does live in New York... oops, it's my pessimistic nature coming out. Maybe it's the end of a dysfunctional relationship. There's this band that I listen to, called Hungry Lucy, and they came out with an album called, "To Kill a King." It's a dysfunctional, abusive relationship and the king keeps her in a cage. At the end she frees herself... he says, "If you leave, my suicide will follow," and she says, "Then what are you waiting for?" ... I'm probably reading too much into this. But it's neat that the painting can bring up that much. This one is my favorite, I think.
(We move to a series of smaller paintings, "Kiss" and several diptychs called "Bridge")
Sandra: This is called "Kiss?" Someone is not there.
Anna: Yes, it's very sad. Even the colors are sad.
Sandra: Well, none of these people are happy. This is a very unusual composition and it works. I mean, how often do you see a figure shoved way over like that, partially off the canvas.
Anna: Look at how he modulated the red background around the guy in the red shirt ("Bridge 4") - that's very nicely done.
(We move to two larger paintings, not exactly a diptych, but a pair, called "Blue Doorway" and Green Doorway")
Sandra: He's got the "trapped" look going on there. Like he's trying to push his way out of there. And I sense a great deal of defensiveness in the other guy. But isn't that how it is in most human relationships? You can't just leave yourself wide open right off the top. Actually it's probably even harder for men. These are all men in these paintings, but considering what the the theme is, it works the best.
Anna: These paintings are one year earlier than the first ones we were looking at, and do you notice how different they are? These are tighter, more developed, the background is more decorated. The 2005 paintings are much looser. Which I guess makes sense, since most painters seem to loosen up as they paint more and become more confident.
Sandra: These two paintings are sold, but they really need to be together... I hope whoever bought them, got them together. (Speaking to Steve:) did the same person buy both of these?
Steve: Yes, actually.
Sandra & Anna: Oh, good.
Sandra: OK, now maybe I should read the statement. I purposely avoided it before, because I didn't want it to influence my opinion.
We hung out at the desk for few minutes, reading the notebook of artist info and looking at the gallery catalog for this show, which we both liked so much that we each purchased a copy. Then Steve told us about the upcoming show and gave me an invitation. I've always found the Heather Marx Gallery to be a friendly, approachable place, which is one of the reasons I chose it for this, my first attempt at an "artists looking at art" piece.
Sandra Yagi is represented by Bert Green in Los Angeles and Brad Cooper in Tampa.
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April 17, 2005 (Sunday night) - Earthquakes, killer cars and figure drawing
This is the 99th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. There's a guy who works at a supermarket in my neighborhood (the Sunset Andronico's) who remembers being carried down the stairs by his mother during that quake. He's 102 years old, he's still stocking shelves, and he seems pretty happy about it. I bring him up as an inspiration to artists and others with no retirement funds...
 Many thanks to Ramona for this funny killer-car photo and get well wishes. (A little more Ibuprofen and I'll be fine.) And a really big "thank you" to Tyler Green for that very nice link last week - it rescued my declining numbers. ( I was introduced to someone this weekend and their response was, "Oh, Anna Conti? Tyler Green just linked to you!")
Mark Barry at ionarts mentions the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race, which was inspired by the Arcata to Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race, which is influenced by nearby Humboldt State University, alma mater of many of Northern California's painters.
Franklin at Artblog.net says: "The age of criticism may have died with Greenberg, and we have entered the age of competing public relations statements. " And he promises more about that on Monday.
 There was a fun story in this weekend's NYT ("Trendy Artists Pick Up an Old-Fashioned Habit") about the "return" of figure drawing groups among New York artists, but they certainly never disappeared around here. On any given day, if you ask around a bit, you can find a studio hosting a life drawing session. Even the public high school (SOTA) does it once a week.
Speaking of figure painting, I taped my first "artists looking at art" interview/review on Friday. I went to the Heather Marx Gallery with Sandra Yagi to see the work of New York figure painter Forest Williams. I'm almost done transcribing it - will post it in a few hours. I've set up a few more of these, but it's been more difficult than I had anticipated getting another artist to agree to be taped while looking at art. There seems to be a lot of resistance to committing words to a visual experience. I have some sympathy for this feeling, but strongly recommend getting over it. Any volunteers (active artists) should feel free to contact me if they'd like to be interviewed while checking out another artist's show.
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April 15, 2005 (Friday) - Well now, that puts a whole new perspective on things...
Out on the streets this morning, a woman in a silver car ran me down in the crosswalk at the intersection of Lincoln & 41st. Or, to be more accurate, I fell down as I was jumping out of her way. No major injuries, except maybe a torqued back & bruised knee & elbow. But I did see my life flash before my eyes, and as I saw the car accelerating directly toward me, I thought, "That bumper is going to break both of my legs, should I jump right or left, which way is she going to to swerve, if she swerves at all?" And my body decided for me and jumped left and she swerved right, and my right arm and leg grazed the side of her car as I went down. She rolled down the window and I heard a faint voice drifting off across the park saying, "Are you alright?" and she drove on.
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April 14, 2005 (Thursday) - Painting is my full time job, the business of art is my part time job. Real life? What's that?
WARNING: Stress-relieving rant ahead - click off, unless you're in the "misery loves company" contingent.
I've spent the last few days putting together packets of slides and press releases and proposals and applications that might convince someone, somewhere, to show and sell my paintings. Plus I'm doing the same thing for two arts organizations that I belong to. Then there's the followup emails and phone calls. I hate this stuff. I tend to put it off until it piles up to the point where I have to spend four or five days on it, or more, usually more, with no painting in sight. Worst of all, I had to attend a local artists meeting to "report in person" on my activities on their (our) behalf. A detailed email report won't do. You have to submit yourself for grilling. To be honest, last night's meeting wasn't too bad (there were almost none of the usual flaky, not-listening, irrational, or self-absorbed nut cases) but even when it goes well, it's stressful. This is why my molars are being reduced to nubbins.
Yesterday I heard, for the third time this week, the comment, "Why do we have to submit slides so early? The show is not until ..." (Like we have nothing better to do but promote your work and of course will clear the decks to do just that, at the optimal time for your convenience.) A sure sign that they have no clue, or don't care, how difficult and time consuming it is to collect the materials, produce the package, and then distribute it, involving dozens of other outfits, all on their own crammed schedules.
Which reminds me, who designed this universe (did I hear you say "intelligent" design?) so that, in any given group or organization, five percent of the people do eighty percent of the work? It's gotta be a universal law, because if you try to force more participation (pick your method: positive reinforcement, shaming, nagging, fines, threats, or expulsion) the result is exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the appearance of participation. Except of course from that other group... the ones that you would be willing to bribe, with cash, if they would just stay home and not stick their messy little fingers into the mix.
Incidentally - why are we still dealing with slides, when there are cheaper, quicker, easier ways to move promotional images around? I'll tell you my theory on that one. Because it's easier to scan a hundred artists' slides than to explain to fifty of them how to use their computers, and then try to correct the god-awful files they sent you.
OK, I'm done. I didn't name names, so if you're insulted by something I said, consider the possibility that I wasn't talking about you, before responding.
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April 13, 2005 (Wednesday) - Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA, final installment
These are the last of my edited notes of some of the comments made by Peter Schjeldahl during his lecture at SFMOMA last Thursday:
"There's great democratic virtue and wisdom in Robert Bechtle's acceptance of middle class values. At least, there's no judgment going on, that I can see. This group is being squeezed by current tax policies, but we won't go there tonight... the question is, how are we going to survive it? I think it's a matter of accepting a certain level of malaise and angst, and maybe not whining about it.
Bechtel paints atmosphere, but he doesn't paint temperature, smells, sound. You don't have weather out here, you have climate. In this vacuum, free floating anxiety dilates and expands, and time extends in either direction with an unchanging sense of the way things are. This can be angelic or hellish. It reminds me of a movie, "Fat City." At the end, a small-town boxer is in a bar after a fight he lost and he's plainly punch-drunk. He's had some brain damage. You're seeing the shot from his point of view. He's looking around the bar... dead silence, slow motion, panning, looking at everything.... and bang, it ends.
The thing I hope this evokes on your mind is the theme of American emptiness, of emptiness as America. The spiritual identity of America is a sense of a void. Another word for emptiness is freedom. The great symbols throughout the history of American art and literature are wilderness, the big river, the open road, the prairie, the whiteness of the whale, the little light across the water in the "Great Gatsby", Pollock, Rothko, and for heaven's sake Andy Warhol.... One of my favorite lines in American literature is from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic":
"In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea."
In other words, he sure didn't come from anywhere around here. It's like, we have no holy ground (except by appropriation.) And so the constant struggle of every generation is to discover again how to survive in this peculiar semi-OK place that we've come to.
Robert Bechtel is more than just a picture maker, he's a real bard, in the way he turns that sense of insupportable emptiness into a thing of accomplishment and fascination.
Your first sense of what you're looking at, when you see a work of art, is unreliable. And if you just look and move on, you think you know what you saw.... but if you stay an extra five seconds, you become less and less sure that you know what you see. If you stick around, you don't know what you see... it's certainly not a car, and it's not a photograph. There are things that oil paint can do, that oil paint has been doing since Giovanni Bellini, that photography has never been able to touch. It's the greatest technological breakthrough of the 14th century.
I remember when I visited Bechtle's studio in the 70s and I saw how the projected slide made an image that was incredibly crude and general and really had very little information. So past a certain point you have to do it with tricks.
Illustration has been denigrated for 150 years, and is finally gaining a little respectability again. The problem is, if you take all of the story out of the picture, then the story surrounds the picture. It becomes a story about how abstraction is good for you. You get to a point where the story about the work is so good, you don't need the work at all.
The issue of film vs canvas is about memory. It's the discipline the artist has, of focusing on, of painting the unrememberable. Not the unmemorable, the unrememberable. The things you can not remember, you won't remember, because your brain won't see it. Recently, in the last couple of decades, there's been brain research on the question of, for instance, where in the brain are memories stored? The answer is nowhere. There are no such things as memories. Memory is a fiction. What we call memories are stories that the brain fashions to satisfy certain feelings, certain hormonal events. We don't remember things about which we have no feelings. Our brains were not designed to remember, they were designed to anticipate. We retain things in story form because we believe they are going to recur. We don't remember one darn thing, or things we believe are one time. 99.9% of the world is outside the sphere of what requires memory.
So, set that aside for a minute and look at how the eye works. We've heard that it's like a camera, but it's way beyond that. It's more like a computer than anything the rest of the brain is doing. It takes up most of the brain. The light comes in, it's broken down into light, dark, colors, horizontal or vertical lines... and then it's reassembled according to a library of references. (These are not memories - it's more like a data bank.) Then the whole, reassembled package is sent to the cortex, which has the sense of seeing it instantly. It's actually an eighth of a second after the light came in. You're already in the past of whatever you're seeing. This, by the way, makes hitting a baseball really incredible. We think we're seeing, but no, no - what we see is something off the shelf, from the reference library. The proof of this is the double take. You wake up in the morning, you open your eyes, there's some socks on the floor over there? You see a squirrel. You don't see a pair of socks that looks like a squirrel, you see a f**king squirrel, the whiskers, little eyes... but the cortex rebels, and says "look again." You look again, you see the socks. You don't see the squirrel turning into socks. This, by the way, is why we love pictures. Pictures save us the effort of construction - they go straight through. And with a great deal of security, because we don't have to worry about the details - they're all in there, they're safe. We made them from the light, not from what's out there. Who knows what the f**k is out there. We just have to agree with it enough not to bump into things and die."
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April 12, 2005 (Tuesday) - Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA
These are my edited notes of some of the comments made by Peter Schjeldahl during his lecture at SFMOMA last Thursday:
"There's no organized discourse on Photorealism. Photorealism is dull, for the most part. I wouldn't be talking about this at all, if it weren't for Robert Bechtle, who made it a problem by being so good.
To be hip in the 70s you never wanted to seen as working too hard - that was very gauche. And the effort in Robert Bechtle's work would make you want to go lie down somewhere.
You can be really good, or really important. There's a lot of art that's very good, that I don't talk to people about, because it doesn't make a difference. Then there's other work that's very important, but it's terrible. But when art is both good and important, then you tend to get excited.
Right now there's any number of young artists that can paint and draw incredibly well. There's a real return to pure skill. Everything is coming around again, which reminds me... Have you noticed that the new car styles now are like, big butts? It's a kind of maternal thing, like Venus of Willendorf or something.
Photography is a condition for Robert's work, but not the subject of it. He uses the photograph like a ladder - he climbs up and then kicks it away. You can't get back to the photograph from the painting.
The long assault of photography on painting started with Baudelaire, and one wave after another impacted painting but painting is still standing. It turns out that all of the functions it used to have - documentation, decoration (you can fill that space over the couch with a Gursky) were taken over by photography. And history painting was usurped by the novel (Balzac, Tolstoy and Dickens.) And then of course, the movies came along and killed everything.
The one aspect of painting that proved to be invincible to any mechanical media is intentionality, or total on-purposeness. That is, even when something is being slavishly reproduced, it is being done so on purpose, by touch. If you trust the painter, and what he or she is doing, there is nothing you can see that is not there by specific human choice or intent. It can be a drip of paint - that's intentional because they could have painted it out.
There is plenty of stuff in Robert Bechtle's paintings that is California. But there's plenty of nothingness, too. The subject of Bechtle's paintings is time. They're crammed with time. Mountains of time. More time than anyone could possibly have use for. Positively nothing is happening here, whatever. Of course, nothing happening is part of the tenor of our daily lives, but we do not notice. Why don't we notice? To notice it is to enter the state known as boredom. Boredom is the unwilling awareness of passing time. Which reminds us that we are dying. We will do anything avoid that awareness. Music is the easiest way to decorate the passing seconds and keeps us from noticing that terrible droning in the distance. When we do become aware of it, in a steady way, through art, it is awesome. We participate in the sublime.
... Hold that thought while we go into Hopper...
There are parallels between Edward Hopper and Robert Bechtel that have to do with time. Hopper dealt with theatrical time. He didn't care about the actors, he was more interested in the set. His art is closest to that of Alfred Hitchcock, who story-boarded every shot. There is so much consciousness in Hopper's paintings, in the buildings and objects, and it infects them like the flu. It's also there in Bechtle's paintings, but in a milder form, like the sniffles. Like Hopper, Bechtle almost never paints doors. When you do see a door, it's very minor, very de-emphasized. It doesn't look passable.
I think that really, neither Hopper nor Bechtel are fundamentally realist painters. Hopper is a Symbolist. He was a painter of interiors - psychological spaces. Bechtel is not a realist, but a Pop artist. He's concerned with aspects of life that are common to everybody.
I'm not a big fan of all of Bechtle's paintings. I don't much care for the interiors. This may be a cultural thing - I come from the East, which is a culture of the interior. There's a kind of generalized gloominess in Bechtle's interiors... maybe in California, being indoors is, in and of itself, tragic."
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April 8, 2005 (Friday) - Marilyn Minter and Peter Schjeldahl
I got to SFMOMA a little early last night, so I took a quick tour of the Marilyn Minter exhibit (photorealistic paintings in enamel on metal) before getting a seat at the Peter Schjeldahl lecture. I'll have to go back and spend more time with the paintings. Maybe I'll take another artist with me and tape a conversation about the work. I was favorably inclined toward these paintings before I saw them, based on what I'd read about her process and a few web images. My first hit on seeing the paintings was, "well done." There was a small room off the main gallery with smaller works from the same series and I was half-way through these when I noticed that they were photographs, not paintings. I went back out to the main exhibit space to see the paintings again, and my next thought was, "Was bother?" (Meaning, why bother with the painting after you've set up and shot the photograph.) Oh god, this is that annoying comment I often get in response to my own paintings. And now I'm saying it about someone else. What's going on here? I need more time to think about this.... and will get back to you.
The Peter Schjeldahl lecture was well worth the price of admission. He was like a funny, fidgety, nutty professor, careening wildly from topic to topic (although you realized eventually that there was a goal and we were getting there) as he paced back and forth, waving his arms... once he knocked off his microphone and when he picked up the pieces from the floor, he held up one and said to the control room, "This little thing here? You don't need it. It works without it," and then he tossed it aside. There were dozens of great quotes about artmaking, art history, and painting vs. photography. I need more time to go through my notes and to write something coherent, so I'll do that this weekend and post a full report on Monday.
Now I need to get back to painting. And think about my experience at the Marilyn Minter exhibit.
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April 7, 2005 (Thursday) - time to get out of the studio
Been doing a lot of painting this week. That's the good news. The bad news? I'm getting a little wiggy.... time to get out of the studio. Painting in the park today and then some gallery visits, and this evening: a lecture by New Yorker art critic, Peter Schjeldahl. His talk is titled, "The Story of the Image."
So, no painting or writing today... need to let the garden grow a bit before cutting any more flowers.
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April 6, 2005 (Wednesday) - Poetry and Painting
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I heard an interview this week with U.S. Poet Laureate (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Ted Kooser. He has a building on his property that he uses as a painting studio. I looked for quite a while, but wasn't able to find any examples of his painting. His knowlege of and appreciation for painting come through in some of his poems, and I don't just mean his eye for visual details.
When Terry Gross asked him why he wrote poetry, he said, "I'm trying to find order in a chaotic and disorderly world." That rings true for me.
He told another interviewer that he works to get his poems to, "look as if they had been dashed off with a flourish, like a good splashy watercolor painting."
Here's his poem about Mary Cassatt's pastel box:
"A Box of Pastels"
I once held on my knees a simple wooden box
in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.
It was a set of pastels that had years before
belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,
and all of the colors she'd used in her work
lay open before me. Those hues she'd most used,
the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,
while the cool colors - violet, ultramarine -
had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.
She'd had little patience with darkness, and her heart
held only a measure of shadow. I touched
the warm dust of those colors, her tools,
and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.
-from "Delights & Shadows" by Ted Kooser,
© 2004, Copper Canyon Press
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| Not Mary Cassett's pastels (sorry) but mine.
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April 5, 2005 (Tuesday) - Hockney collection coming to San Francisco
 I've been sitting on this for on this for months, because I was asked not to say anything... but now that Stanlee Gatti announced it in public, I guess I can too.
Yesterday the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum (SFPALM) honored Stanlee Gatti with the first annual San Francisco Arts Medallion, for his many years’ contribution to the cultural life of the city. During his speech at the awards luncheon, Gatti tossed out some amazing statistics. He said that:
- There are 750,000 people in SF and 4,200 arts organizations.
- San Francisco has more arts organizations per capita than any other city in the world (more than New York, London, Paris and all of Italy.)
- SFPALM is the biggest organization of its kind in the world (over 3 million items in the collection.)
and...
- David Hockney has donated the entire collection of his opera and theater design work to SFPALM, to be housed in their new Museum of Performance & Design.
Incidentally, a documentary about Hockney's stage design has just been released. Called, "The Colors of Music", it follows the artist’s creative process and includes sequences from The Rake’s Progress, The Magic Flute, Parade, Le Sacre Du Printemps, Tristan and Isolde, Turandot and Die Frau Ohne Schatten. (Images of Hockney Opera sets from the official film site.)
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April 4, 2005 (Monday) - Is painting about image or words?
 From"Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California" by Richard Candida Smith, 1995, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-20699-1
In the chapter on the West Coast Postsurrealists, referring to Helen Lundeberg:
Part of the postsurrealists' failure was due to their inability to compete in an art world increasingly structured as much around the written word as around actual art objects. Lundeberg was neither a philosopher nor a writer. (Her paper,) "New Classicism," was barely one page in length, and her subsequent statements were even shorter. She expressed her ideas in size and color range. Her subtle gradation of saturation and tone achieved the illusion of space and depth while bringing variety into her pictures in a way that required attentive observation if her effects were to be appreciated. the postsurrealist aesthetic was restrained to the point of being quiescent, with none of the dramatic leaping from the canvas that marked the paintings of Dali, Ernst, or their American followers.
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April 1, 2005 (Friday) - Channeling Raoul
  Painting outdoors, with watercolors is a lot different from painting in my studio, with acrylics. "No kidding," you're thinking, "What's the point?" It's the act of kicking myself out of my usual routine that's important. The different materials and location also force a different style - looser, more improvisational than the way I usually work. And I'm NOT very good at this kind of painting. I've found that the way to get the most out of the experience is to focus on the experience. Call it practice. Not making a painting. Yesterday, before heading out, I looked for inspiration in a little book in my library of watercolors by Raoul Dufy. They're lovely little drawings, with simple lines and colors... I'm still aspiring to this level of simplicity, but I got a lot closer today than I had in the last few weeks.
Photos at right are my painting companions yesterday: David Neri and Pam Heyda.
Image above is my watercolor view of North Lake, on Chain of Lakes Drive, in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
Images below are from "Raoul Dufy" by Claude Roger-Marx, published 1950, in France, (no ISBN)
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